Los Argonautas 🚢⚓️ – Una Aventura Épica de Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

📖 ¡Bienvenidos a una nueva narración de Ahora de Cuentos! En esta ocasión, les presentamos *Los Argonautas* de Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, una obra que combina aventura, exploración y una trama llena de emociones. 🌊✈️

Acompañen a los personajes en un viaje inolvidable a través del mar, enfrentándose a desafíos y superando obstáculos en una historia llena de valentía y camaradería. ¿Quiénes serán los héroes de esta travesía? ¿Qué secretos esconderá el océano? 🌟

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-Los Argonautas 🚢⚓️ – Una Aventura Épica de Vicente Blasco Ibáñez [https://youtu.be/cjR84smUFmo]
-🧭 La Ruta del Aventurero ✨ Una odisea de libertad y destino [https://youtu.be/S5C3c8jHVvI]

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🚢 ¡Embárcate con nosotros en esta aventura y vive *Los Argonautas* al máximo!

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In The Argonauts, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez transports us on an adventure of passion, struggle, and exploration. The story follows a group of brave men who, led by their determination and courage, face the risks and sacrifices of life at sea. Through their eyes, we discover a world full of challenges, discoveries, and the eternal search for freedom. Prepare to immerse yourself in a story filled with emotion and courage. Chapter 1. Feeling a touch on his neck, Fernando de Ojeda dropped his pen and raised his head. Behind him, a dwarf palm tree suddenly moved its broad, multi-fingered hands. To avoid this contact, he moved the rattan chair forward, but he could no longer write. Something new had happened around him while, with his chest on the edge of the table and his eyes on his papers, he fled far, far away, accompanied in this ideal escape by the slight rustling of his pen. He saw things and people with the same outward appearance as he emerged from his abstraction; But an internal, noisy, and moving life seemed to have been born in things that had until then been inanimate, while ordinary life fell silent and shrank in people, as if suddenly seized by timidity. His eyes, tired from writing, fled from the electric bulbs on the ceiling, inflamed in the middle of the afternoon, to rest on the rectangles of the windows that framed the grayish blue of a winter day. The whiteness of the lacquered wood trembled with a certain damp reflection that seemed to come from outside. Two rooms, enlarged by their lack of height, were Ojeda’s field of vision. In the first, where he was, the uniform whiteness of the decor was mingled with the glossy green of the greenhouse palm trees, the painterly green of the wooden lattices stretched from pilaster to pilaster, and the yellowish, hairy green of some artificial vines, whose leaves looked like scraps of velvet. Floral chintz armchairs around bamboo tables formed islands, where groups of people gathered to spread butter and jam on toast, sniff the scent of tea, or follow the bubbling of mineral water tinged with syrups and liqueurs. Blond waiters in short blue jackets and gold buttons passed with trays raised through the channels of this human archipelago, dodging the promontories of the backrests, the gulfs and peninsulas formed by the knees. A wall-to-wall window made of small beveled glass revealed the adjacent lounge, also white, but with gold trim. The seats upholstered in pink silk, the same as that adorning the walls, were occupied by ladies. The atmosphere was cleaner than in the winter garden, where an atmosphere of cigar smoke and oriental tobacco, scented with opium, floated over the plants. Beyond these female circles around the tea tables, half a dozen musicians, uniformed like the waiters, were grouped on a platform around a grand piano. Their blond, Germanic heads and the bows of their violins stood out against the luminous rectangles of four windows that blocked the view. On the other side of the glass, slightly clouded by the humidity outside, a sort of slender, yellow, invisible column moved slowly from one window to another , faithfully accompanying it in this change of position, regular and rhythmic like a pendulum, with black, oblique lines resembling strings. Everything was the same as an hour before, when the tea had been steaming in Ojeda’s now-empty cup , and the sheets of paper, now covered with compact lines, had whitened on the table. The people near him smoked silently or followed their conversations with sleepy slowness. From the back of the second parlor, mingled with the laughter of women and the clashing of trays, came the tapping of the piano and the wailing of violins; from the ceiling, colored simultaneously by the blue reflection of the afternoon and the cold glow of the electric bulbs, came the chirping of birds, like a country evocation that seemed to enliven the artificial rigidity of the deformed garden. Outside, The busts of passersby slid from window to window, always the same ones, hiding only to reappear with almost mechanical regularity, as if moving in a confined space, their steps counted. Blond children, supported by copper-colored maids, pressed the pink suction cups of their lips to the glass, misting them with circles of steam, and waved their tiny hands to greet the mothers and sisters in the parlors. Something new had happened, however, while Ojeda was writing. His armchair, previously motionless and solidly stable, seemed agitated by nervous shudders, like a panting beast on its hind legs. The crowd, as if suddenly animated by a mischievous soul, jumped in small jumps, clattering on its plate, from one end of the table to the other. Bronze cages hanging from the ceiling began to sway, and inside them, canaries hopped, still singing, searching for a still point in the swaying of their prison. The window curtains, held in place by their brackets, flapped in the face of an invisible breeze. The mosaic floor, smooth, seamless, inert to the eye, seemed to undulate as if a hurricane were raging beneath it. The dull hum of the people occupying the two rooms was joined by a continuous clatter of plates, glass, and wood. Everything suddenly sang, as if a strange life had resurrected the inanimate objects, making them converse with voices and tapping: the knife against the glass, the spoon against the bottle, the armchair against the table, the earthenware matchbox against the flower vase. In a corner of the greenhouse, lined up on a sideboard, the coffee pots and teapots seemed to deliberate with the solemnity of a council of elders, their metallic bellies colliding gravely. A basket of white lilacs placed in the center of the room trembled like a snowdrift touched by a whirlwind. The motionless, firm walls, of considerable thickness judging by the deep frames of doors and windows, were also ready to be animated by impulses of this mysterious life. They remained silent, with the calm of buildings that defy the centuries; but Ojeda, seeing them, was reminded of certain people who, even when silent, inspire the certainty, for some unknown reason , that they have a good voice and love singing. These white walls, which seemed to be made of a single piece, could also creak with internal friction, adding their crackles and groans to the concert of objects. An unlocked door swung for a few moments like a mad fan, until with a bang like a pistol shot, it alerted the servants, who rushed to secure it. And this shudder of an invisible hurricane seemed stranger in the closed, well-caulked atmosphere of the parlors, ever thicker and warmer from the breathing of the people, the smoke from their cigars, and the steam from the cups. The blond children had disappeared from the windows; the passersby, ever fewer in number, strolled outside with their heads bowed, one hand on their caps and tilting their faces to protect their eyes and noses from something unpleasant; women’s veils rustled like flags or rose in spirals of color, remaining rebellious against the gloved hands that sought to imprison them. Some, who advanced with their chests puffed out in a defiant air and their heads uncovered, felt around their foreheads the tragic disheveled state of Medusa: a flash of hair fluttering back, as if an invisible force were trying to tear it out. Long periods of time now passed without the glass reflecting a person’s passage. But something new began to appear at once before all of them. It was a blue band, dull and opaque, which began to appear faintly on the inner edge of the windows. Then it rose and rose slowly with the rising of the boiling water, until it filled half the glass rectangle. It remained motionless for a moment, distant circles of foam trembling within it, curious eyes trying to peer into the rooms, and soon afterward it began its very slow descent, giving way to the sad The clarity of a sunless afternoon. And when the windows on one side were free of this blue witness, those on the opposite side were invariably occupied. Ojeda saw a pale woman rush past his table, holding a handkerchief to her mouth, in anguished haste. Then, behind her, leaning on the arm of a servant, passed a lady in her sixties, speaking in a pained voice in Portuguese. Some of his neighbors rose, slipping down the grand staircase with its carved mahogany balusters, which ended at the door of the winter garden. Great gaps opened up in the gathering. People disappeared discreetly, in a gentle retreat, without the others noticing which way they had escaped. The small orchestra seemed to gain more sonority as the rooms emptied: the string instruments wept as if announcing a misfortune in the blue melancholy of the afternoon. Conversations languished around the tables. Many closed their eyes as if troubled by sad memories. Two doors opened simultaneously, letting in a moment of cold, overwhelming air , laden with humidity and salty fumes, which swirled flowers and plants and sent papers flying across the tables. Fernando held his hands, and when calm was restored, he settled back into his chair with voluptuous delight. He felt proud of his health, certain that it could not be disturbed amidst the growing anxiety revealed in the sadness in many eyes and the pallor of many faces. It was the selfish pleasure of someone who contemplates the danger of others from a safe place. He also experienced an animal satisfaction in appreciating his soft seat, the warm atmosphere, the plants and flowers that surrounded him. Such must have been the great joys of the Eskimos, huddled in their stinking dwelling during the winter, while outside the hurricane blows and the snow falls. He inhaled the smoke from his cigar, called a waiter to take away the tea service, which was bothering him with its incessant clinking, and searched among the papers for the interrupted sheet. “What was I writing?” As he murmured, he stroked his mustache with the end of his fountain pen, while his eyes scanned the smudged pages to restore the connection of his thoughts. He instantly forgot where he was; he suddenly passed into a different world, a world all his own, which seemed to throb in the sheets blackened by his writing. Impelled by desire, he moved through them, rereading his thoughts as if they belonged to someone else, finding a melancholic and painful delight in uniting them once again with his memories. In Lisbon, I could only write you a few lines on a postcard. I ran out of time. The train arrived late; Then the baggage check at Customs and the ocean liner, already anchored in the river, mooing every moment like one that doesn’t want to wait. And I, who am so clumsy with the common tasks of life!… Remember how many times you’ve laughed at my uselessness on our travels… Our travels, oh! so distant, so distant! That I don’t know when they’ll be repeated again… Fortunately, I found a companion on the train: a certain Isidro Maltrana, a curious fellow, whom I knew vaguely in my days of heroic bohemianism, and who is going, like me, to Buenos Aires. The identity of our destinies has made us quickly become close. We’ve been together for about sixty hours, and it seems as if we’ve been paired all our lives. He says he wants to be my secretary, or rather, my squire, in this stupendous adventure I’ve just embarked on. In Lisbon, he took up his duties, taking charge of the annoying tasks of embarkation… But why am I telling you this? Perhaps to distract myself, to deceive myself, for fear of evoking the memories of our last day, which still seem to envelop me like those intense, tenacious perfumes that follow us everywhere. Last Sunday! Do you remember? Do you remember? Only three days have passed: I still seem to feel the touch of your hair in my hands; I still hear your voice; I still see your eyes. I breathe you in this solitude. I carry in my pocket, on my chest, your last handkerchief. You come with me… And we are already so far from each other!… Ojeda stopped reading for a few moments, moved by his own words. Vulgar phrases, of a frivolity as old as the world: all lovers say the same thing. Perhaps those waiters in blue jackets wrote the same words in his language to the blonde frauleins of Hamburg and Bremen. But love is like death and like all the great accidents of existence. In others, it seems regular, ordinary, undeserving of attention; but when experienced in one’s own person, it takes on the unprecedented proportions of one of those events that are bound to influence the fate of the world. For him, three days earlier in Madrid, on a Sunday evening, an enormous event had occurred, equal to those that change the course of humanity or the appearance of the planet. And convinced of this, he wanted to encompass with his pen the infinite grandeur of his desolation. We pretended serenity, confident in the future, certain that we would see each other again; but suddenly it was impossible to pretend any longer , and there were tears in our eyes and in our voices… And yet , this pain was almost nothing; it contained more worry than reality. We could still see each other; we could still speak to each other. We wept as one weeps in the house of a dead person who is still physically present. The pain seems anesthetized by the stupor of the catastrophe; there is still a reality that serves as consolation; the body is still visible: one weeps more for the future than for the present. The terrible thing is when they take him away, and nothing remains, and one must forever cling to the memory… The other day, when I parted from you, I considered myself the most unhappy of men, and now I think back with envy to those moments. I could still see you!… And now every moment that passes distances me further from you; every turn of the propellers creates a greater separation between us; a minute represents hundreds of meters; An hour, an enormous distance that we couldn’t cover in a day even if we walked leaning against each other, looking into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the world. Our skies will be different; our stars will be different: when you live in the splendors of spring, I will feel the cold of winter; when you wake like a lark, with the sun shining through your balconies, I will moan in the middle of the night, murmuring your name… And it will be in vain! The desperate expanse of half the planet will come between us… Oh! Who will give me back your beloved eyes, their golden reflections, your soft arms, the whiteness of a wafer, your lisping voice like a child’s lullaby, your sealing-wax mouth, your pneumatic chest, cushion of dreams and oblivion!… He evoked in his memory, with the relief of living things, his last day in Madrid… A large red stain trembled on the wallpaper : it was the reflection of the burning coal piled on the fireplace, the only light in the bedroom. And on the red background, flickering, a horizontal shadow, with human contours. Ojeda knew the lines of this body well: it was her, pressed against him, under the bed covers , diminished, humbled by the pain of a silent despair. He too remained silent, his neck on the pillows; perceiving in his arms the sweet touch of silky backs wrapped in lace; feeling on one shoulder the slight heaviness of her head, which seemed to want to hide, to sink. A damp caress refreshed his neck: perhaps it was the touch of her abandoned mouth; perhaps they were tears. And the two remained in painful immobility, fearing that their eyes would meet, avoiding a word that would make their silent sorrow explode; but the two, feigning this heroic indifference, guessed at each other. Their caresses had been sad, desperate; something similar— Ojeda thought—to the love of a man condemned to death on the eve of his execution. Animal pleasure had made them forget reality for a time; But when fatigue and exhaustion set in, they both experienced the same disappointment as a sick person who sees their pain reappear after a palliative that they thought would cure them forever… And that was it! And the terrible hour was closer than before! Through the closed balconies came the sounds of the narrow, popular street. A vendor was hawking baked potatoes, calling them “garden chops,” with a melancholy moan, as if singing of a misfortune. Ojeda greeted him mentally, with a certain emotion, and thought that perhaps she was doing the same. They had never seen him; they didn’t know for sure if he was a man, a boy, or an old woman, but for four years they had heard him every evening of their amorous tryst, always at the same hour, serving them his cry of chronometric warning. Surely it was six- thirty. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” When would they hear him again?… Then a crowd of children passed by, shouting out the afternoon papers with the report of the bullfight. A hand-cranked piano, in the middle of the street, began to play a waltz from a Viennese operetta, with hurried tapping and accompanied by bells. The organ grinder’s voice could be heard shouting for “something to be thrown” from the balconies. When the piano fell silent, a guitar murmur could be heard from afar, along with the clash of castanets and the iron ring of a triangle. The brave voice of a nomadic singer sang a jota, a venerable music of the homeland, afraid to venture into the center of Madrid and slowly fading away in the refuge of the working-class neighborhoods. This medieval song had also visited them many afternoons , evoking in their closed bedroom memories of car trips across the high plateaus of Castile: a vision of stubble plains with trickling waters fringed by poplars; Cubes of strength standing upright among piles of ruins; brown villages; church towers topped with storks’ nests. Goodbye! Goodbye too! Suddenly, a metallic sound, with a mystical vibration, soft as a woman’s voice , cut through the air, enveloping the sounds of the street. For Ojeda, she was the most beloved of all the invisible visitors who came to seek them out in their amorous confinement. “Don Miguel’s bell,” a mouth murmured sadly next to his neck. Yes; Don Miguel’s bell, the one that every evening warned them of the time to shake off their sweet laziness, to rise and begin preparations for departure… “Don Miguel” was Cervantes, and the bell belonged to a convent nearby where he had been buried. No one knew his grave. His bones were pulverized, mixed with those of the sacristans and former residents of the neighborhood; but it was indisputable that they had buried his corpse there, and that was enough for Fernando. And unaware of the convent’s identity and its female inhabitants, the poor nuns’ bell was always, for the two lovers, “Don Miguel’s bell.” They felt great satisfaction and even pride in incorporating the memory of the famous nobleman into their secret love affairs. Ojeda, who was a poet, had decided to occupy that house for his amorous encounters solely because of its proximity to the convent. Furthermore, this working-class and filthy neighborhood had been the birthplace of the great authors of the Golden Age, the so-called “poets’ quarter .” The most celebrated men of Castilian literature had lived almost simultaneously in the space occupied by three small streets . When Fernando went out at nightfall, feeling his lover’s arm on his arm and the sweet tickling of her playful fingers on his wrist, he would sometimes pause on the narrow sidewalk before reaching the wide streets of the city center. “This was Lope de Vega’s house…” Not this one; There was another one that occupied the same site and had an orchard, and in it, under the shade of a few trees, that prodigious worker wrote hundreds of comedies and millions of verses… He wore a cassock; but under it, at night, he carried his good sword of Toledo to put to flight the enemies who came out to meet him. Gallant and heartless in his youth, like Don Juan, he had taken refuge, seeing his old age approaching, in the safety of the Church to say his mass. between one act of writing that had just been completed and another that had begun to be versified. The dry leaves of his garden rustled beneath the wide skirts of lively comedians who came in search of madrigals improvised by the maestro behind closed doors. And Quevedo had lived in a nearby house, and further away , other less renowned poets… Ojeda felt the respect a traveler feels for the ruins “where something has happened” as he passed through these narrow streets, with their uneven pavement covered in filth, groups of children playing “alt-bull” on the corners, gossips sitting in front of doors through which mists of poor stew spread, and balconies dripping with the dampness of old clothes left to dry. Centuries before, a priest with a high forehead had also passed through these same places, rolling up his cassock in the puddles and touching his mustache and beard with the gesture of an old soldier. It was Don Pedro Calderón. The neighborhood processions had often seen a gaunt, white-chinned, stuttering old man with a mutilated hand, the nobleman Cervantes, a veteran of famous wars, awaiting the hour of death with melancholy resignation, with no other title than that of “Slave of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament.” “Don Miguel’s bell!” repeated a voice next to Ojeda. “One must have resolution… Up!” And amid the fluttering of the repelled covers, a body of firm, satiny contact passed over him. He saw her standing before the fireplace, wrapped in furnace-like glow that flamboyantly inflamed the pearly whiteness of her nakedness. She protested, as always, when she noticed that her lover, sitting up in bed, was searching for the electric switch. No light: she liked to begin her arrangements by the glow of the fireplace. Later she could light it. And she wandered around the room, searching from piece of furniture to piece of clothing scattered haphazardly in the passionate madness of the first moment. She moved from the glow of the fireplace to the shadowy corners, preoccupied with these searches, revealing, in her shameless distraction, as she bent down and stood up, her most hidden intimacies. Each time she returned to the circle of light, a new garment covered her body. Fernando followed her with his gaze from the depths of the bed, illuminated by red from below, her bust lost in the shadows. She struggled, panting and frowning, with the tightness of the corset, which refused to enclose her in its shape. It was always the same: her body, after the supreme spasms, seemed to expand in the repose of the noblest of fatigues. He saw her enclosed in a silk medallion, an undergarment imposed by the narrowness of fashionable costumes, with a certain masculine and graceful air of a medieval maiden, shaking her short locks of thick black curls, her real hair, free from the false hairpieces, waiting on the marble mantelpiece for the moment of coupling. The elegant lady, with a haughty and ironic expression, assumed the appearance of a page in intimacy. Then he saw himself standing, approaching her, his voice hoarse and trembling with emotion. “Adored page!… And never to see you again! To lose you soon !” But his lover, arranging her hair in front of the mirror, spoke with feigned coldness, her voice trembling. “Get dressed… Let’s go soon. And to think that on a night like this I have to go with Aunt to the Royal Palace!… How annoying!” A clatter of metal striking Ojeda pulled Ojeda from his reverie. This impression made him tremble, as his memory flashed back to the present. He found himself back in the greenhouse, before the sheets of the menu he’d begun. The waiters were collecting the teapots and trays from the floor, which had been motionless a short while before on a sideboard. The movement of things was becoming more and more violent. Almost everyone had disappeared while Fernando dreamed with his eyes half-closed. Some armchairs rocked by themselves, as if trying to play with each other at being unoccupied; the abandoned tables creaked, tilting, just as in a ghostly evocation. Only a faint rustle remained in the windows. A livid glow: the electric light descended conqueringly from the ceilings, invading every corner. In the luxurious lounge, some blond-haired, red-cheeked ladies were doing needlework or, wearing glasses, reading illustrated newspapers. The music continued playing imperturbably for them and the waiters. Fernando wanted to shake off this taste of melancholic memories. “Let’s write!” He needed to finish the letter, for they would arrive at port at dawn the next day… But the music held him back, paralyzing his will with the vibration of something familiar. What was the cello singing? He suddenly saw, as if traced in the air by the deep tones of the instrument, the manly figure of Wolfram von Eschembach, the noble troubadour counselor of Tannhauser the Damned, and his imagination put words to the melancholic song of the strings. “Oh you, my sweet evening star, who cast forth from the depths of the sky your gentle radiance!…” The Wagnerian chant reminded him of another star that had appeared at a painful moment in his existence, and once again he forgot the present and remained motionless in his seat, like a soulless body, like a fakir in rigid meditation, around whom vines grow and snakes coil while his spirit lives on thousands of miles away. He saw himself in a dimly lit street, turning up the collar of his overcoat while she shivered in her fur coat. The abrupt transition from the warm bedroom to the icy evening breeze made them shiver. They left the house with a certain trepidation, not daring to look at the furniture and paintings, modest decorations thrown together at random four years before. They held too many memories to be contemplated with indifference, and they had resolved to maintain their feigned serenity until the last moment. Ojeda gave a few duros to the doorkeeper, who came out to meet them wrapped in a shawl to open the entrance hall windows . He was giving her an advance on next month’s tip. “May God reward you, gentlemen! Cover yourselves well, it’s very cold… See you tomorrow, gentlemen! ” Fernando was moved by the good woman’s words. When would that tomorrow be? Tomorrow his old servant would come to clear the house, to take away those pieces of furniture he had given her to prevent the desecration of a sale. She, after taking a few steps into the street, stopped and commanded imperiously: “Spit it out!… Why?” Once the surprise had passed, he obeyed. He remembered that on all their trips, whenever they thought they were happy in a place, his lover would make the same wish. “Spit it out so we can return.” It was equivalent to leaving something of themselves that would one day irresistibly attract them. She did the same, and suddenly, reassured, she grabbed his arm. Her small feet, mounted on high heels, wobbled painfully every time they stepped from the sidewalk into the stream paved with uneven pebbles. Because of this, she leaned heavily on Ojeda, letting him feel the adorable, firm touch of her body from shoulder to knee. “You’ll come back, Fernando,” she murmured. “I’ve asked… who you know, and so it will be. You laugh at these things, you’re an impious person, but that’s what I’m here for: to pray for you and for your successful outcome from this adventure you’ve concocted. Return to Madrid? Ojeda remembered her lover’s words when they had gotten together in the early afternoon. Since he was leaving that same night, she would leave for Paris two days later. “And so I will!” the woman affirmed. “Oh, Madrid! How I hate it!” How horrible it is to stay here forever!… And when you think about it, what I fear is living there… without you… Poor little Madrid! I love it so much! I knew you living there!… But no, I couldn’t stay here another week. I’d see you everywhere; every street holds a memory of us. No; definitely… I hate it. But you’ll come back, tell me you’ll come back soon. Just think, you’ve spat on your way back, and that’s important. You won’t come right here… fine… But you’ll come back to Europe. And this is Europe, Fernando!… We’ll meet in Paris, and if not in Switzerland… or if Do you think it would be better in Italy, or perhaps in Athens or Cairo? We know everything. We’ve been happy in so many places!… But tell me when you’re going to return. Tell me straight!… Don’t fool me! Fernando’s face twisted with a painful laugh. Return! He hadn’t even begun his journey yet, and at its end, the unknown awaited him, with its adventures and mysteries. He would return soon; at most, it would take a year. My word! “A year!” she murmured. “Damned money!” They were passing by the convent and had to step off the sidewalk, giving way to some devout women in black mantillas who were heading for the church. Ojeda bowed his head. “Goodbye, Don Miguel!” He said a mental farewell to his illustrious neighbor. He had been a complete man, a man representative of his time: a soldier of sea and land, a rebel captive, an unsung hero, a believer and womanizer, an unsuccessful flatterer of nobles and the wealthy. The only thing missing from the intense life of the great gentleman was the embarkation for the Indies. On the sloping streets that descended to Carrera de San Jerónimo, some undeveloped land left a wide expanse of sky between the houses. Their eyes simultaneously focused on a star that stood out above the others with extraordinary brilliance. He, turning his gaze toward his companion, thought he saw the star’s reflection, like a point of light, in the trembling of a tear. Through the veil of his hat, he could make out her pale profile, diminished by a gesture of painful shyness, her lips pursed tightly, the sides of her nose flared with anguish, a deep line between her eyebrows: the vertical wrinkle that always announced her worries and her anger. “Listen, and don’t make fun of me,” she said, breaking the silence. “I wanted to ask you , when you’re there and think of me a little, to look at that star at this very hour. I thought about it last night… I’ve thought about it all these nights. You’ll look at it, remembering me, and I’ll look at it at the same time. It’ll be like in a novel… and who knows if anything of us will ever be found! There are such mysterious things in the world!” She said this with an air of desperate humility, like a man condemned to death who takes refuge in the most absurd hope, and Ojeda, after answering her, regretted his frankness. “Poor María Teresa!” When she looked at the star at dusk, he would be looking at the sun of the early afternoon. And even if it were nighttime for both of them at the same time, who knows if the same star would be shining above their heads ! Each hemisphere of the Earth has its own sky and its own constellations. ” She lowered her head, stunned. “So far! So far!…” In a low voice, she continued asking questions, curious to know the distance that would separate them and at the same time frightened by its magnitude. And was it true that a letter would take nearly a month to establish communication between their thoughts? And would an equal amount of time elapse before they received a reply? They had thought themselves unhappy when, in their short separations, one living in Madrid and the other in Paris, two days passed without news. “Listen carefully,” she said, shortening her pace and fixing her eyes on Fernando’s with imperious resolve. “I don’t want you to go. You won’t go, you mustn’t go!… My heart tells me something bad is going to happen.” She stamped her foot on the ground; she convulsively squeezed Ojeda’s wrist with her gloved paw, as if she feared he would disappear. He gave a movement of impatience. To stay!… It was impossible; they were waiting for him there. How could this occur to him at the last minute? Besides, such a resolution would accomplish nothing. A few hours of happiness with the hope that they wouldn’t be separated, and then, the next day, the same demands that would force him to leave, the same need to rebuild his life. “No, Teri; you know I must go. You yourself advised me to; it seemed right to you that I should go like a brave man in the conquest of fortune. We have been talking about the trip for a month in relative tranquility, and now… now you oppose it like a child. Courage; look at me. Do you think I don’t suffer?” Like you?… But she hung her head stubbornly. They had talked about the trip calmly for a month because it was still far away. She trusted… without knowing what: she didn’t want to think. It was something like death, which we all know will come in its time; but we see it as so far away… so far away!… She had maintained a certain calm when the trip was only a topic of conversation; but now it was a reality, a fact that was going to happen in a few hours, and she couldn’t resign herself to it. “And I won’t see you, Fernando; think about it! I won’t see you, and days, weeks, months, who knows, maybe years will pass!… And you won’t see me either, and there will only be pieces of paper between us on which we will try to put our souls and we will only put letters. Lord!” To end it like this… perhaps forever, when we’ve spent four years together, believing we’d die if a few weeks went by without seeing each other!… They were on Carrera de San Jerónimo, walking in the opposite direction to the great stream of people that was ascending the street toward the interior of the city. The bourgeois families, in their Sunday best, had their shoes whitened by the dust of their walks. Groups of men were commenting with energetic gesticulation on the incidents of that afternoon’s bullfight . Women from the town, pulling their little ones by the hand, followed their husbands, who walked with his cape hanging low, his cap tilted, and his eyes shining, all of them humming some chorus of the fashionable zarzuela. They had just come from having a snack at Las Ventas and were savoring the last bliss of cheap wine, the pickled omelet, and the contemplation of the miserable landscape of the outskirts, more abundant in zinc roofs, dust, and pianos than in water and trees. “How these people make me so angry!” Teri would say, looking at them with hostility and avoiding their contact. “No, not angry; poor things! Maybe envy… To think that they’re staying and you’re leaving!… They’re happier than we are: they’ll live here, where we’ve been so happy. ” Then she added, with an accent of childish lightness that contrasted with her tragic mask and the lunar gleam in her eyes: “Look, instead of going to America, writing poetry and all those Jewish ambitions that suddenly come to you to earn money, you should have been one of these; a bricklayer, for example: no, not a bricklayer; you could fall off a scaffold, my poor thing!… A carpenter; that’s right; or a cabinetmaker… A cabinetmaker, even better. And you’d look so handsome in your cape and cap; and I’d wear a shawl and a high bun, full of combs. And now we’d go back to our neighborhood arm in arm.” not as we are, but more cheerful, and early tomorrow morning, you and I will go to the workshop to find my man at noon with a full basket, and we will eat together on a bench or at the edge of a sidewalk… And my man, since he is a good-looking man, would surely please other people, and I would fight with them and tear their hair out… Say, don’t you think I’m capable of fighting for you, so that another doesn’t take you away?… But the world is all wrong. And to think that these poor people might envy us!… You, who are leaving without knowing why or what for! Me, who am surely going to die!… There is no justice, Lord, not a shred of justice. This desire for popular life suddenly transformed their gestures and their language. “Dirty money!… Indecent money! He is to blame for everything that happens to us. Because of him you leave and I am left dying of grief. But Lord!” Couldn’t that scoundrel money be like the sun, like the air, which belongs to everyone and is for everyone? We women don’t understand many things, but I believe that this is how the world should be arranged so that people could be happy… And if it can’t be like this, let them do away with the thief… No, don’t talk; don’t irritate me with your wise man’s curses; don’t contradict me, look, I’m very nervous. Say it with me: “Death to money!” And as if with these words she had vented all her indignation, she added meekly: “The fact is that I am wrong to insult that bandit. He is fleeing from us, but he will return; he will return soon and we will be happy. Let my lawsuit with my husband’s children be over; it will happen any moment now and it will end well, everyone tells me so. Then I will not lead this life of Disguised poverty, of elegant bohemianism; I won’t have to rely on my widowhood and my aunt’s gifts; and I’ll be rich, and you won’t suffer anymore, you won’t work, because I’ll support you… me! Your María Teresa, who will be your little wife! She felt Ojeda’s arm shudder beneath her hand; how his body, pressed against her in the rhythm of the march, seemed to repel her with shock. “Don’t start off like always, Fernando. Look, I can’t stand it… Yes, sir, I’ll support you; it will be my greatest glory. You’re leaving for me, to make yourself rich, to surround myself with luxuries and comforts, and you go—my poor soul! —like a soldier goes to war, to suffer, to exhaust yourself. And you don’t want me to give you what’s mine if I become rich?… Shut up!” You know I can’t stand you when you get silly with your chivalry… Yes sir, I’ll support you, I’ll guard you like a bird in its cage, and you’ll either write poetry or do nothing. You’ll do my bidding simply by loving me very much. And I’ll give myself the pleasure of supporting my man, of spoiling him and pampering him, of worrying about his affairs and always looking after him like a king’s man. You’ll be my pimp; you’ll be my “partner,” as they say in the slums… Sometimes I think of some of the saleswomen I’ve seen in the Plaza de la Cebada, with their well-starched petticoats and their fine gold earrings. They sell, work, handle the money, and the little man stands behind them, doing nothing but providing the company with his macho authority or holding the position when the partner is away. What a delight! That’s how I’d love you. All of mine for you!… My rich pimp, let me dream. Let me build my dreams. Don’t contradict me. I don’t like you when you act so dignified, so chivalrous. I would love you more if you were a thief; you would seem more interesting to me… Oh! I feel so sad! So sad! They were now in the Salón del Prado, far from the hustle and bustle of the main street, walking among flowerbeds, along a lonely avenue on whose ground the spotlights traced large white circles. María Teresa remained silent, as if the excitement of her false happiness had suddenly ceased upon coming into contact with this solitude. She gripped Fernando’s arm more tightly, and, brushing his face with the brim of her hat, she murmured: “Tell me, what if I were to go with you?” It was a plea, a timid murmur, the request that is considered impossible, but is formulated as a last hope. Ojeda smiled sadly. To leave together! A happiness he had often thought about; but he didn’t know what his life there would be like. Surely one of untold hardships and miseries. And she, a creature of luxury, accustomed to the comforts of money, wanted to follow him on his uncertain adventure!… No; such extreme resolutions are only acceptable in the theater. Life has other demands. Sacrifice is possible as something momentary, heroic, that can only last a short time: but sacrifice for an entire existence!… “Remember, Teri, your usual phrase: ‘Life is life.’ We must give it what is its own. You would come with me bravely; from the first steps, the lack of money, the lack of consideration of people, the scandal we would leave behind, the loss of the interests you are defending, would prove our folly. And you would remain silent because you love me, and you would endure it all with resignation; I believe it; I know you well… But the remorse of having agreed to your madness ! The sadness of not having opposed it with my experience as a man! The fear of sensing in a word of yours, in a glance, the regret of the past! That would be when we would be lost forever. No; It’s better for us to part now. I’ll be back soon, I swear. And who knows! You’ll come back there… later: when I know what my fate may be. She abruptly broke away from his arm, walked a few hesitant steps, and almost collapsed on a bench. Her right hand, clasping a tiny handkerchief, passed between the veil and her face to cover her eyes. She was crying; she was crying silently, without shudders or hiccups of pain, as if her crying were a natural function long since passed. Disappointed. Despair finally broke through, dormant all afternoon, deceived by moments of voluptuous forgetfulness. And tears followed tears, tracing luminous twists on the matte background of her complexion. When she lifted her veil to wipe them, Ojeda saw a triangle of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, a ring of cadaverous blackness around them. Her nose seemed sharper, her mouth deeper : she was a different woman from the one who half an hour earlier had been searching for her clothes by the firelight. Ten years had suddenly fallen upon her . Her face seemed scratched by exhaustion and grief. Fernando pleaded like a frightened child. Courage! He had to overcome his emotions. Teri was brave when she wanted to be. “You’re leaving,” she moaned, not listening to him. “Now I’m convinced. Until this moment I hadn’t seen clearly. It’s true that you’re leaving.” And there’s no remedy! What a horrible thing! They remained like that for a long time: Maria Teresa leaning against the back of the bench, one hand on her face and the other buried in her muff; Ferdinand standing, trying to inspire her with incoherent words. They were both shivering with cold without realizing it, shaken by the icy wind that made the spotlights flicker. The pain kept them as if distant from their bodies, deaf to their sensations, insensitive to all external impressions. The red lanterns of a hackney carriage were advancing slowly along a street near the promenade. “Call him,” she said resolutely, getting up. “Let’s get this over with quickly; this can’t go on any longer… It’s better if we separate here.” He nodded. Yes; it would be better. Why prolong this torment!… And when the carriage stopped, María Teresa marched toward him, her head straight, but with a hesitant step, twisting her face so as not to see Ojeda. She hesitated for a moment as she put her foot on the running board, and finally stepped back. “Pay him and let him go… We’ll walk to Cibeles. We’ll see each other for a moment longer.” Fernando agreed again. The pain nullified his will, and so he accepted the prolongation of his torment as a blessing. They linked arms again and walked silently, slowly. Their eyes avoided each other. They avoided speaking, fearing to awaken his despair with words . It was enough for them to feel each other next to each other, to perceive the vibrations of their two lives with the touch of their bodies in contact. Teri seemed obsessed by her memories and murmured a few words, as if speaking to herself, in a monotonous, vague voice, like that of someone dreaming: “Next week… do you remember? Next week it will be four years since we met. ” Ojeda felt his awkwardness dissipate with this memory, but he continued walking in silence. Four years… only four years! And they had been as long and rich as the rest of his life… More, much more! His previous existence barely counted for him; it was like a limbo of colorless events. His true life had begun with María Teresa. He thought with ironic pity about his existence before meeting her. He believed then that he had savored all the varieties and complications of love, and even considered himself weary of them. He had had highly valued women as his own, snatching them away in a bid of generosity from his closest friends at the expense of his fortune. What he had squandered years before, when upon his mother’s death he found himself in possession of a fortune somewhat diminished by his prodigalities as a son of a family!… His loves in high society had also achieved a certain resonance. He still bore a slight scar on his chest, a stab wound received in a duel with a certain gentleman who, after blindly tolerating all his wife’s previous friends, had suddenly felt terribly jealous of Ojeda. Love made him shrug his shoulders at that time of his life: a pastime like ambition or gambling; a sweet deception to entertain himself. He was back, at thirty-two, from this lie that fills the world, sustains life, and is the main The occupation of humanity. Everything had been easy for him in the early days. He remembered his mother, a pale, courteous lady with a somewhat blurred personality, who seemed to shrink as if oppressed by the majesty of her husband. Her love for Ferdinand, his eldest son, was the only vehement feeling that unfolded and made her sweet passivity vibrate with energy. He also remembered his father, an imposing figure who had triumphed in Parliament for twenty years thanks to the correctness with which he wore his coat, as well as his solemn speeches, which lasted entire afternoons before the empty benches. He spoke English and German, which gave him a certain mysterious, indisputable prestige, and whenever his party was called to power, his name appeared first on the list of ministers. No one dared to challenge him for the direction of diplomatic relations. Never had he been surprised by the smallest speck on his coat, nor the slightest trace of his own thoughts in his words. And along with all this, a noble correctness that accompanied him even in the smallest acts of his life, a lordly and kindly rectitude that seemed to ennoble his bombastic intellectual mediocrity. Ojeda had admired him until he was twenty, giving him preference in his affections over his good, sweet, and insignificant mother. He had savored afternoons of pride and glory in the Congressional gallery, thinking that the gentleman who, from the blue bench, made the dome resonate with his deep voice and moved his arms with such elegance, was the author of his existence. Later, when his love of poetry took him out of the solemn and melodious circle in which his family moved and he lived in the Athenaeum and in the newspaper offices, his capacity for admiration diminished, and while he continued to feel a certain veneration for his father’s moral character , he believed less in the value of his intelligence. When this figure died, on the eve of becoming a minister for the seventh time, Fernando had just joined the diplomatic corps, as if by doing so he were continuing a family tradition. No sooner had the newspapers ceased to speak of “the irreparable loss the country had suffered” with the death of this illustrious man than silence fell around his memory, with that easy forgetfulness that accompanies men of the theater and politics. Whenever Fernando met the party leader or some other illustrious friend of his father, he was the subject of introductions. “This is Ojeda’s boy… Poor Ojeda! A man who was worth a lot.” And after this requital, he continued his talk about political accidents . Meanwhile, his mother lived locked in the painful stupefaction that this death had produced, considering it something unprecedented, inexplicable, as if figures of her husband’s caliber could not die, and she imagined the entire country in the same state of mind. Fernando wanted to advance his career, to be assigned to a Legation, and the good lady didn’t dare oppose his wishes. She would remain in Madrid with her daughter, while the eldest son gave new luster to his father’s surname abroad . The grave gentlemen once again evoked their forgotten companion for a few moments. “Something must be done for the boy from Ojeda.” And Fernando spent ten years outside Spain as Secretary of Legation, with frequent transfers that took him from the nations of Northern Europe to the republics of South America, always accompanied by the protection of the friends of the “ill-fated personage.” But this protection seemed increasingly distant, more tenuous, like the already fading memory of the great man. The son of the eternal minister, accustomed to flattery and social influence since his student days, was beginning to notice the emptiness of indifference surrounding his diplomatic personality. Being “the boy from Ojeda” meant nothing anymore. Now it was the “boys” of other figures of more recent fame who deserved the favor pushes. Furthermore, a complete lack of adaptation caused him to clash with his superiors, who considered him intolerable because of his independence. He began to talk to contempt for “the career.” At one Legation, the minister, who had achieved promotion before the invention of typewriters due to the exquisite calligraphy with which he copied protocols, would say to Ojeda with ironic superiority: “What terrible handwriting you have!… And you write poetry? And you boast of being a man of letters?” Other leaders reproached him for his “ordinary” hobbies, his clear intention to avoid the high-spirited gatherings of the diplomatic world in favor of hanging out with the country’s bohemian rabble, long-haired youth who recited poetry and argued loudly over absinthe, under clouds of tobacco. A minister had written to Madrid for a whole year to have Secretary Ojeda, a dangerous individual whom many considered a socialist, removed from his Legation. In reality, he only wanted to get him away so that the minister would regain her good-natured composure and not get involved with an inferior by singing ballads and reciting poetry in the twilight . His fame reached the Ministry of State. “What a pity for the boy! Damned literature! If only the great man would raise his head!” And everyone, section heads, ministers of various ranks, secretaries, and even attachés, repeated the same thing: “He has talent, he’s original; but he lacks the right touch.” The said right touch signified his lack of adaptation to “his career,” his reluctance to conform to the traditions and frivolities of diplomatic life… For what the damned career was worth! His mother sent him every month an amount three or four times his salary. His sister Lola, despite seeing in him the embodiment of all the gallantry and charms of manliness, protested against his maternal generosity. All for the son who was abroad parading his golden coat, and for her, who had to find a husband, the haggling and hardships. Family harmony! In some American countries, he and his colleagues lamented that a car driver or a hotel manager earned a higher salary than a diplomat. Because of this, the hopes of their life of splendid misery always revolved around marriage, all of them coveting a rich bride to make a good name for themselves in “the profession.” The desire not to upset his mother, who saw diplomacy as the only worthy occupation, was what kept Fernando in his position; but when the poor lady died, he resigned. Accustomed to receiving financial aid without being directly involved in the management of his interests, Ojeda believed himself rich, very rich, finding himself the owner of a house in Madrid and much land in Andalusia. His sister was married to an engineer, a respectable man, who had made his fortune in South America, assisted by some relatives. He was the family’s administrative talent, and Fernando mocked his honest simplicity, without ceasing to admire him. His wife dominated him with the prestige of his birth: he was proud of being the posthumous son-in-law of the “illustrious Señor Ojeda,” and recalled his glories more often than his children. His mother-in-law’s family also provided great satisfaction for his vanity. Although she had enjoyed no honorific title other than that of wife of a great man, she was related to several countesses, marquises, and noblewomen of Spain, whose honors and distinctions the engineer kept an exact account of. His good-natured pride believed he had miserably wasted his time when the year ended without having made ninety visits to these illustrious ladies, whom he called par excellence “our aunts.” Ojeda entrusted his estate to him so that he could lead a carefree life of double pleasure. He passed seamlessly from the world in which his birth had placed him to a humbler one, toward which his artistic interests propelled him. In a single day, he would chat about women, gambling, and horses with the unoccupied, elegant youth of the aristocratic clubs; then he would spend the afternoon in the shabby studio of some “independent and unknown” artist, speaking informally with long-haired men in battered boots who perhaps hadn’t had lunch; afterward, he would attend a tea party, where he would flirt with ladies. of contradictory fame, and he ate in a palace or a bohemian tavern, wearing a tailcoat, and then went to the Teatro Real. Dawn surprised him in Fornos’s offices with childhood friends and high-priced women, and other times in the cabins of a grocery store with guitarists, bullfighters, shawl-wearing “partners,” and “fraternal friends” who addressed him informally and whose surnames he didn’t know well: men with enormous diamonds, flamboyant, talkative, who had sometimes been in prison or frequently skirted its doors. He had a certain reputation among the literary crowd downstairs, who shouted and struggled to get upstairs. “A nice, talented young man… It’s a shame he’s rich!” And those who pitied his wealth called him nice at the same time because of the ease with which he agreed to a donation of five duros. He compiled his poems in a printed volume… Magnificent! It was Musset. He launched another volume… Superb! He was Baudelaire. He published a third book… Colossal! He was… the Holy Spirit himself made into poetry. Verses hinder no one and are the occupation of a great lord, for the same reason they don’t make money. He wrote a heroic drama, a chivalric drama, the epic of the conquistadors in the virgin Indies, with sonorous stanzas resonating with the clinking of swords and breastplates, and the professionals greeted, smiling like hyenas, this boy from a good family who came to take their bread off their table. The verses were very beautiful, but “that wasn’t theater.” He was too much of a poet for the stage. During that time, he met María Teresa. It was at the home of one of his mother’s relatives; at the tea party of a countess who was among the venerated “aunts” of Lola’s husband. Ferdinand went to these gatherings when, between five and seven in the evening, he couldn’t find a better distraction from his boredom. He knew in advance what his illustrious relatives, pretentious old women with dyed hair and teeth resembling dominoes, would ask him. “You big loser, when are you getting married?” And if he resigned himself to attending these gatherings, it was precisely so he wouldn’t get married, to take advantage of the boredom of some lady who moved humiliatedly from one room to another without finding company, starting sentimental conversations with her that sometimes ended in something more positive. In the room where the buffet was set up, he found María Teresa. She had just arrived from Paris, where she lived for long periods. A quick appearance in Madrid, and then off she went again. She was simultaneously annoyed and made to laugh by the morbid curiosity and fearful arrogance of her friends. They feigned surprise at seeing her, hugged her, admired her clothes, complimented her beauty, asked her for information on the latest fashions, and then ran away, trying not to run into her again. Ojeda knew her vaguely. Her husband had been a career man, a former plenipotentiary currently vegetating in retirement in a provincial town. Years before, he had seen her at a dinner at the Spanish Embassy in Paris, when she was newly married and was leaving with her husband to occupy the Spanish Legation at a court in northern Europe. Ferdinand had desired her with his avid youthful admiration. What a woman! But she, proud of her beauty and her new rank, barely noticed the modest secretary of an American Legation, passing through Paris. She only had smiles for the important figures surrounding her, and a gesture of gratitude for the rich, old widower who, against his children’s wishes, had made her his wife. Coming from a poor and glorious military family, she found herself suddenly transformed , by her husband’s almost senile enthusiasm, into a great diplomatic lady, surrounded by all the comforts of wealth, no longer having to suffer the torment of mediocrity with which her tastes as an elegant woman had struggled since childhood. After that, Fernando saw her no more. But he had heard so many things about her!… Her husband’s children made sure to spread them, and all of Maria Teresa’s friends repeated them with the secret delight of destroying a companion who inspires envy. Who could possibly know the truth! It was true that her old husband, suddenly resigning his full authority, came to live in Spain, sometimes in Madrid, avoiding contact with his children, toward whom he held a certain resentment, other times in the provinces, devoting himself, so they said, to large agricultural enterprises. She remained in Paris, and from time to time escaped to the Peninsula to see her husband, reestablishing between them for a few days a certain pretense of reconciliation; but in reality—according to her friends—these trips were solely for the purpose of earning money. María Teresa’s eyes seemed to attract him, and the two greeted each other like old acquaintances. She smiled and motherly congratulated him on his poetry, which she undoubtedly hadn’t read, and on his drama, which she would never know. He was almost a great man. How could I have imagined him like that when I had seen him for the first time in Paris!… “Besides, I’ve been told you’re a tremendous scoundrel.” Ojeda bowed, smiling with exaggerated courtesy. “And you too, so they say, seem a bit of a ‘slut.'” She hesitated for a moment, frowning, not knowing whether to be angry at these words, and finally, she burst into a trill of laughter. “Come on over and we’ll sit in that corner. It’s impossible to be angry with you. What an interesting fellow! Let’s have a little fun with all these people… We’ve seen other things. ” They spent the afternoon talking about the countries they’d visited, the people from “the race” they’d met, interrupting these reminiscences to laugh at those who passed through the dining room and exchange their gossip. When they talked, they stared at each other with a curious fixity, as if surprised at never having met before, each guessing with rapid clairvoyance what the other was thinking; thoughts that developed outside the flow of their words. The next day they felt the need to see each other… and the next… and the next. She was concerned about his life; she pestered him with questions to get to know it in every detail; His tales of adventures in the Madrid underworld made her laugh a lot. “I’d like to see that; to meet your bohemians, your flamenco singers. Take me with you, Fernandito; be good. I know something about Paris, but what’s here is undoubtedly more interesting, more typical… It must smell like stew.” These capricious desires disappeared suddenly after the fall… if there was a fall. They went to each other almost without knowing how, by natural and easy impulse, without really knowing which of the two made the first attempt or when the realization began. She didn’t take the trouble to feign the slightest resistance, to flirt with smiling refusals accompanied by approving eyes. “From the moment I saw you, I guessed this was going to be it… and it has been. You can think what you want; perhaps you think I’m easier than I am.” But with you, why pretend!… Since Teri was leaving for Paris, he left too, and began what Fernando called the best period of his existence: a life of selfish concentration, a life for two, of blindness and forgetfulness toward everything beyond them, interrupted by frequent trips undertaken at random for a reading or a historical memory. “How beautiful it was to kiss between the columns of the Parthenon!” And they embarked on a trip to Greece. “What a delight to see the desert, the two of them together, from the top of the Pyramids!” And they left for Egypt. And so they went to contemplate, holding each other’s waists and with their heads together, the midnight sun in Norway, the snow-covered Kremlin, the palm trees of the Biskra oasis , and the blue currents of the Bosphorus, not to mention other, more vulgar excursions in search of the Venetian canal, the Tuscan hill, or the Swiss lake as a decorative backdrop for a love that longed to encompass the entire old world in its insolent happiness. Ojeda soon noticed a transformation in Teri’s character. At times, she lost her cheerful unconsciousness of a crazy bird. She was more serious in her words; she displayed a conservative measure in her judgments about love. She, who at first encouraged him to recount the adventures of his past, laughing joyfully the more countless they were, She paled now with a gesture of protest. “I don’t want to hear you,” she said, covering her ears. “Shut up, for God’s sake! You disgust me when I remember those things… I’ll end up not loving you. ” On her travels, she would be seized by sudden jealousy every time Fernando looked at a well-dressed traveler. Then it was he who was surprised, asking with dull irritation to unravel the mysteries of the past. What life had Teri had been like before they met? Why were they gossiping so much about her life in that northern court? Why had she separated from her husband? She should speak without fear; he accepted everything in advance: it hadn’t happened in his time. But Teri shook her head negatively, with a reflective tenacity in her expression and mysterious eyes, like a woman who knows that in love, frank confessions are neither forgotten nor forgiven. “All lies… slander. I have nothing to tell you. Forget that; Don’t torment yourself … There was nothing; and even if there had been something… I didn’t know you then, I didn’t know you! And with this exclamation she closed and justified her entire past. She regarded Fernando as something of her own that belonged to her forever. More than once she had complained in hotels about the ease with which certain adventuresses were accommodated, gravely endangering marital peace . By dint of calling herself “Madame Ojeda,” she had forgotten her true situation and became indignant, with all the fervor inspired by the right of property, at the mere thought that some woman might snatch “her husband” away from her. When, tired from so many trips, they landed in Madrid and lived separately for a time, he at his sister’s house, she with an aunt she considered a second mother, this separation seemed to inflamed her jealousy. When Teri found herself in the closed bedroom in the evenings, where the soft, plaintive sound of “Don Miguel’s bell” reached her, she would suddenly have angry outbursts. “You’re already living in your Madrid, where you’ve done so many mischievous things… Who knows if you’re cheating on me with something, you great thief!” After these outbursts of rage, she huddled around him, humble and timid. “It’s because I’m afraid of losing you, of someone else stealing my man away from me. I’d like to secure you forever, to have you tied by one leg like a goldfinch. Say: if we were to get married, what peace of mind!… You who know so much, answer: will we ever get married?” Fernando, who during the first months saw in María Teresa only another conquest, an elegant and beautiful woman who flattered his masculine vanity, suddenly suffered similar outbursts of anger. He, who at first had no desire to know and had voluntarily forgotten the past with all the slanderous vagueness he had heard about Teri, suddenly felt seized by a painful and unhealthy curiosity, a desire to cruelly enjoy hurting herself, and he took advantage of moments of abandonment to make her talk, wanting to know her past loves. “When I tell you I haven’t had any!” she protested. ” Believe me: you were the first and you will be the last.” She put in her eyes the naive wonder and in her voice the childlike humility of a woman who needs to be believed… Ojeda needed to believe too. Why tire herself in this hunt for the past! And with sudden confidence, she desired the same thing as her lover, a marriage that would consolidate their happiness. The selfishness of love exploded in María Teresa with cruel desires. “Oh, when will Joaquín die!… For what good is he in the world!” Joaquín was the husband, and she, from reports from her friends or from the brief interviews she had with the old man upon returning to Spain, calculated the probabilities of his death. “He’s worse; he’s almost senile. This will be over any moment.” The sensitive María Teresa, who pitied the dogs abandoned in the street and argued with the coachmen when they raised the whip on the beasts, spoke coldly of death, as if she only had affection for her love and the rest of the world was of no interest. Ojeda listened to her with a certain remorse. To wish death on a poor man! A gentleman who had done them no harm and upon whom they heaped countless mysterious insults daily from afar! What cowardice! But amorous selfishness ended up awakening in him all the same, with implacable cruelty. That stupid old man, by the privilege of his wealth, had possessed her first; he had savored the same joys as he, but with the charm of novelty. He might as well die… Let him die! And he died suddenly, while they were far away; and upon returning to Madrid in haste, stunned by the happy news, they encountered something they had never known before: the value of money, how difficult it is to lay a hand on it when it insists on fleeing, the material and prosaic necessity on which all the hopes and desires of life rest. Don Joaquín had left the world without leaving his wife any income other than a government pension as the widow of a plenipotentiary minister: a little more than she paid her maid in Paris. Part of his fortune came from his first wife and passed to his children; the other part, which was considerable, was donated during his lifetime to the same children, who had returned to his good graces in recent years. The impetuous Maria Teresa’s first idea was to buy a revolver and take turns killing her husband’s sons and daughters, as well as his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, without sparing his grandchildren. Cursed race! Thieves! And for this she had sacrificed the early years of her youth to a foolish old man, renouncing love? But no; he was good and loved her. He had assured her many times that he would leave things in order for after his death. It was the others who were trying to rob her… And
desisting from the purchase of the revolver, she threw herself into the adventures of a lawsuit with the passionate fervor that the incidents, entanglements, and quarrels of any litigation arouse in some women . She would prove that her husband’s family had taken advantage of his lax mentality in recent months to rob her with false documents. Fernando received the setback coldly. Deep down, he had always been repulsed by the fact that the old man’s money had entered his house when he legally married María Teresa. “Don’t worry; maybe it’s better this way. Count on me. I’ll work if necessary. ” But another surprise awaited him, too, from his brother-in-law, a man of order who had wanted to give him an account for some time. Several mortgages had weighed on his assets from the time Fernando had been leading a carefree life, and to this must be added the large sums he owed the family. His trips with Teri had devoured a lot of money. Ojeda was perplexed, as if awakened by the pile of papers the engineer was presenting him, and he pushed them away with a dignified gesture. There was no point in examining them; what his brother-in-law said must be true. The poor man humbly excused himself. He had delayed speaking, for fear that Fernando would be upset; he was willing to make any sacrifice; but he had two children, Lola was in the process of giving him a third, and he feared her protests from an orderly and economical woman who didn’t want to be ruined by a brother. The engineer had a plan… Why didn’t he marry a rich woman? With her figure and her name! An Ojeda! He knew better than anyone what that surname represented. “No; I prefer to work. I’ll get ahead.” And selling goods to raise funds, Fernando threw himself into business with a blindness that brooked no advice. In addition, he gambled hard at the club until dawn, in search of fleeting profits. Oh, his love! His poor love, humiliated and debased by worries about money! Goodbye to the unconsciousness of the wandering bird, the disdain for tomorrow’s forecasts! Their kisses often had the crispness of desperate caresses; They would both suddenly become absorbed and were afraid to ask themselves what they were thinking about. Some afternoons, in the disorder of the bed, the ringing of “Don Miguel’s bell” would surprise Ojeda. He was seriously discussing a big deal, a meeting with friends from the club, indifferent and cold before the adored flesh he couldn’t contemplate in the past without covering it with fiery caresses. She, for her part, spoke of the lawsuit, the great undertaking of her life, with all the vehemence of material interest and hatred. Courtly words, procedural terms quickly assimilated in her conferences with the lawyers, passed through her adorable mouth. Triumph was assured, but they would have to wait a while. Meanwhile , her lordly exterior was undergoing a transformation that didn’t escape Fernando’s eyes. Months and months passed without anything fresh coming to adorn her beauty, once eager for expensive novelties. As the seasons passed, the same dresses from the previous year reappeared , skillfully altered. Her Paris wardrobe could get her out of trouble for a long time. She spoke enthusiastically of the poor seamstresses of Madrid who, under her guidance, performed prodigious feats of clothing and hat alterations. The showy jewels, the first gifts with which her husband had tamed her youthful shyness, were only displayed occasionally, after mysterious captivities in the hands of moneylenders. Some had disappeared forever. María Teresa praised her aunt’s generosity. She took care of her maintenance and entertainment, proud to flaunt her at her side in theaters and at parties. She was capable of giving her entire fortune, but she had daughters, and they struggled constantly against their cousin’s influence. Sometimes, with blushing shyness and averting her eyes, she would ask Ojeda about the state of his affairs. “If only you had some money I need!” And when he hurriedly fulfilled her demand, María Teresa seemed to regret it. “How shameful! Me asking you for money!… It’s for something important!” You know… the lawsuit. But anyway, since we’re going to get married, everything we have must be shared. When I get my way, you won’t have to work anymore, my poor darling! You won’t have to worry about your business anymore. These businesses couldn’t be worse. In less than a year, Fernando had suffered two considerable losses in illusory ventures into which he was dragged by certain friends at the club as inexperienced as he was. Gambling also contributed to diminishing his fortune. From time to time, a win inspired him with great faith in the future and brought gifts and generosity for Teri. After these brief periods of optimism, the silent anger reappeared when he saw his hopes slowly crumble. In this situation, when he didn’t know what to do and felt overcome by mortal discouragement, a wealthy Spaniard, resident in Buenos Aires, his brother-in-law’s uncle, passed through Madrid. That man, who had fled his homeland plagued by poverty thirty years earlier, spoke of millions with astonishing familiarity and mocked the mediocrity of Iberian business. Conversations with this gentleman, who often dined at his nephew’s house, listened to and admired by the entire family like a triumphant hero, were for Ojeda like so many lashes applied to his dormant will. The rise achieved by this former rustic and many others of his class—why not attempt it himself? And with a courageous effort, trembling as if confessing to an affair, he explained his intentions to María Teresa. He wanted to leave; he needed to be rich for her, only for her. That relative of his brother-in-law promised to help him, and he, with the remnants of his fortune, could attempt something fruitful and quickly successful in America. Fernando was especially insistent on the speed of his trip. A matter of a year, or two at the most; and even then, he could go and return sometimes. She must have deluded herself into believing she loved a soldier who was leaving for war, but a war without the risk of death. Teri listened to him pale, her eyes watering, but she ultimately approved his decision. Yes, she had to go; it was better for her to work in a more conducive and favorable environment than that of the old world. To soften their grief, they tried to embellish the upcoming trip with romantic reminiscences and traditional optimism. He was going to be like the paladins of old romances, who set out to explore vast lands to present presents to their lady. He would return bringing millions, and they would once again experience an opulent existence, with luxurious trips around the world, grand hotels, a perpetual automobile, and they would be able to free their pearl necklaces and luminous jewels from the captivity of usury. A sacrifice of two years: not one more. Everyone knows that in America this time is enough for an intelligent man to acquire riches. So many fools achieve them there!… They remembered some comedies in which the enamored protagonist sets out at the end of the first act for the New World to make his fortune, and by the beginning of the second, he is already a millionaire and has returned. Some transformations can be seen in him that do him no harm: a few premature gray hairs, a tanned complexion, more energetic and angular features; But only fifteen minutes have passed since the curtain came down until it rises again. In reality, it wouldn’t have been fifteen minutes, it would have been fifteen months: perhaps two years; but the sacrifice of this time might as well be made in exchange for affirming happiness. That’s how the last few weeks had passed, talking about the trip, discussing their preparations, forging illusions about the results, but always seeing it in the distance; until, suddenly, they were warned by the claw of the immediate, the inevitable. And Ojeda, upon awakening from this dizzying evocation of memories that had only lasted a few seconds and encompassed an entire period of his existence, found himself walking through the Salón del Prado on a cold night, beside a woman who walked faintly, as if death awaited her at the end of the walk, avoiding his words, avoiding his gaze. “That’s all,” Teri said when they reached the Cibeles fountain. “No, don’t kiss me: it would hurt me a lot.” I wouldn’t have the strength to leave… Neither would my hand… No; goodbye! Goodbye! She pushed him away from her as if he were a stranger; she turned her head away so as not to see him. Suddenly, calling a carriage to wait for her, she fled. Fernando remained motionless for a long time, watching the rented vehicle slowly clatter away toward the Puerta de Alcalá. Inside the creaking, ancient box, his hopes, the very reason for his life, were fading away. And that was what great separations, deep sorrows, were really like: without resounding words, without eloquent phrases; completely different from what one sees in theaters and books! The hours before their departure, spent in her brother-in-law’s little hotel , up there at the top of Castellana, now seemed to her like a torment of family intimacy. In her room, her luggage was in disarray and her old servant was busy with the final preparations; in the dining room, Lola’s children, who didn’t want to go to bed without saying goodbye to him. “Uncle, bring us a parrot… Uncle, a monkey… When you come back, remember, Uncle, to bring a little black boy…” And his sister, who had assumed a protective air with the excitement of his departure, lectured him maternally. She hoped he would lead a more serious life there and remedy his follies. The husband approved of the marital prudence with optimistic affirmations. He was certain that Fernando was going to succeed: his uncle was waiting for him there, and he was a man who could help him a lot. And, carried away by his thoroughness in business matters, he bored him once again with the account of the steps he was taking to liquidate the remnants of his fortune in cash, and the timing and method in which he would remit the sums. At eleven at night, Ojeda found himself in a car on the way to the Estacion del Norte station, passing through lonely, sleepy streets where the night watchmen were beginning to park. He hadn’t wanted his sister and brother-in-law to accompany him, thus avoiding the final expansions of his family. Near the station, around the corner, he saw the Teatro Real. Goodbye, memories! Goodbye, María Teresa! She would be there in a box, surrounded by light, with her aunt and her friends, perhaps under the the hungry, covetous glances of manly avarice fixed on the smooth whiteness of her décolletage. And he, far away! Further and further away!… Getting out of the car, he found the area around the station deserted. His was a train with few passengers: a simple sleeping car that, at the waistline, was going to join the Portugal Express at the Delicias station. Near the entrance, he saw some porters coming toward him to take his suitcases, and a stationary hackney carriage, its sleepy driver and horse sniffing the ground. Something white, framed by a small window, was moving in its dark interior. The light from a gas lamp drew from this bulk an iridescent reflection, a gleam of precious stones. Ojeda, unaware of her advance, found herself standing by the carriage door… It was her, wrapped in a silk and fur cape, the feathers in her hair bent by the low ceiling; she, powdered, painted to hide her pallor, with heavy diamonds in her earlobes and a tragic stare in her wide-open eyes. “I wanted to see you without you seeing me,” she murmured in a plaintive voice. “To see you once more. I’ve escaped from the Royal Palace… I couldn’t live thinking you were still here. And now, goodbye!… No; no kisses. Goodbye! ” The coachman, undoubtedly obeying a previous order, gave the horse a whiplash, and Fernando had to step aside. A wheel passed by his feet. As the white vision instantly blurred, he glimpsed the stirring of a handkerchief and thought he heard a moan. The station platforms were deserted and gloomy. Only the red stars of a few lanterns shone, stars lost in the darkness beneath the enormous iron shell of the roof. On the central track, a locomotive and a car, which, isolated, looked like a toy. Fernando saw that he would only have the members of one family as traveling companions . But what a family! It filled almost all the compartments of the car, and around it and a mountain of luggage bustled more than a dozen servants: hotel porters, commuting waiters, porters, drivers. He felt content with this proximity: he was beginning to be among his own people. That family had to be Argentine; one of those families that occupies the entire floor of a large hotel, fills an entire car, rents the side of a ship, and, closely united, moves from one hemisphere to another without leaving anything behind but the furniture. The chief of the tribe gave orders and tips; The tall, fleshy, majestic lady, her waist somewhat deformed by motherhood, was reading the railway guide through her gold-rimmed glasses. Near her were three elegant young women, the daughters, and two equally adorned but older ones: the gentleman’s sisters-in-law. A little further away was the mother-in-law, a venerable matron dressed in black, with a stately and resolute air, who looked after the younger girls. Then there were the sons, of whom there were many, and Ojeda saw them as if they were like organ pipes when they happened to line up, from oldest to youngest. The oldest had a clean-shaven face, was smoking, and had the resolute air of a man who knows everything and has nothing left to see. Fernando thought, as he examined him, that perhaps he had carried in his suitcase some photographs of professional beauties from Paris with passionate dedications: “To my dear coco from Buenos Aires.” The younger siblings gleefully displayed several recently acquired tambourines, with bullfighting tricks painted on the head, and some bloody banderillas from the afternoon’s bullfight. Then came the family’s auxiliary staff: an Andalusian valet , who uttered a “che” after every two words so as not to be confused with the locals; a red-faced, grumpy British governess; a Galician maid in a black dress with a masculine collar and cuffs ; another with scruffy hair, a chocolate complexion, and slanted, slanted eyes. And the entire family with an air of quiet audacity, of immutable daring; robust, tough, and large from the A carnivorous diet from the moment they were weaned; brazenly eyeing everything, shouting at each other, bursting through doors in a crushing surge, as if everything belonged to them. Ojeda felt himself dwarfed by the number and splendor of his fellow travelers. What money it would cost to move this tribe, accustomed to living always in a state of abundance and comfort! What that gentleman in a tailcoat and top hat, the leader of the caravan, whom the servants called “doctor,” would have behind him!… What wheat can do! What cows’ bellies can provide!… But a sudden confidence took hold of him when he thought of the ancestors of this luxurious people, all of them uniformed according to the latest fashions from Paris. His grandparents, or who knows if his parents, had set out, like him, for the new lands in search of their fortune. Not like him, certainly worse: on a sailing ship, carrying his shoes under his arm to prolong their use, accepting the onboard food as an unknown gift… Perhaps he was arriving a little late, but it would be strange if they hadn’t left him some crumb. And
looking at the happy band, as if a sympathy of hidden kinship suddenly united him to all of them, he murmured happily, with the first joy he had experienced in a long time: “Here we go, all of us, dear friends.” The memory of the night spent on the train, a sleepless night accompanied by the image of Teri wrapped in her white cape, with feathers waving over her hair and two stars in her ears, made him remember that he had an unfinished letter before him; and concentrating his gaze again, he saw himself in the winter garden of the ocean liner. He was alone. None of the florid foreign women who were doing needlework and leafing through magazines remained in the lounge . The musicians had disappeared. The night silence was only broken by the faint creaking of wood and the swaying of objects. Ojeda decided to write. Have faith in our destiny. Do not despair: perhaps our love needed this trial to strengthen itself. The important thing is that you love me, because if you love me, there is no adverse power in the world that can separate us… Do you remember that afternoon at the Real, when we listened together to the first act of Twilight of the Gods? Our heads, almost joined, seemed to drink in the magician’s music , and with the music the words: words of a poet, of one of the greatest love poets who ever lived, grand and strong, worthy of heroes. The Valkyrie, transformed into a woman, still shaken by the surprise of carnal initiation, bids farewell to Siegfried, the virgin hero who has also just known love. The desire for adventure, for new endeavors, drives him to travel the world. A man must not remain in sterile contemplation at the feet of his beloved forever. He must do great things for her; he must harness the faith and energy that love pours into the vessel of her soul. When they part, they experience, like us, the first bitterness of estrangement, but they are as steadfast as demigods. “Oh, if Brunhilde were your soul to accompany you on your wanderings!” she says, eager to follow him. “It is always for her that my courage is kindled,” the hero replies. “Then you will be Siegfried and Brunhilde together? ” “Wherever I am, you will both be present. ” “Will the rock where I await you then be deserted? ” “No! For by doing nothing but one, wherever you are, we will both be.” »–Oh august gods, sublime beings, come and satisfy your gaze upon us!… Separated from each other, who will separate us?… Separated from each other, who will be able to separate us?… »–Hail to you, Brunhilda, shining star! Hail, valiant love! »–Hail to you, Siegfried, victorious light! Hail, triumphant life! »They do not weep, Teri, and they appear grand and serene in their farewell, not because they are children of gods, but because they have a the trust of children, a naive and healthy faith in the eternity of their love. Let us be like them; let us dry our tears and face the shadows of the future without fear, with the certainty that we must be more powerful than fate. Let us also say: “Far from each other, who will separate us?… Separated from each other, who can separate us?” Wherever I am, we will both be; for we are one, and wherever you are, my soul will go with you. Hail, Teri, shining star! Hail, radiant love!… When he had closed the letter, he left the winter garden, his steps somewhat unsteady because of the unsteady ground. He opened a very thick door, similar to a gate in a wall, and had to put a hand to his cap as a freezing downpour enveloped him. He found himself on one of the ship’s promenades. On one side, white, polished walls reflecting the light from the ceiling’s electric lights, and armchairs abandoned in a long row; on the opposite side, a canvas-covered railing, displaying between each column, as a decorative ornament, red lifeline scrolls with the ship’s name painted in white: Goethe. Beyond the railing, the mystery: an intense blackness that devoured the electric glow, not allowing it to advance more than a few inches into its shadowy depths; phosphorescent foaming, the dull murmur of invisible forces that announced their presence with shocks and stirrings. Ojeda saw a man in a tuxedo coming toward him with a hesitant step and greeting him from afar. “How our friend Goethe moves! As if he had just finished drinking at Auerbach’s tavern with the merry cronies of his poem.” It was Maltrana, who had prepared for lunch, pleased with this sumptuary arrangement of the ship, a great novelty for him. He confessed to Fernando that he was hungry and had dressed early, believing he would hasten the call to the dining room. The sea air—according to him—turned his stomach into a cage of wild beasts. “Tonight the steamer will dance a bit, but at dawn we will anchor in Tenerife. Take a look at me, noble friend: I think that for a man embarking for the first time, I’m not doing too badly.” With his back to the sea, he took in with a satisfied glance the clear brightness of the ship, the cleanliness of the floor, the lavish lighting, the fragments of the lounge that could be seen through the windows. “What a life, eh, friend Ojeda?… Meals at their scheduled times, with the sound of a trumpet; the table set four times a day; an army of waiters and maids, most of whom understand me with difficulty, which is an advantage for prolonging the conversation and getting to know each other better. Each one dressed in his best clothes, as if a tuxedo were the chasuble of the stomach cult; ice-cold beer, free music at every turn, and a lovely society: a society condemned to live together, whether angry or merry, to show each one in his true face, for no comedian can sustain his pretenses during such a long and continuous performance… And no one can escape; and no one is obliged to think or do anything; and we all offer ourselves for the spectacle just as we are. Eating well and… the rest, if a good opportunity presents itself; that’s the program… Too bad our life hasn’t always been like this!… Too bad it won’t be when we reach the other side of this blue street! Chapter 2. A military march woke Ojeda, sounding overhead with a great clatter of martial brass. A ray of sunlight entered through the cabin window, tracing trembling, crystalline ripples on the wall, a reflection of the invisible waters. The ship advanced slowly and finally stood still, while above the music continued roaring its triumphant march, which seemed to evoke a parade of two-headed eagles with outstretched wings over masses of pointed hooves. Tenerife. Fernando looked through the curtains and saw only a sea Blue and calm: the united and luminous waters of a calm bay. Land was on the other side of the ship. And since he knew the island from having landed there on previous voyages, he lay down again to enjoy the pleasures of laziness while in the nearby cabins doors banged, calls were exchanged in different languages, and the corridors echoed with the trot of hurried people, attracted by the charm of the new land. An hour later, Ojeda ascended to the upper decks. The ship, as it came to a standstill, seemed different. It had lost the appearance of a closed and well-caulked mansion it had had in previous days. Doors and windows were open, letting in streams of air, along with the sun, laden with the scent of warm vegetation. The birds sang in their cages with sudden confidence at the feeling of their motionlessness. The plants in the greenhouse seemed to expand, rhythmically moving their green hands, as if greeting their sisters on the nearby shore. Fresh flowers , their petals still tinged with dew from the fields, clustered on the dining room tables. The passengers planted their feet with surprise and satisfaction on the floor, as still and firm as an island, after the noisy instability of the previous night. As Fernando stepped out onto the promenade deck, he felt his legs tangled in a pile of colorful fabrics spread out next to the door, while the shouts of a crowd buzzed in his ears. He felt like he was at one of those open-air fairs held weekly in the towns of Spain. He had to push his way through the dense groups with his elbows. Benches and chairs had been converted into counters. A multicolored wave of warm hues invaded the floor, rising to the tops of the railings and the window openings. They were tablecloths with subtle openwork patterns resembling spiderwebs; silk scarves in fierce hues that gave the eyes a sensation of warmth; Kimonos with birds and gold foliage; light pajamas that seemed made of cigarette paper; multicolored pillows like mosaics; white or black veils embroidered with silver that brought to mind the tragic widows of India ascending to their marital bonfires to the sound of a funeral march. Needlework from the Canary Islanders mingled with garish junk from Asia. Andalusian and Hindustani vendors gesticulated among the groups of passengers, praising their wares with sonorous Spanish hyperbole or with a babble a mixture of all languages. Ojeda found himself attacked by small, copper-skinned men with broad, short faces, mustaches, and burning eyes stained with tobacco . They looked like flat-faced, mustachioed bulldogs; But good, humble dogs clinging to him would bark softly: “Sir, buy my pretty bedspread for your madam.” “Sir, a shawl: everything cheap.” Local vendors passed by offering boxes of silver-wrapped cigars, bearing the most famous Cuban brands, even though they came from the factories of Tenerife. Every now and then, new boats boarded the transatlantic liner loaded with bales. Their drivers climbed the ladder with simian agility and, stretching a rope, hoisted up the merchandise, then set up a new stall. The island’s fruits spread their tropical perfume along the promenade: the banana permeated the air with the essence of its honeyed pulp. Some vendors went back and forth offering hammocks of thread or large woven cane chairs, enormous and majestic like thrones. It was impossible to walk around the ship without being pushed by people, bumped by chairs being moved , or getting your feet tangled in piles of fabric. Fernando took refuge at the end of the prow walkway, leaning on the railing next to the bass drum and brass instruments abandoned by the musicians. The island rose in the background, its terraced volcanic mountains, with quadrangles of cultivated land dotted with small white houses. Below , next to the blue mass of the sea, the Spanish fortifications extended their ancient bastions, the corners topped by projecting stone sentry boxes. The city was pink, and above it rose the bell towers of several churches with tiled domes. Four X-ray towers marked the lines of their almost immaterial body in space, revealing the sky through the ironwork. Higher above the city, in a wrinkle of the mountain, waved the flag of a modern castle: an elegant hotel where consumptives from the north came to breathe. Between the dock and the ocean liner, a wide bay with flat coal barges abandoned on their moorings, bobbing in solitude; Steamers of various flags, around whose flanks the movement of cargo was agitated by the creaking of cranes and the swarming of smaller craft; green-hulled sailing ships, seemingly dead, without a man on deck, stretching the skeletal arms of their masts into space; the roar of sirens announced an imminent departure, and other roars announced the immediate arrival from the horizon; Belgian flags, raised high on masts, headed for the mouths of the Congo; English prows coming from the Cape or turning course toward the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico; ships of all nationalities sailing in a straight line southward in search of the coasts of Brazil and the republics of the Plata; five-masted hulls resting, awaiting orders, returning from China, Hindustan, or Australia; tricolor-flagged steamers en route to the African ports of colonial France; Spanish schooners dedicated to the coastal trade of the Canary Islands and the stops in Morocco. The island, smiling and indolent at the crossroads of the great routes leading to Africa and America, seemed to impassively contemplate this movement of world navigation, while for a few hours it provided the black nourishment of coal to the steaming organisms that arrived and departed without knowing it; festooned on its coast by a rough fleet of prickly pears and agaves; guarding behind the volcanic mountains of its coastline the secret of its hidden tropical valleys; scaling the sky with a succession of peaks over which the white wisps of clouds floated, and displaying above this mass of fleeces the peak of Teide, a conical cap striated with snow, which was like the tassel or button of this immense skullcap of land emerged from the ocean. Around the _Goethe_, a floating, mobile town had established itself, gliding along its flanks to the accompaniment of clashing bows, the entanglement of paddles, and continual calls to the rows of curious heads that lined the various floors of the ocean liner. They were rowboats , sailing boats, small steamers, sturdy barges with piles of coal. Files of white men, who seemed to be disguised as black men, entered the ship through the open ports on both sides, carrying large baskets on their shoulders, scattering coal dust. On the smaller boats, merchants stood, agitated like puppets by the undulations of the bay, haggling their exotic fabrics with the third-class crowd crowded on the gunwales forward and aft. From other boats loaded with pyramids of fruit, oranges and bunches of bananas flew in a rough trajectory toward the eager hands of the emigrants, who returned coins wrapped in papers. The nationality of the ship influenced commercial transactions , and merchants with Andalusian accents sold everything for marks and pfennigs. Canoes little bigger than troughs were crewed by naked, chocolate-colored boys, gleaming with the water that trickled from their limbs. While one rowed, moving short oars like paddles, another, huddled in the stern from the cold of the continuous dives, he would roar at the top of his lungs: “Sir, throw in two marks, and I’ll catch them!” “Sir, five marks, and I’ll pass under the ship!” “Sir… sir!” It was a cry that rose incessantly to the surface of the water; a continual appeal to the “sir” to test the swimming agility of the harbor rascals. And when the white piece fell into the abyss, the swimmer would reach it with his head bowed and his hands clasped in the form of a prow, leaving the canoe rolling behind his feet with the momentum of the jump. His tanned body took on an ivory clarity in the green crystal of the troubled waters. His limbs could be seen waving beside the hull of the ship, like white scissors that opened and closed rhythmically; until, returning to the surface with the coin in his mouth and brushing back the damp lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead, he would regain the canoe with the agility of a monkey and once again shiver with cold, imploring at the top of his lungs the “gentleman’s” generosity. Ojeda, busy following the progress of the little divers, suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder and someone coming to lean on the railing next to him. “But you didn’t want to go ashore?” Maltrana shrugged. “Why?” Some small steamboats full of passengers had left early in the morning : families still dizzy from the night’s rolling and eager to set foot on solid ground; blond ladies dreaming of excursions inland, forgetting that the ship was only going to stop long enough to make coal: about four hours. Even a German gentleman, whom everyone called “doktor,” without really knowing the reason for the title, had asked him, upon learning that Tenerife was a Spanish island, if he would have time to attend a bullfight. And Maltrana laughed, thinking about the possibility of an imaginary bullfight at seven in the morning, hastily organized to please the “doktor.” No one had invited him ashore, and he wanted to avoid expenses. His friend Fernando knew how little money he had with which to undertake his journey. By pestering his friends at the Madrid newspapers, he had been able to get a free ticket, a first-class ticket, paying what third-class passengers paid. “In all fairness, I should have gone down there eating fare with that flock of Jews and Christians, Russians, Germans, Turks, Spaniards, and… crowned devils ! For people from all countries come here. But I am what they call a poor man in a frock coat, and sometimes the holy social inequality, the basis, they say, of order and good manners, would be used for something good. ” If he’d had more time to explore the interior of the island, he wouldn’t have stayed on the ship. But to see the city and its residents?… He had made enough Spanish acquaintances in Spain, and he’d often had to write about the Canary Islands without ever having seen them. Now he was only interested in new countries. And Maltrana added, looking at the island: “This is the gatehouse of Europe. I find it somewhat similar to the pet dogs that appear at the passage of those leaving and those entering. When we think we’re in the boundless ocean, the island appears before the ship and stops to sniff it out. To the one leaving, it says: “Go with God, son, and don’t come back here if you don’t have money. Before you get struck by lightning.” And to the American who arrives, it greets him with the friendliness of a gatekeeper: “Welcome to your grandmother’s house if you have money to spend…” I’m not interested in this land, which is like the tail of a world we left behind. I wish to be in the other hemisphere as soon as possible, to see how my luck is there. I’m the same as those sick people who go from spa to spa, always hoping that health will await them at the next one. Everyone on the ship was eager to reach the end of the voyage; Maltrana saw a sign of impatience in the speed with which the passengers changed clothes, believing they had made considerable progress while still being close to Europe. It was still winter; but many, excited by the heading south, they had thought it appropriate, upon touching in Tenerife, to come up on deck in summer dresses, white caps, or straw hats. The ladies, who in previous days had been going about the ship in thick, mannish coats and wrapped in veils like odalisques, now showed the rosy flesh of their flesh through the lace of their blouses. “Summer begins for us,” said Maltrana, “and with summer, illusions. Those of us who are coming for the first time on our way to America feel the same prejudice as the wise men of Columbus’s time, who affirmed that gold could only be found where there were black people and it was very hot … Feeling that the sun burns us more intensely than in Europe, we believe ourselves less far from fortune. ” The two friends remained silent for a long time. The waves of the crowd reached them as they made a circle around the vendors displaying new merchandise. Ojeda felt annoyed by this confusion of shouts and shoving. “If we went up?” And up one of the stairs that led from the promenade deck, they climbed to the top floor of the ship, called the “boat deck” in shipboard parlance . No one. Their eyes, accustomed to the softness of the white partitions of the lower deck, to its slightly blue dimness, which gave it the appearance of a convent-like promenade, blinked from the excess of light on this upper deck, where vast spaces remained open to the sky, the planks warming under the glare of the sun. A few awnings cast rectangular, blackish shadows over the yellowish floor. For the first time, Ojeda climbed this deck. The cold had kept them all below in the previous days. Only Maltrana, restless and curious about the latest news of navigation, had wandered from the captain’s bridge to the deep pits, starting conversations, both in the first-class passenger lounges and in the bow and stern compartments where the emigrants were crammed . “I like this deck,” he said enthusiastically, “because it’s the only place where you know you’re on a ship. Below are salons, dining rooms, majestic staircases, waiters in white ties, hallways with numbered rooms: a real hotel. If it weren’t for the floor that moves from time to time, you’d think you were living in a fashionable seaside resort. You have to get up from your seat, take a walk, and lean over the railing to convince yourself you’re at sea. Not here: here you feel like a sailor; you can take in the entire circle of the Ocean, which never ends, and in which we always occupy the center, no matter how far we advance. Look, Ojeda, at the majestic things our friend Goethe has in his head.” And with the pride of a discoverer, he went on to show off the wonders of this deck, which he had strolled through in the previous days, when the sea was a livid hue, the sky leaden, and a cutting wind blew from bow to stern. “Look at the chimney: that enormous yellow tower, almost frightening when seen up close. The money it expels in smoke! It’s something of a bell tower, and down below, in the depths of the ship, is the temple, the sanctuary of fire, with its burning altars that produce steam. Hey? What do you think of the image? I’ll offer it to you for a few verses… And as robust as the chimney is, look how it’s held down and supported by several stays, so the wind doesn’t knock it over. Look at those four ventilators surrounding it as if they were its brood: four yellow trombones, their mouths painted red, through which we could both squeeze at once. They carry air to the depths of the engines and furnaces. Let’s say they’re the ogive that ventilates this cathedral of steel and coal.” Then, throwing his head back, he would raise his gaze to the top of the ship’s two masts. –Do you see four wires attached to two frets, running from one post to the other? They look like guitar strings and are the network of radiographic telegraphy. The wires go down to the telegraph operator’s booth, And if you come closer, you’ll hear a creaking sound similar to that of eggs in oil: something as if the clerk were frying the dispatches before serving them to the public… And all those enormous boxes of frosted glass, those wired domes, are skylights that give light to salons and stairwells. Seen from below, they shine with intricate mosaic designs , coats of arms of nations, and up here they look like opaque stoves like those in greenhouses… This deck has its inhabitants; it’s a town apart, the upper district, the Acropolis where the Archons who direct our movable republic live. Look forward at that block of cabins, with white walls and gray baseboards. There are the living quarters of the sovereign commander and his ministers, the officers. Around them are the cabins of the rich people, the aristocracy, always seeking the shadow of authority. Above the roof, a small promenade, the last quarter of the ship’s quarters; At the front, the bridge, something like the Ministry of the Interior, where the maintenance of order is monitored day and night; near it, the telegraph office, that is, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Insubordinate yourself, and a whistle will sound on the bridge that will bring forth through a hatch, like theater devils, four strong blond men with blue anchors tattooed on their biceps, who will carry you off to sleep on the bar… If a danger threatens the stability of our small state, and the Executive Branch will send an electronic circular to the other powers sailing invisibly, demanding their prompt intervention. Maltrana turned his eyes toward the stern, beyond the chimney and the engine room ventilators. “There, the Acropolis has another block of flats, but it’s inhabited only by ordinary people: something like the village huts that once rose like warts before the gates of castles.” This is our General Hygiene Department: the laundries, the ironing room, and the gymnasium, with countless electrically powered machines , diabolical inventions that stretch you, shrink you, scratch your back, and tickle you like a string of ants. “What a sight to see at the laundromat, my friend Ojeda!” he continued after a pause. “What a pity it’s closed now! There are machines with cylinders, just like newspaper presses; only instead of spewing out printed sheets, they spit out shirts, trousers, sheets, mountains of linen, such as you would only see if you suddenly cleared out an entire street of shops… The ironing is even more interesting. Imagine three plump, blond girls, a short skirt, and over it a long, striped blouse that reveals Germanic-white arms and a Rubens-style breast.” Yesterday I spent the afternoon with them, watching the poor things sweating while using the electric irons and how they laughed when they heard me talk for hours without understanding a word. I cracked our jokes, occasionally pinching them to appreciate the toughness of their blouses. Just a matter of passing the time! And they opened their eyes and blushed, saying, “_Ia… Ia…_.” I’ll take you tomorrow, when they can’t see us. I’ll introduce you: don’t be afraid. I’m the best friend! Then Isidro looked at the sides of the deck, where two rows of boats were hanging from their steel davits. “Beautiful whaleboats made of wood as polished and lustrous as a salon floor. Each one can hold fifty people; and the mast, the sail, the oars, everything necessary, is stored in their belly, under the canvas hood that covers it.” As we approach the end of the voyage, they will rest inside the ship, tied between those wedges in the floor; but during the voyage, they will be suspended outside, ready to be launched into the water in case of danger… And that forest of yellow trombones with red mouths that emerge from all sides, like dragon throats? They are tentacles that the belly of the ship throws out into space to hunt for oxygen, steel trunks that, with the impulse of The march is sucking life away… Don’t be surprised, Ojeda, that I wax lyrical. I haven’t traveled like you. Everything is new to this poor fellow who spent his life wandering around the cheapest boarding houses, and as for ships, he’s seen no others but the small boats on the Retiro pond… And this is vast, very vast! He paused for a moment, as if concentrating his thoughts to better appreciate such grandeur, and then continued: “What surrounds us is even more enormous. We know from books that the sea is immense; but immensity in reading is nothing more than a word. You have to place yourself in it, feel the wandering of your imagination before the limitless space, make comparisons… Yesterday I was walking around the ship. To walk around the lower deck, which occupies only the center, I needed two hundred steps: a few turns, and you feel tired as after a march.” Large halls, a café just like those in cities, dining rooms that can hold hundreds of people, long and complicated hallways, just like in hotels, large dormitories, storerooms, music, and people forming separate classes, establishing social divisions, just as if we were on land. How enormous! Everything, how enormous!… And this is just looking at the privileged quarters, the central castle of the ship, with its nooks and crannies, staircases, bathrooms, toilets, and heating and cooling pipes. The whiteness of the electric light emerges in every corner where a bit of shade can gather; water gushing from taps every three meters for a thorough cleaning; soft carpets muffling footsteps; a hygienic drugstore smell spreading disinfectant perfumes where sad human needs shed their filth. This is an enchanted palace. Isidro continued the description of the ship. There were also the working-class neighborhoods forward and aft to be counted: the crowds of emigrants, eating and drinking perhaps more abundantly than at home, singing and dreaming because they were moving toward hope. And beneath them, machines that chain and force the mysterious and malignant forces to work; food warehouses like those of a city preparing for siege; storehouses of merchandise, bales of fabric, agricultural machinery, construction supplies, the riches of fashion; everything that young people need for the development of their dizzying progress. And this grandeur of a monstrous hotel, a caravanserai, a floating village, instilled in all the passengers a feeling of security, as if they were on solid ground. Who could destroy the thick steel walls, the solid windows, the heavy furniture, the machinery with its overwhelming pulse? It didn’t matter that the ground moved; this couldn’t diminish their confidence: it was just an incident . They lived with their backs to the ocean and had eyes only for the great inventions of men. They all ended up forgetting the abyss beneath their feet and lived the same life as on land. Only when, on their walks, they reached the bow or the stern and found themselves facing the immense sea did they feel the impression of someone waking up lying beside a precipice. Nothing! Nothing but an intense blue as far as the horizon and a lighter blue in the sky. Sometimes, far down in the depths , an almost imperceptible black dot, a faint shred of steam, a ship just like the other, perhaps larger… “And yet,” Maltrana continued, “with less courage than an ant in the middle of the plains of La Mancha… The engines, the salons, the steel walls, nothing, absolutely nothing before the immensity of the majestic blue.” A simple snort from him, and he’s sucked in… And to avoid this bad impression, we stop looking at the ocean and go inside the ship to listen to music in the salons, to drink beer in the cafe, to listen to gossip on which the fate of the world seems to depend. What an interesting animal man is, my friend Ojeda!… As a beast of reason, he knows the enormity of danger better than other beasts; but He lives happily, because he has the power to forget, and he is also certain that there is a Providence with no other occupation than watching over him. Contemplating again the enormous proportions of the ship, he seemed to regret his words. “Despite the grandeur of the sea, this too is grandeur. Our appreciations are always relative; we never lack a reason to compare it with something greater to humble our pride. The earth is great, and men, to perpetuate their memory on it, have spent thousands of years slaughtering each other, inventing new ways of communicating with the gods, or writing on tablets, parchments, and papers so that their name remains with a few lines in the tome they call History… And this earth is less in the sea of space, much less than Goethe in the middle of the ocean; less than a grain of coal lost in the three thousand tons of coal that pass through their coal bunkers. Beyond the lining of the atmosphere, they ignore us; we do not exist.” And planets a hundred times, a thousand times larger than Earth are, before the immensity, rubbish like us; and the father sun that holds us by its reins, and for whom a slight advance of its fiery coram vobis would be enough to turn us to ashes, is nothing more than a poor devil, one of so many bohemians of the immensity, who in turn contemplates another planet, recognizing it as its lord… And so on, until it never ends. Isidro was silent for a few moments, as if reflecting, and then added: “But everything is equally relative if we look down. This Goethe could be swallowed up by a storm, of course; but with his belly of steel and his triple keel, he is like an island in the middle of these seas that less than a century ago carried nothing but feathers from the frigates and brigantines in which the ancestors of today’s millionaires went to America .” The good Pinzón, repairer of the famous caravels, would cross himself with the astonishment of a devout sailor if he were resurrected on this ship and saw its witchcraft. And he and the great navigators of his time, who advanced with their eyes on the compass, could in turn laugh at the Phoenician, Greek, and Carthaginian sailors, who dared not lose sight of the mountains. And these, in turn, must have looked with pity at the naked, black men who, on the African coasts, went out to meet their triremes in canoes made of hide or bark. And the first one who, with axe and fire, hollowed out the trunk of a tree and dove into the water was a demigod to the unfortunates who had to swim through rivers and estuaries like eels… Let us always look down, friend Ojeda, for our peace of mind, and say that the Goethe is a great ship and that life is perfect on her. Let’s understand existence as a respectable lady who last night, when the ship was moving the most and on this last deck there was a frightening darkness, the wind shrieking like a thousand legions of demons, was scandalized by the fact that many men were going to the dining room without a tuxedo and the German artists were smoking cigarettes in the greenhouse. Ojeda was pleased to listen to his friend’s exuberant eloquence. The novelties of that maritime life infused him with an indefatigable mobility . “You are the spirit of the ship,” he said. “In just a few days you have traveled it completely, and there is no corner you don’t know or secret you have escaped.” Maltrana modestly excused himself. He still had much to see, but he would eventually find out everything: long days of sailing lay ahead. As for the passengers, there were few he didn’t know. Some of them struggled with a lack of means of expression; Some women only spoke German, but with a smile and a wave of their hands, he would eventually make himself understood. Of those who could understand him in Spanish or French—which was the majority—he considered himself a friend, but a close friend. And Ojeda smiled upon hearing him speak with enthusiasm of this intimacy that dated back three days. “I know the ship better than the house of Doña Margarita, my employer, where I lived for eight years. I can describe it without fear of being wrong. This mobile hotel has ten floors. The top three, the most Deep, they are closed. They are the transport holds, where bulky bundles are piled up, pieces of machinery stuffed into crates lowered by cranes through the hatches and lined up like books in a library. All this merchandise occupies two sections of the ship, bow and stern, and in between is the engine room. Electric light illuminates this world, which can be called submarine, since it lies below the waterline: the ventilators that reach up to here are its lungs… Then comes what they call the main deck, with the sleeping quarters of the third-class personnel: about four hundred forward, many more aft; and between them are the ship’s service clothing stores and luggage storage , the strongroom for storing packages and samples, the cabins for the lower personnel, the cold storage rooms, which are enormous and hold a large part of our food, and the mail room , a warehouse full of sacks containing… who knows! News of life and death, as you would say in your verses, riches, oaths of love, the soul of an entire continent going to meet another continent… He paused for a moment to add with a mysterious expression: “And there’s also the treasure room. I didn’t go in there, friend Ojeda. It’s an armored room, which not even the commander can enter. A responsible officer keeps the key. But I’ve been at the door, and I confess I felt a certain emotion. Do you know how much money we have under our feet? Fifteen million; not in scrap paper, but in minted and shining gold, in pounds sterling and twenty-mark coins. They shipped it in two shipments from Hamburg and Southampton: it’s money that the banks of Europe send to those of Argentina to make loans to farmers, now that they are preparing to harvest. And on all the trips there or back, that treasure never comes back empty.” I’ve been told that the millions are in steel boxes lined with wood and sealed, the cutest little things: fifteen kilos each; eighty thousand pounds piled up inside… Tell me, Fernando, aren’t you tempted by this neighborhood? Doesn’t it move you?… Ojeda shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate the futility of a reply. “If we had much less,” Maltrana continued, “you wouldn’t be forced to embark on colonization adventures, and I’d live a life of character. It’s a shame we’re not in the heroic and romantic times when Lord Byron and Espronceda sang of the pirate!” You and I would stir up the third-class people, throw the captain and all the crew into the sea, land the serious passengers on an island, uncork the thousands of bottles and barrels in the warehouses, and go… we’ll see where, with all the blond, Polish, and Viennese girls from the operetta troupe that comes down below. Of course, you and I would sleep in the treasure room, on those interesting boxes. What do you think of the idea? “Well, I like it,” Fernando said, laughing. “It’s quite a program; I’ll think about it. ” “But these are not times for great deeds,” Maltrana added, “and heroes have to go into exile, to move clods of earth or polish shoes, to the other side of the ocean… Let’s not think of being glorious supermen; let’s be mediocre and continue our description… Above the main deck is what they call the upper deck. At the bow and stern are sailors’ quarters, hospitals, stores for navigational equipment, kitchens for emigrants, and between both ends, cabins and more cabins for the first- class personnel, hairdressers, bathrooms, and toilets everywhere. And here ends the true case of the ship, what can be called the sailing vessel, the equal and uniform construction from one end to the other, without inequalities on the deck. Isidro was perplexed, as if a new thought had occurred to him. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed what I did, friend Ojeda; but as soon as I boarded this I noticed a peculiarity, perhaps due to my lack of knowledge of modern navigation and the habit of looking at old ships in books. In the past, when sailing in battle, man placed towers at both ends of the ship and established the bow and stern castles. In the front were the combatants; in the center, low and defenseless, the rabble; in the stern, the chief and his retinue. When times of peace and security came, the progress of naval architecture gradually reduced the sculpted altar-like castles, with figureheads , tritons, and undines; but the stern continued to be the place of honor, the quarters of the privileged. And such is the force of routine that, until a few years ago, the preferred place on steamships was the stern, above the propeller that makes everything tremble and where the rolling is most violent. Only yesterday, so to speak, they learned that on a moving ship, the midpoint is the one that oscillates the least, and the old bow and stern decks have been moved toward each other, meeting in the center, which is, for the passenger, the place of greatest stability. Now, ships look like mountains when seen from afar; before, they were two-headed monsters joined by a body almost above the waterline… From the top of this central deck, we can’t even guess at the existence of the stern and bow, which are three stories below us. The central deck is a world apart. People live in their compartments without knowing what’s going on in the rest of the ship. Perhaps I’m the only one who leaves it on the entire voyage. The privileged find their needs satisfied without leaving this luxurious neighborhood, and not even out of curiosity do they go down the stairs that lead to the poor quarters… But it must be admitted that the neighborhoods there are filthy and linger with the stench of sour soup. Maltrana shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate he was about to finish his description. “You already know the rest, since it belongs to the radius in which we move. The deck called the saloon deck, because on the bow side it has the dining room, and beyond it the luxury cabins, and the kitchens for the first-class personnel, with the pastry shop, the bakery, the wine cellars and refrigerators for daily service. I always go after midnight to take a look at the galley. It’s an interesting sight to see how they take the bread out of the ovens: a succulent perfume! One night you will come with me…” Above this deck is what they call the promenade deck, with the music room and the winter garden; beyond that, the children’s dining room and the passengers’ private bathrooms; and on the part facing aft, the fumoir, or better to us, the café, which seems to be one of the establishments of its kind on dry land. Above the promenade deck, the boat deck, where we are now; and higher up, this quarterdeck that roofs the cabins of the ship’s senior personnel and has the bridge at the front, with its chart room for the officer of the watch and its storage for navigational charts. ” Isidro remained silent, as if he no longer had anything to tell; but then he added with a smile: “And there’s still someone who lives higher up on this mountain of apartments: the ship’s muezzin, the lookout man or night watchman who lives at what they call the ‘nest’. This nest is a kind of steel pulpit that only fits one person and is attached to the foremast. At night, when the bridge bell strikes each half-hour, the lookout man answers up there with another bell and shouts through the horn some words that, in the darkness, seem to come from the clouds. It’s a bellow in German like those let out by the dragon that Siegfried kills in the jungle. Last night they explained to me what the night watchman says to the bridge officer. “Nothing new; “All the lights are on.” The lights are the ship’s position lights. And if he keeps quiet, because he falls asleep, he’ll end up sleeping tied to the bar. ” “I know all that; I’ve sailed a bit,” said Ojeda. “But more than the ship, I’m interested in those aboard. You, as a goblin, must know them all. Isidro raised his head proudly. “All of them, yes, sir!” There was no passenger on the ship better connected than he. In the mornings, he would approach the first people who came up on deck. “Good morning, sir. How was your night?” There were affectionate people who responded gratefully, striking up a friendly conversation, as if they had known each other for a long time; others, suspicious and sullen, responded with grunts or continued their stroll. The Argentine families had initially greeted his overflowing familiarity with haughty surprise. So many adventurers travel to their country! But upon noticing that he wasn’t a gringo, but a pure Galician, they softened, becoming more communicative, as if they found something in him that reminded them of their ancestors. Some girls had even asked him if he was a friend of the king and what time of year the court balls were held… With those who couldn’t understand, he expressed himself through courtesies and winks, which provoked communicative laughter. The operetta artists, upon seeing him, burst into peals of laughter and incomprehensible phrases. “Although it may seem immodest, I must declare that I’ve landed on my feet here. I’m most sympathetic to these people; if I were to put myself forward for anything, not one of them would refuse me their vote. All friends… And what a mix! They come rich and undeniably wealthy, like that doctor and his immense family who made the journey with us from Madrid; Moruzaga’s widow , another Argentine, with her five daughters, modest and pleasant little girls who recite monologues in French, understand each other in English, and sometimes, out of condescension, speak to me in Spanish; And with them other less distinguished, but equally solid, landowners returning to their inland estates. Interesting and good people! I venerate them. If they put their cows and sheep in pairs, they would surely reach Buenos Aires from here; if they lined up the sheaves of wheat they harvest each year, they could form a belt that would encompass the globe. Ojeda greeted these hyperboles with a smile, and his friend seemed annoyed. “Yes, sir; that’s right, and I’m not diminishing anything. It’s a source of pride to have friends like these… There’s also an arch-millionaire coming, a gringo, who’s king of I don’t know what; I think it’s coal in the port of Buenos Aires, or flax, or corn; I don’t remember. The other rich people stay away from him because he’s not of their class, because there’s still memory of when he walked around in hobnailed shoes and ate polenta in the wharf taverns. He’s a founder of a dynasty; a Bonaparte struggling to be recognized by the other royal families, ennobled by tradition. His grandchildren will be distinguished people, but he pays for his triumph by enduring gossip and scorn. I’m glad they treat him badly. What a proud man! He barely answers me when I greet him; he seems afraid I ‘ll ask him for something. His wife, younger than he, is a kind of fresh-faced cook, whom you’ve surely noticed. I believe he never takes off the uniform of his wealth even to sleep: at seven in the morning he’s already on deck with a string of pearls, the size of sparrow eggs, and so scandalously gaudy that anyone, not knowing his fortune, would believe them to be fake… And to complete the group of rich people, three of our compatriots come, two from Buenos Aires and one from Montevideo, former shopkeepers who have been in America for forty years … Excellent people; honest, down-to-earth, and a little crude. They give me good advice, they wouldn’t lend me five duros if I asked for it, and they let me pay when we have a drink. I’ll introduce you to them one of these days. They invariably begin their moral sermons in a way that inspires enthusiasm. “You journalists, you’re half- mad…” “You, who won’t do anything in America because you’re a man of the pen…” And they all agree that to make a name for yourself, you must have been educated behind a counter, initiated into the sublime art. of selling for fifty what was worth ten, spending only two of the forty profit. Maltrana reflected for a long time, gathering his memories. “And of the rich in America, I think I’ve finished the list. But even more interesting people are coming. An Italian bishop who travels at the expense of a wealthy family. They are people long established in a neighborhood there they call La Boca. They bring him at all costs, to show him to their friends and acquaintances and tell them: ‘Don’t think we’re just anyone in our country. Look at this Monsignor, he’s a relative of ours.’ And they surround him with veneration, as if he were the family banner; they carry him by the arm, ‘Monsignor, this way,’ ‘Monsignor, that way,’ and the poor ecclesiastical day laborer who has become a bishop seems like a sleepwalker, stunned by so much care and honor. I believe they force him to wear the gold cross on his chest every night to enter the dining room, and if he forgets, they scold him… Another priest arrives, a French abbot with a long beard, with the air of a sailor, who has been hired to give Catholic lectures in a theater in Buenos Aires. This was the initiative of the Argentine ladies living in Paris, who wished to erase the taste of impiety left by other traveling orators. And we also have a lecturer on sociology, whom I believe is Italian. There’s something for everyone… And five or six French coquettes, who are going there for the sixth time because they’ve received good news about the harvest, the most calm, quiet, and well-behaved people on board; and the whole flock of blond, crazy goats from the operetta troupe; and countless fashion and jewelry commissioners, male and female; and about two dozen German merchants established in America, square, good-natured, calm, but who show tiger’s claws when they talk about business… and Jews, many Jews. According to what I’ve read, on Columbus’s first voyage two already embarked on the caravels, and since then they haven’t stopped coming. In the New World, the black man’s only concerns are racial , and since no one pays attention to the Jews, they lose the resentment inspired by persecution and end up blending in with the rest… By the way; there’s also a boatman from Paris coming, a decorated gentleman with a long, red beard, whom you’ve probably seen in the mornings on the promenade with his legs wrapped in a skin and studying tomes full of figures. He’s going to Brazil on business. His wife always wears an enormous pearl necklace; But they are smaller than those of the gringo’s wife, and this makes the two of them look at each other out of the corner of their eyes , pressing their lips together… He hesitated for a moment, reconstructing the list of those absent in his memory. “There are also some Americans from the North, whom you must have noticed by the noise they make. They are clean-shaven, with baggy trousers, and a button in the lapel, the insignia of some society in their country. At all hours they uncork champagne in the smoking room; they ask for the box of cigars and reach in to grab many at once ; they sing loudly and are the torment of the musicians, because they are always demanding that they play: ” Miusic! Miusic!”… A tall, handsome Yankee lady also comes alone. Her husband is waiting for her in Rio de Janeiro; he has some business in the interior of Brazil… And several German girls who are going to marry in America without knowing their fiancés. Marriages, it seems, are arranged by letters and portraits. The settler or mechanic who comes to establish himself in the towns of Argentina or the Brazilian jungles, sends a letter to his people: “Send me a girl of these and other qualities. There are three thousand marks for clothing and the passage. And the girl embarks without knowing her future husband except in a photographic bust, and her only concern is that when she sees him, he turns out to be of good height… There are also… But here, friend Ojeda, I don’t know what to say…” Maltrana seemed to hesitate, and finally added: “There is a young lady who goes with her parents, the gentle Nélida, a mixture of characters and bloodlines that disorients the most astute, and I confess that I It gives you a lot to think about. Her father is German, her mother from one of the Pacific republics; she was born in Argentina, but has lived in Berlin since she was nine. She’s that girl you must have seen on the promenade, always accompanied by men; very tall, slender, with a short skirt so tight that she can’t take a step without the fabric molding her entire body. Her hair is cut like a pageboy’s bob, like the singers… I haven’t met birds of this species until now. Over there in Madrid, people are less complicated… We also have a few well-dressed young men, of vague nationality, who speak various languages fluently. I haven’t quite gauged them. They could be commercial commission agents feigning the air of high society, ruined barons in search of a rich American woman, or elegant thieves like those in novels. Who knows! But that ends my story for now. The landsmen are returning. Let’s go below to hear their impressions of Tenerife. The bustling fair continued on the promenade deck. The passengers had finished their shopping, and now it was the ship’s maids and stewards who were taking advantage of the last moments to make their purchases more cheaply. On the return voyage, the Goethe did not stop in Tenerife to refuel, and with their thoughts on Hamburg, they were buying colorful fabrics, handkerchiefs, and tablecloths to give to those waiting for them there. Maltrana stopped next to a Hindustani man who was bargaining with a young woman. She stood in a doorway, afraid to be seen in the sunlight and at the same time displaying her near-nakedness, covered in a simple pink kimono that revealed the outline of her body. Her arms and part of her chest betrayed the freshness of a recent bath. She had gotten up late and had just hurried up on deck to make her purchases before the vendors left. The copper-colored man was praising the richness of a blue tunic with branches and white birds that she was holding in her hands. “She asks me for two pounds, what do you think?” the young woman said, smiling at Maltrana, while he nudged his companion with his elbow. Ojeda guessed from this sign that it was Nélida. She smiled at him, with the same smile she gave to all the men. For the first time, she was noticing him. Fernando saw her as taller, younger than Teri, but with a vulgar and daring appearance that he found unpleasant. Only her amber eyes, which took on a golden reflection in the light, reminded him—alas!—of the others. Perhaps they weren’t the same; but he kept them open and shining in his imagination, and the slightest resemblance made him believe in a complete identity. “I’ll take this,” Nélida said, looking lovingly at the Asian garment. “But I don’t have any money: we’ll have to ask Mama for the two pounds… Haven’t you seen Mama?” And without waiting for a reply, she disappeared down the stairs amid the fluttering of the pink fabric, like a faint cloud, which revealed the firm silhouette of her naked body. The excursionists from land appeared on the promenade. The steamboats pressed against the sides of the ocean liner to return its human cargo. The women, carrying large bouquets of flowers, hurried to their cabins or chatted with friends who had stayed behind on the ship, as if returning from a long expedition. They had come from Spain! They had already seen Spain! One more country to add to their travel stories. The men, with their wide-brimmed hats covered in dust, their cufflinks hanging from one shoulder, and still clutching their walking sticks, spoke solemnly of their journey. For many, it was the first land they had set foot on since leaving Hamburg or Paris. The ship had stopped very briefly in Vigo and Lisbon. They remarked in unison on the backwardness and laziness of that land. All the old readings about Spain, all the traditional prejudices and errors, suddenly reappeared with just a two-hour walk around an African island. The German “doktor” He would call for a bullfight at seven in the morning, boasting of his knowledge of Spanish by calling everyone he’d found on land wearing military uniform “cuadrilleros.” He also spoke of familiars from the Inquisition, recalling the fat, dark-skinned priests who left church in search of homemade hot chocolate after saying mass. A young Belgian man, whom many called “baron,” lamented the sloping streets and the cars. Not a single automobile!… The women leaned out of the windows like odalisques. “And to think,” Ojeda said to his friend, “that perhaps one of these people will write an article entitled “My Trip to Spain.” A swarthy man, wearing a showy tie and trousers rolled up in the English style, strained his slow, syrupy accent to express indignation. “Don’t tell me!… What a brave fool I was to come down! I’ve been to Europe four times, and I’ve never wanted to see Spain.” There’s no progress there: there ‘s nothing there. Give me England… I wish the English had discovered us . I’m for civilization, you know, friend?… A lot of civilization. Maltrana smiled, at the same time pointing it out to his friend. That’s Pérez speaking… Pérez from some little republic that faces the Pacific. I’ve been told that in your country, to be anything, you have to prove you’re descended from eight Indian grandparents and half a dozen Black people. The white man is at the bottom. Since the blessed independence, they haven’t been able to scrape by peacefully. Every year they oust a president, and from time to time they shoot the one they catch and burn the corpse so it leaves no seed. “And I’m for civilization, you know, friend?…” Let’s go over there so we don’t hear him. They sat at the end of the walkway that led over the bow, between the saloon windows and a large glass window from which the entire forward part of the ship could be seen. On the fore-deck, some sailors were beginning preparations to raise the anchor. Officers and boatswains ran around the deck, pushing the vendors to hastily close their bundles, abruptly cutting short the last-ditch haggling. Bundles were slid from ropes over the gunwales to the boats pitching around the ladder. The swimmers uttered their last cries: “Sir, one mark. Throw in one mark, sir, the steamer’s coming.” “I confess, friend Ojeda,” said Maltrana, “that I feel the emotion of someone looking into the black mouth of a cavern and wondering: ‘What’s inside?…’ Here, the cavern is blue and luminous, but the anxiety is no lessened… What will I find beyond this island? When will we return this way?” Fortunately, we have the support of hope… good and equitable hope for all, because all of us in this shell are assisted equally… I’m making this trip to earn money, for the desire to know what wealth is; and I’m not doing it just for myself. I have a son, and although one laughs at certain bourgeois who justify their evil deeds and their thefts with the quality of being family men, believe me, this thing of fatherhood drives us to great things and makes us brave like heroes… You’re also going there for the desire for money. A man of your class, who has what you had in Madrid—I know everything!—doesn’t change his life without a powerful motive. “I…” said Fernando with perplexity, “yes… for money, like you… And who knows! Perhaps for something other than wealth; for other, less explainable desires.” He had reflected a great deal the previous night, and delving into his decisions, he found unconscious motives, hitherto unsuspected , that drove him forward with a push as rude as the desire for wealth. Heine’s poetic ballad seemed to sing in his ears , in which he describes how the knight Tannhauser tore himself from the arms of Venus simply for the pleasure of knowing human suffering again. “O Venus, my beautiful lady! Exquisite wines and tender kisses have satisfied my heart. I thirst for suffering. We have joked We have laughed a lot, we have laughed too much: tears now make me envious, and it is with thorns and not roses that I wish to see my head crowned…» Man lives in eternal discontent. Perhaps he too flees, like the poet who loved the goddess, from a surfeit of happiness and a thirst for sorrow. Suddenly, beside them, the band began to play a triumphant march. The roof of the promenade and the thick glass of the viewing platform trembled with the harmonious roar of the brass instruments. “The ship is setting sail,” said Maltrana, jumping up. “Look how the island is moving. We’re leaving! We’re leaving!… What the music is playing is magnificent; I have never heard anything so solemn; it is the salute to hope, the great triumphant march of illusion. And as if possessed by an irresistible desire for movement, he fled from his friend. “Hope!”… Ojeda, without leaving his seat, once again saw himself far away, very far away, as he had been the previous afternoon. She was in Paris, and María Teresa was returning from a trip to the fashion stores. This time, her only purchase was a book. She had bought it at the Louvre department store, enthralled by its cheapness and beautiful binding. Adorable Teri! Always a woman! She, to whom Fernando conceded more talent than to many literary women, bought her books in the fashion stores between a piece of lace and a dozen gloves. It was a French translation of Aeschylus’s tragedies. In the following days, they read with their heads together, like the adulterous lovers in the Dantesque poem. “How beautiful!” she exclaimed. “And you say this is thousands of years old? It’s so modern! It seems so recent!” Carried away by her capricious imagination, she regretted that the noble and melancholic words of Prometheus were not accompanied by music. “A piece by Wagner, do you understand? By our beloved Don Ricardo… Or better yet, by Beethoven: something like the Ninth Symphony.” Fernando recalled the scene that had moved them both to a shudder of admiration. Prometheus is chained to the rock, and around him, the waves lapping, the merciful Oceanids, the sea nymphs, take pity on the hero’s suffering. “What have you done, wretch, to deserve such a punishment from the gods?” “I have taught mortals not to think about death,” Prometheus replies. “And how did you achieve this?” ” I have taught them blind hope.” And for thousands and thousands of years, the beneficent and consoling divinity that the somber hero had given to humans reigned over the world, repaying this generosity with the torment of having his entrails ripped out by the eagle, “Zeus’s winged dog.” She led the flocks of armed men; she had fluttered before the prows of the explorers; with her quiet step, she moved the closed silence where sages and artists meditate; she guided the crowds eager for well-being and ample opportunity, who were uprooted from one hemisphere to reestablish themselves in the other. Ferdinand saw her; he saw her coming, with his half-closed eyes, over the blue sea, like a bubble of gold detached from the sun, like a rag of light that finally stopped on the edge of the prow, just like the divine images that adorned the ships of the first Argonauts. Her wings stretched majestically in the ether like concave sails; her tunic swirled behind her in harmonious folds, driven by the wind. She looked like the Victory of Samothrace, and like her, she was missing her head. That’s why Ojeda finally recognized her. She doesn’t think, she doesn’t have eyes… It was hope, blind hope that with the advance of its torso pointed to the South. Chapter 3. After lunch, the passengers of the _Goethe_ heard the band playing on the bow, with the sleepy distance that the immensity of the Ocean infuses into all vibrations. “They’re going to vaccinate the third class,” said Maltrana, always informed of what was happening on the ship. They were still in front of the island, skirting its rugged mountains, stony waves of ancient eruptions that had reached the sea. They went down the Slopes, like sheep in a herd, white houses, some half-hidden in the green-shaded folds. Above the peaks, the snowy hood of Teide passed like a curious head, hiding or appearing, depending on how close or far the ship was from the coast. Maltrana couldn’t remain calm in the winter garden while he drank coffee with Fernando. Something extraordinary was happening on board without his being able to witness it. “Do you think we should go and see the third-class people? It must be interesting. ” They descended the two-story stairs, and leaving the central castle, they found themselves on the foredeck esplanade, at the foot of the foremast. Under the large awning that shaded this space, the sweaty stench of a crowd gathered. The ship’s doctor and several assistants, all in white blouses, occupied the center next to a table laden with first-aid kits. And to the sound of the music, the emigrants passed by in an endless file, each with one arm uncovered, presenting it to the vaccinator’s lancer. The first officer, assisted by the station attendants, organized the procession, ensuring that everyone, after rolling up their sleeves, presented their passage papers with the other hand. The act of vaccination was also a headcount. Upon leaving Tenerife, the last port of call in the Old World, the great voyage began; no one was to board the ship until America, and the station needed to know the number of people on board. The sailors searched the bays, the dark passageways, the holds, and even the most remote corners, looking for hidden travelers, pushing the fugitives who were trying to avoid this operation. The German officers constantly called to give their orders to a station employee, a stout man with a gray mustache who spoke several languages, switching from one to another with astonishing ease. Maltrana and he greeted each other affectionately. “That’s Don Carmelo,” said Ojeda, “a fellow countryman of ours. He speaks all the languages of Europe; also Arabic, and I think a little Japanese. And with all his wisdom, here he is, earning a few marks, with no other satisfaction than wearing a uniform cap and being called an officer by the emigrants. I look for him every day in his office, which is downstairs, always with the light on, and we chat about what’s happening on the ship. What a man! There you see him, he completed his studies in Málaga, all by himself, going from ship to ship around the port and saying to any sailor he found boring: “Let’s write a paragraph in your language, mate.” While Isidro was speaking of his friend’s wife and children, Andalusians transplanted to Hamburg, and of the latter’s financial difficulties, which forced him to search among the wealthy passengers for someone willing to pass the leisure time of the voyage by studying languages, Don Carmelo shouted with the accent of his homeland: “Too Dios con el papé en la mano! Let it be seen well!” And he repeated the order in Italian, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. The men had filed past, and now it was the women, with an escort of children, who were coming forward to receive the vaccination. Before the doctor passed muscular arms with the whiteness and firmness of northern flesh; greasy arms into which the doctors’ fingers sank ; amber-rounded arms, similar to those of Titian’s women, but bearing a dark triangle of mangy filth at the top . They struggled to uncover the women with the sleeves of their chemises or the thick elastic, and in this struggle their chests were opened, revealing scapulars and medals over the sagging of motherhood. The Arab women, dark and bony, went almost naked under their striped blouses; the stout Neapolitan women, with disheveled hair and glowing eyes, returned to their bodices with calm shamelessness the bulging luxuries that emerged when they unbuttoned them; the angular Castilian women with oily, dark hair, coiffed like Pre-Raphaelite virgins, quickly covered their arm with triple linings and they walked away blushing, waving the short, dancing bawl of their sweaty little boys. Some children bawled, clinging to their mothers, trembling with terror at the sight of the attendants’ white blouses; others, hats on the back of their heads and showing the ivory grins of their wolfish teeth, fought over who would advance their arm first, as if it were a party. Maltrana explained to his friend the order in which the emigrants were divided. The prow was for “the Latins”: Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, French, Arabs, Jews of the South, and even Egyptians. No one could guess the Latinism of these last people; but that was how the police station had pigeonholed them. In the stern, other nations were crowded: Germans, Russians, and Jews, many Jews of diverse origins, Poles, Galicians, Ruthenians, Muscovites, and Balkans, cooking separately, according to the concerns and rites of their religion. The Israelites brought meat slaughtered by the rabbis of Hamburg. The boisterous Latin population enjoyed the privilege over the other castes of drinking wine with meals twice a week and drinking hot chocolate at dawn twice more, instead of the usual coffee. Don Carmelo’s lamentations, swearing to himself with great fanfare, interrupted Maltrana. “Damn my weapon! I was wondering why we made the voyage without surprises. But, comrade, there’s no way to get rid of those people!” He exchanged a few words in German with the first officer and then shouted to some Spanish waiters who were serving “the Latins”: “Look, those fine young men; bring them over here!” Six young men advanced, their heads uncovered, their clothes ragged, and their feet stuck in torn shoes or threadbare sandals. “Why don’t you have a ticket and you’ve come here bustling around without any fuss, as if this were everyone’s house? And you think it’s going to be like this? You, where are you from?” And the six bustling people began to answer Don Carmelo’s interrogations . One was from Tenerife, and the rest came from Andalusia and Galicia. They had secretly sneaked onto several ships, which had thrown them ashore upon reaching the Canary Islands. And then they were off again looking for a hiding place in the hold of another ship! That was how they planned to arrive, no matter what. All six wanted to go to Buenos Aires; and like humble beasts, resigned in advance to the blows they believed they deserved, they lowered their heads, content with their misfortune if they managed to reach the end of the journey. Don Carmelo spoke in a low voice to the first officer. “That’s fine,” he said solemnly. “But since no one comes here without passengers and the ship can’t turn back for you, you’re going to swim back to Tenerife. The island is right there.” He pointed to the coast that could be seen in the distance, between the ship’s rail and the edge of the awning. The officer impassively stroked his blond beard while the interpreter translated his orders. The women opened their eyes in astonishment and terror. “Set up a ladder so we can fry more easily,” Don Carmelo ordered. The stewards obeyed him, placing a small ladder against the rail while the interpreter repeated the order. “Into the water, boys! Just a little dip.” »
The older bustles remained with their heads bowed, between incredulous and terrified, doubting that this order could be true but equally doubting that it was all a joke, accustomed to harshness and punishment on the ships that had served as their refuge. One, almost a child, dared to look over the side, appreciating with horrified eyes the enormous distance that stretched between the ship and the coast. “I don’t want to!… I don’t want to die!… I want to go to Buenos Aires! Mother!… Mommy!” And he threw himself on the ground moaning, kicking his legs to repel those who approached. Sighs and exclamations began to emanate from the groups of women. Don Carmelo looked at the first officer who was still stroking his beard. “Okay, kids; it’ll be later. You’ll swim tonight. In the meantime, get your vaccinations, and then you’ll eat… Let’s see some old pants for these fine lads; there’s no point in showing off their shame to the passengers… But it’s agreed, eh, kids? You’ll swim tonight . ” Suddenly reassured, the bustles allowed themselves to be led by the sailors, who pushed them roughly, accepting this treatment with humility and gratitude. “You have to be energetic,” Don Carmelo said to the two friends, with a fierce expression. “If it weren’t this way, the whole ship would be filled with people without passengers. Four will work in the engines; they’re always short on stokers; and the two youngest will help clean the decks. We could have landed them in Rio de Janeiro. But the captain is good, and we’ll surely get them to Buenos Aires. The rascals are going to get their way .” The music continued to play, and the parade of rolled-up sleeves before the group in white blouses resumed . Ojeda was impressed by the previous scene. He thought he could still hear the moans of the lad kicking his feet on the deck: “I don’t want to die! I want to go to Buenos Aires!” The port vagabond had the same hope as he and almost everyone else who inhabited the upper decks . Dozing among the bales and barrels of a dock, he had also seen the winged, headless goddess; he had felt the caress of hope. And there they all marched, facing the nostalgia of memory or the needs of the present; jumbled, confused, equalized by the common hope… Buenos Aires! What a powerful magic that name has, making the wretched run like hungry mice to hide in the bowels of ships! Maltrana grew impatient with the monotony of the parade. “After these, they’ll vaccinate those in the stern: people less clean and presentable than “the Latins,” with long hair and sheepskin coats . We’ll be better off up above.” And they climbed to the highest part of the ship, to the boat deck, seeking the shade of an awning and two free armchairs to rest in the blue solitude imbued with light. Most of the passengers preferred to stay below, sheltered in the soft twilight of the promenade deck. Maltrana greeted a lady who was reading, stretched out in a long armchair, her back resting on a cushion, her legs sheathed in white silk and the high heels of her shoes showing through the snowy, curling fluff of her skirt . Fernando, warned by his companion’s elbow , noticed her dark blond hair, gathered in a helmet-shaped shape; her clear, trembling eyes, like drops of seawater, which rose for a moment from their book to stare at him with calm determination. in the white of her neck, a breadcrumb whiteness lightly gilded by the sun and the sea breeze. “It’s the Yankee, the lady who eats near our table,” Isidro murmured. “She speaks to few people; she barely greets some of the old women on board; she avoids the company of others… I’m the only man with whom she exchanges greetings, but when I try to speak to her, she pretends not to understand me… And yet, I guess in her a cheerful and manly character: she must be a pleasant companion; just look at how gracefully she smiles. What cute dimples form next to her mouth! How velvety her eyes become!… But there’s no rapport yet among the people on board; it seems we’re all visiting.” They sat down some distance from the American, and she lowered her eyes again to her book, leaning sideways in her chair to ignore the presence of the newcomers. Before them was the blue of the ocean, smooth, dense, without a single wrinkle, and in the background, at the stern, a triangle of shadow that blurred the horizon, a kind of gray, pyramidal cloud, which was the island… Absolute calm… Sitting in the middle of the deck, they could not see the foam that the speed of the march swirled against the sides of the ship. From this height, their eyes only encompassed the The background, that is, the motionless sea, which seemed covered with a diaphanous and transparent crust, a crust of glass reflecting the dense, pasty blue of the depths. If it weren’t for the black wisps that escaped from the funnel, floating in the sultry calm of the afternoon, one might have thought the ship was at sea… And the island was always in sight, like the enchanted lands of legend, which seem to advance behind the footsteps of the fleeing. A sighing silence spread its overwhelming peace over the deck, flooded with light. Under the awnings, light snores could be heard, rhythmic breathing, backs turned outward on the long chairs, heads buried in pillows or resting on the backrests, eyes half-closed and mouths open to the coolness of the shade. The floor creaked in the heated places under the slow tread of some passerby. The echoes of music rose, distant, dormant, as if rising from the depths of the sea. Children’s cries and the clashing of wood came from the other side of the fireplace, revealing the various incidents of a sports game. The afternoon sun set the entire west coast ablaze with its blinding rain. “Why would they call this the ‘Dark Sea’?” said Maltrana, who could not remain silent for long. These words awakened in both of them the memory of old readings. Ojeda thought of his poetic drama of the conquistadors, whose preparation had required him to study the epic poems of the navigators who discovered virgin lands. Isidro remembered the work he had done during his time as a literary mercenary, when he hunted for notes in libraries and archives for the preparation of a book that would later be signed by a certain figure eager to enter an Academy. “What we don’t know is always dark,” Ojeda replied. A cloud on the horizon or several sunless days were enough to call Dark a sea where one advanced hesitantly, fearing the surprises of mystery and losing sight of the coasts. I confess that the geography of the Dark Sea, before the compass made long explorations possible, is a geography that enchants and rejuvenates me: something like those fairy tales that delight us like the perfume of withered flowers, evoking the first impressions of childhood. And the two enumerated in their animated conversation all the attempts of men, since ancient times, to unravel the mystery of the Dark Sea. The Carthaginian sailors sailed south along the coasts of Africa, bringing back, after a voyage of several years, elephant tusks that they suspended from temples, ornate ornaments, and the skins of hairy, tailed men that must have been the wrappings of great orangutans. And the Senate placed such value on such discoveries that it guarded the navigators’ routes as a state secret, seeing in distant lands a safe refuge for its people if an unfortunate war made expatriation necessary. In this sea of darkness, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Homer and Hesiod had placed Elysium, the abode of the blessed, the Gorgons, the land of eternal spring, and the Hesperides, with their golden apples guarded by a fiery dragon. Then it was the Arab navigators who launched themselves into the sea of darkness, and their geographers populated the mystery of the marine solitudes with poetic inventions, embellishing the discoveries like a tale from *The Thousand and One Nights*. The Emir Edrisi spoke of the islands of Uac uac, the farthest reaches of the world in the 12th century on the eastern side: islands so abundant in riches that monkeys and dogs wore gold collars. A tree, of which there were great forests, gave the islands their name; the _uac uac_, so called because it cried out or barked with the same sounds at anyone who set foot in the archipelago for the first time. And this tree had at the ends of its branches, first, abundant flowers, and then instead of fruit, beautiful girls, virgin beauties, who They could be exported for the harems. The Almagrurino brothers, eight Moorish residents of Lisbon, had advanced from the West. Long before 1147—the year in which the Muslims were expelled from the city—they gathered the necessary provisions for a long voyage, “not wanting to return without penetrating to the end of the Dark Sea.” Thus they discovered the island of “the bitter sheep” and the island of “the red men,” but were forced to return to Lisbon short of provisions, since they could not eat the sheep from the discovered lands due to their unpleasant taste. As for the red men, they were tall , had reddish skin, and “hair that was not thick, but long to the shoulders”; features that made many wonder whether the Almagrurino brothers had actually landed on some eastern island in America. At the same time that Arab geography produced lands from the Dark Sea, Christian legend populated it with islands no less marvelous. When the Moors invaded the Peninsula and defeated King Roderic, a multitude of Christians, led by seven bishops, had embarked to flee across the ocean to find an island on which they founded seven cities. Many Portuguese sailors, swept away by the storm, had ended up on this island, where they were treated magnificently by people who spoke their language and had churches. But as they attempted to return to their homeland, the inhabitants opposed them , eager to keep the existence of the “Island of the Seven Cities” a secret. Some who had managed to return showed the sands of those beaches, which were almost pure gold. But when new expeditions were mounted to explore it, they never found the way. Another island, Saint Brendan, or Saint Borombón, occupied seafarers for several centuries; a phantom island that everyone saw and no one ever set foot on. Saint Brendan, a 6th-century Scottish abbot who once commanded three thousand monks, embarked with his disciple Saint Maclovius to explore the ocean in search of islands that possessed the delights of Paradise and were inhabited by infidels. During the voyage, one Christmas Day, the saint prayed to God to allow him to discover land where he could land to celebrate his Mass with due pomp, and immediately an island appeared before the foaming waters of his galley. After the divine services were over, when Saint Borombón returned to the ship with his acolytes, the land instantly submerged in the waters. It was a monstrous whale that, by God’s command, had lent itself to this service. After wandering for years across the ocean, they landed on an island and found, lying in a tomb, the corpse of a giant. The two holy monks resurrected him, held interesting discussions with him, and he proved so reasonable and well-behaved that he eventually converted to Christianity and was baptized. But after fifteen days, the giant tires of life, desires death so he can enjoy the benefits of his conversion by entering heaven, and politely requests permission to die again , a reasonable request to which the saints agree. And since then, no mortal has managed to reach the island of San Borombón. Some sailors from the Canary Islands see it very close during their voyages; some even moor their boats in the trees on the shore, among the remains of ships covered in sand; but an unexpected storm always arises, an earthquake, and the sea tosses them far away. And centuries and centuries pass without anyone setting foot on its beaches. The inhabitants of Tenerife saw it clearly at certain times of the year and hundreds of witnesses came forward to the authorities, testifying to its configuration: two great mountains with a green valley in the center. “America was entirely discovered,” said Ojeda, “when the residents of Tenerife were still sending expeditions to their coast, through these waters, in search of the famous land of San Borombón.” And the island, which could be clearly seen from the top of the mountains, faded into the distance. the horizon and ended up disappearing when someone went to meet it on a ship. There were many expeditions, some paid for by the island’s rulers, others by private individuals, but all without success; and the people, increasingly convinced of the existence of San Borombón, attributed these failures to the inexperience of the expeditionaries rather than renounce the charm of the marvelous. Almost all maps of the time placed this island near the Canary Islands, and eighty years before the independence of the colonies, when Spanish America was already thinking of declaring itself of age, an expedition led by a respectable gentleman still left Tenerife, and since it was a mysterious enterprise, two friars were on his ship. Some believed that this phantom island was the place of the earthly Paradise where Elijah and Enoch live in eternal bliss… Holy poetry always takes advantage of popular fictions, and for this reason Tasso, when enchanting the knight Rinaldo in the magical gardens of Armida, places them on a Canary Island, undoubtedly recalling the tradition of that of Saint Borombón. Then the two friends spoke of Atlantis, a land swallowed up by the convulsions of the ocean floor and which had left as a reminder of its existence a tradition of powerful giants in various theogonies: Hercules beating his columns between Spain and Africa and joining two seas; Dhoulcarnain _He with the Two Horns_ and Chidr _The Green Character_, heroes of the Arabic fable inspired by Phoenician traditions, opening a channel between the Dark Sea, that is, the Atlantic, and the Damascene Sea, the Mediterranean. Hellenistic science had divined, through poetic fiction, the true shape of the planet. In early times, the Earth was a disk floating on the waters of the Ocean River, tilted slightly southward by the weight of the abundant tropical vegetation. But the Pythagoreans replaced this hypothesis with the affirmation of the planet’s sphericity, and after that, it was not necessary to make a great effort to imagine the possibility of sailing from the tip of Europe, that is, from Spain, to the eastern coasts of Asia, following a course westward. Aristotle and Strabo spoke of a “single sea that bathed simultaneously the opposite coasts of the two continents,” adding that in a very few days a ship could travel from the Pillars of Hercules to the easternmost part of Asia. These ideas were preserved and propagated throughout the Middle Ages among scholars. Many Church Fathers continued to consider the earth as a flat surface, in accordance with the fantastic geography of the Byzantine monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, but in monasteries and universities, small groups of ancient traditions and the doctrines of Aristotle were transmitted, commented on and disseminated by the Arabs of Spain, the Arabizing rabbis, Albert the Great, and other Christian scholars. Ptolemy’s geography was accepted by educated men. Medieval Europe was concerned with the Asian continent, brought into contact with it by Muslim invasions and Crusader expeditions. Alexander’s conquests as far as the Ganges and the raids of some Roman proconsuls were known from ancient accounts, but a mysterious and unknown part of the continent remained: Asia beyond the Ganges, the largest and richest. The luxury of European courts made the products of India, brought by caravans across the arid Asian plateaus, increasingly necessary : spices, ivory, and silk. Buddhist and Christian priests, driven by religious proselytism, undertook daring voyages that broadened their geographical and intellectual horizons. With the arrival of caravans, the astonishing news of Prester John’s reign and the wonders of the marble and gold cities, as vast as nations, that rose along the rivers of Cathay or on the islands of Cipango spread. Pisans, Venetians, and Genoese, exploiting the compass Invented by the Arabs, they went in search of the products of Asia by following the Red Sea or crossing the Caspian Sea. Daring adventurers wrote in a romantic spirit the accounts of their long years of adventure, and the travels of Marco Polo and Niccolò Conti were as interesting as a book of chivalry. Religious enthusiasm spoke of embassies addressed to the popes by Prester John or the Great Khan of Tartary, powerful lords who from the depths of their palaces sought to enter into contact with Christianity and convert to the true faith. But the embassies always remained on the way, and only some renegade European arrived, as if dispersed, describing the wonders of Asian cities with an exuberance that fired the imagination. Reading the holy books revived in Christian scholars the memory of the rich lands of eastern Asia. They recalled the fleets sent by Solomon to Mount Sopora, which others called Ophir and some believed to be the island of Trapobana. The wise king’s ships, after three years, returned laden with gold, silver, precious stones, peacocks, and elephant tusks. Saint Isidore affirmed that the island of Trapobana “swarmed with pearls and elephants, and that the gold there was finer, the elephants larger , and the daisies and pearls more precious than in India.” Next to Trapobana were two islands: Chrise, which was all gold, and Argyra, all silver. These islands of precious mountains were populated by ants as big as dogs and as poisonous as griffins, which used their paws to dig the gold out of the ground and roll them into balls, abandoning them on the beach. Solomon’s sailors would wait out to sea for the beasts to move away in search of food, and then they would disembark and hastily load the balls of gold, to do the same thing the next day. To reach India, to come into contact with its riches, to seize its precious stones and its exotically perfumed spices, to enter the city of Quinsay, a monstrous city thirty-five leagues in area with “two hundred marble bridges, on thick columns of strange magnificence,” was the dream with which the fifteenth century began its life, never to end until it had been realized. The most advanced part of Europe on the ocean, the Iberian Peninsula, was the starting point for all attempts to discover the mysterious route to India by East and West. Contact with the Spanish Arabs had accustomed their navigators to the use of the compass, driving them to stray from the coasts. Portuguese, Galician, and Cantabrian sailors traded with the British Isles and the Hanseatic republics of the Baltic; Catalan and Mallorcan sailors , rivals of the Italians in trade with the East, had been using nautical charts since the middle of the thirteenth century. The Ordinances of Aragon stipulated that each galley should carry two nautical charts, when the other ships of Christendom sailed with no other course than instinct and habit. Raymond Llull spoke of the manufacture in Majorca of nautical instruments, undoubtedly crude, but astonishing for that time, which were used to determine the time and altitude of the Pole aboard ships. A Catalan sailor, Jaime Ferrer, advancing in the Dark Sea, reached Río de Oro, five degrees south of Cape Non, which the Portuguese, eighty-six years later, believed they were the first to have rounded. Prince Henry of Portugal, a great patron of discoveries, founded the Academy of Sagres in the Algarve for geographical studies , and its members, ancient Hebrew navigators and doctors interested in cosmography, elected a Catalan pilot, Master Jacobo de Mallorca, as president. Spaniards and Portuguese, exploring the coasts of Africa or venturing into the ocean, settled on the islands, which were like outposts in this tenacious war with the mystery of the Dark Sea. The Canary Islands , the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde Islands became stopping and resting places for daring sailors, and at the same time in observation points for those who dreamed of new expeditions. The mystery of the ocean held them there, and they married island daughters of Europeans, forming new families of sailors. The settlers of those islands were like armies stationed for long years on a frontier, who eventually founded cities and produced separate generations. The Dark Sea, violated by these intruders in its unfriendly solitude, was reluctantly, little by little, revealing to them the secret of its distant, unexplored horizons. In island homes, people spoke of the discoveries made by every navigator who, in search of better winds, moved away from the known islands. Martín Vicente would bring aboard his ship a “wood carved by artifice and, as he judged, not with iron” after having surveyed the west wind for many days. But Correa, married to a sister-in-law of Columbus, found on the island of Puerto Santo a piece of wood carved in the same way, as well as several reeds so thick, “that one small tube of them could hold three azumbres of water or wine.” The residents of the Azores, whenever strong winds blew from the west or northwest, would find large pine trees swept along their beaches by the waves. On the island of Flores, one of this archipelago, “the sea had thrown two bodies of dead men who seemed to have very wide faces and a similar expression to Christians.” There was also talk that certain rafts with movable houses had appeared near the island , strange vessels that could not sink and that, having been swept away by a storm, had perhaps lost their crews. Antonio Leme, a resident of Madeira, sailing his ship through rough weather toward the west, swore that he had sighted three islands; Another resident of Madeira sent petitions to the King of Portugal for a ship with which he would discover an island he claimed to have seen every year at certain times. And in the Canary Islands, as well as in the Azores, the inhabitants also saw new lands that appeared on the horizon at certain times of the year. These lands, for the common people, were those of maritime tradition: the island of the Seven Cities and that of Saint Borombón, painted by some cartographers on their maps with the titles “Antilla” and “Hand of Satan.” Those with greater knowledge explained, in accordance with ancient writers, the nature of these lands, which were at one time visible and at another hidden and frequently changing location. Pliny had spoken of enormous groves in the North that the sea undermines, and because they have large roots, they float on the waves and from a distance appear to be islands. Seneca had described the nature of certain lands in India, which, being made of light, spongy stone, float on the ocean. The Antilles came to the rescue of sailors lost in the storm, prompting new expeditions with their rapid appearance. Diego Detiene, a caravel captain with Pedro de Velasco, a resident of Palos, as his pilot, set sail from the island of Fayal forty years before Columbus’s discoveries. He sailed hundreds of leagues out to sea, finding signs of land. However, at the end of August, he had to turn back, fearing the approach of winter. Vicente Díaz, a pilot from Tavira, undertook another expedition to the west, but had to turn back due to scarce supplies. Other navigators set out to discover these hidden islands, and no one heard from them again. There was much talk about a pilot who had managed to set foot on these unknown lands. Some considered him a Biscayan, one of those who traded with France and England; others considered him Portuguese, sailing from Lisbon to La Mina; most considered him Andalusian and called him Alonso Sánchez de Huelva. A storm had caught a ship between the Canary Islands and Madeira, driving it to a large island, which was later believed to be Santo Domingo. Sánchez disembarked, took to the high seas, took on water and firewood, and returned to the familiar lands; but the journey was so arduous that twelve of the seventeen men who formed his ship died of hunger and exhaustion. crew, and the remaining five arrived in the Azores in such a state that they died shortly after. This happened in 1484, eight years before the discovery of the Indies. When the first Spanish expeditions landed on the coasts of Cuba, its natives, in frequent communication with those of the island of Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, told them of other white, bearded men who had arrived some time before on a ship. “Interesting people gathered on these islands, outposts of the Dark Sea,” said Maltrana. “Navigators eager for novelty, men of study who were also men of action, they all felt attracted by the mystery of the Ocean. After sailing from the ice of Thule Island to the port of San Jorge de la Mina, where the Lusitanians stocked up on black people to sell in Lisbon, they ended up settling in the Portuguese or Spanish archipelagos, without anyone knowing much of their previous existence. They were like the adventurers with their romantic and obscure lives who in our times live in the mines of South Africa, on the prairies of Australia, in the western United States, or on the pampas of Argentina, vagabonds whose true nationality is unknown, who carry with them a dream, a latent energy, and who, through marriage, marry into powerful families who help them, ultimately achieving triumph. After their victory, they concealed their origins even more carefully, amassing contradictory and implausible testimonies about them. “In the Azores,” said Ojeda, “lived for sixteen years, married to a daughter of the governor of Fayal, the cosmographer Martín Behaín, builder of the first known terrestrial globe, and who is considered by some to be a Bohemian gentleman of Slavic descent, by others to be a Portuguese nobleman given to adventure, and by most to be a simple cloth merchant born in Nuremberg.” And at the same time, married to a daughter of Muñiz de Pelestrelo, former governor of the island of Puerto Santo, lived another adventurer, a navigator of various seas and with an obscure past, a certain Christopher Columbus… “You, who have studied the things of that period, friend Ojeda,” Maltrana asked, “how do you see the famous Admiral?”… “I warn you that I have a very personal opinion. I feel a class sympathy for him : he was a poet. In his book _The Prophecies_ , mediocre but naive verses have been found, which are undoubtedly his . I adore his imagination, which infuses many of his actions with a certain poetic character; his love of the marvelous, his extreme religiosity of a sailor immersed in theology, which makes him say heretical things without knowing it and drives him to choose religious books that are not very accepted… I admire his courage, his tenacity in making a dream come true.” And what inspires me most affectionately in him is that he was not a true man of science, cold and logical, one of those who use reason as their sole instrument and disdain other faculties, but rather an intuitive, more imaginative than learned, similar to Edison and other inventors of our time, who are also not true men of science and leap from absurdity to truth, producing their works by divination, just like artists… I see this extraordinary and mysterious man as full of contradictions and complexities, like a hero of a modern novel; and it is proven by the fact that , four centuries later, his person is still debated and his origin is not known with certainty. “I hate the conventional Columbus fabricated by the common people,” said Isidro. “That Columbus that everyone sees, the same as in statues and paintings, with his fur-lined cape, one hand on the terrestrial sphere that he knew less about than any schoolboy of our time, and the other pointing to the West, as if to say: ‘There is America; I see it and I’m going to go for it…». And Columbus died without realizing that the lands he had discovered were a new and unknown world; saying in his letter to the Pope that he had explored three hundred leagues of the coast of Asia and the island of Cipango, with many others around it… The three hundred Asian leagues were the Atlantic coasts of Central America, and Cipango, or Japan, the island of Santo Domingo. He was the one who placed the least scientific value on the discovery, seeing his voyages as a simple political and commercial enterprise. He had not the slightest suspicion of the novelty of the lands he had discovered: for him, they were the eastern coasts of Asia, India beyond the Ganges, and for this reason he baptized them with the name of the Indies. And in the letter in which he reported the first discovery to his friend and protector Luis Santángel, Minister of Finance of the Crown of Aragon and a converted Jew, he declared that of the discovered lands ” many others had spoken before him, but by conjecture and without acknowledging sight,” referring to the travelers who had spoken and written about the mysteries of Asia. The contemplation of the sea and the calm of the afternoon encouraged the two friends to stay there, continuing their conversation, in which they recalled past readings, often interrupting each other to add a new piece of information. Columbus had found the summary of all the science of his time in the treatise _De imagine mundi_ by Cardinal Pedro de Aliaco, theologian, mathematician, cosmographer, astrologer, and one of those who attended the Council of Constance, where John Huss was burned. The copy _De imagine mundi_ accompanied him on all his voyages. Las Casas had seen this book, already worn and covered with notes, in Columbus’s final years . He found in Aliaco’s work everything that could encourage him in his goal of crossing Asia briefly by sailing westward. The statements of Aristotle and his commentator Averroes, and those of Seneca, all assured the possibility of reaching India from the most advanced point of Spain in just a few days with a favorable wind . The Cardinal also confirmed the small distance between the two extremes of the known world, supported by Pliny, who attributed to India an immeasurable grandeur, a third of the inhabited world, with 118 nations; thus, Asia occupied the entire Pacific Ocean, the entire Atlantic, and advanced toward Europe, filling part of America. Other doctrines opposed this, asserting that the planet occupied more space than land; but Columbus, like all those possessed by a fixed idea, discarded whatever did not seem to agree with his opinion, searching for new and strange arguments to affirm it. He unearthed—giving it the value of a holy book—the Apocalypse of Ezra, a first-century Jewish visionary who lived outside of Palestine. And relying on Ezra, who affirmed that six parts of the world are dry and only the seventh is occupied by the seas, Columbus, shortly before his death, after having made three voyages of discovery, wrote to the Catholic Monarchs: “I say that the world is not as large as the common people say, and the whole of it is in six parts and the seventh is only covered by water.” He also found arguments in support of this in sacred books and classical literature . Some verses from Seneca’s tragedy Medea were for him an indisputable prophecy. “The days will come,” says the chorus, “when the Ocean will loosen its bonds and a new land will emerge, and a mariner like Tiphys, the one who guided Jason, will be the discoverer, and the island of Thule will no longer appear as the least of the lands.” He also sought support in the Old Testament, interpreting obscure words of Isaiah; and in reporting his discovery, he said that it had simply fulfilled the predictions of that prophet. His fantasizing mysticism and the conviction that the new lands he discovered touched the Asian East led him to consider the most bizarre discoveries to have been realized. On the coast of Venezuela, upon noticing the great expanse of fresh water at the mouth of the Orinoco in the ocean, he declared this river “one of the four that bathe the earthly Paradise.” And to give a location to Paradise, which, according to his favorite authors, is located on the summit of a great mountain, wrote to the Catholic Monarchs stating that “the world is not round in the way the ancients say, but in the shape of a pear, which is all very round, except where it has the nipple, which is the highest; or like someone who has a very round ball and on top of it places a woman’s breast, and this part of the nipple is the highest and closest to heaven.” The nipple of the world was on the coast of Paria, near the Orinoco, and on this inaccessible height lived Elijah and Enoch awaiting the Last Judgment. The golden sands found in Hispaniola allowed him to guess the true name of this island. It was the Cipango of Marco Polo and the Asiatic travelers; but before that it had been the land of Ophir, where Solomon sent his ships. In all his letters, the desire for riches and the hope of finding them mingled with a religious enthusiasm for his travels, which would bring the Church the conquest of millions of souls lost in idolatry. “Gold is good, Lady,” he wrote to the queen, “and such is its power that it draws souls from Purgatory and brings them to Paradise. ” And at the same time that he naively exposed this impiety, he wished to gather a great deal of gold to arm an army at his own expense of one hundred thousand infantry and ten thousand cavalry, with which he promised the Pope to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the power of the infidels and stem the advance of the Turks. When he finally became convinced that gold was not abundant and costly to gather, he proposed, for the holy work of conquering Jerusalem, establishing a trade in Indian slaves on the Peninsula, a trade that could yield an annual profit of forty million maravedis. He then sent the first samples of indigenous people to the Seville market. “Everything about that man was extraordinary and contradictory,” said Ojeda. “One can see in him that imbalance that, it seems, is a condition of geniuses. ” “His origins are even more mysterious,” Maltrana replied. “Biographers and historians have been arguing for four centuries about the various places of his birth in the dominion of Genoa. Some even believe him to be Galician, born in Pontevedra, and base their argument on the fact that at the time of his birth there were families of sailors on that coast, some named Colón and others Fonterrosa, the two surnames of the Admiral, and all of them, it seems, of Jewish origin. I attach little importance to the place of a man’s life. Each person is born where they can, where they are allowed to be born, and this means nothing in the formation of our character. ” “That’s right. Our true homeland is where we shape our soul, where we learn to speak, to coordinate ideas through language , and are molded into a tradition. ” “Remember, friend Ojeda, the documents that remain from the Admiral. Not a single writing is written in Italian; not the slightest word of his native language escapes them; he always uses Latin or Spanish, and he calls Spanish “our romance.” He, so fond of literary quotations and verses, never mentions an author from the rich Italian literature, whom he seems to ignore. Amerigo Vespucci, who was from Italy, mentions Dante and Petrarch in his geographical accounts. Columbus cites only the authors of antiquity: “Aristotle,” Pliny, Seneca, etc., and with them the Spanish Arabs, Saint Isidore, King Alfonso, and many Hispanic rabbis, in whose doctrines he seems well versed. This illustrious Genoese, when he writes to Messer Nicolao Oderigo, Genoa’s ambassador to Spain, writes in Spanish, as he wrote to everyone else, when he wasn’t using Latin. Many years earlier, while planning his exploration venture in Lisbon, he had approached Toscanelli, the elderly Florentine cosmographer, to learn new scientific data of the time that would strengthen his intentions. It is not known what he said in his letter of request; it was natural to recommend himself to his favor as a fellow countryman, and yet Toscanelli, the famous “physicist Paulo,” when he replied from his homeland sending him the geographical map that he had so loved, was useful for the discoveries, he implies that he believes him to be Portuguese and speaks to him of the valiant courage of the navigators of his country… Many allege, to justify this ignorance of Italian, so extraordinary in a Genoese, that Columbus left his homeland at the age of fourteen never to return. But can one’s native language be so completely forgotten when one has been spoken to until the age of fourteen?… “I am not passionate about the place of one’s birth either,” said Ojeda. ” I have already said that a man is from the country where he is formed and whose language he speaks. I am more interested in the person than the cradle… But we have the testimony of Columbus himself, which leaves no room for doubt. In his letters, in the institution of the entail for his descendants, in his will, in every paper he writes in his later years, he shows a certain interest in making it known that he is from Genoa, as if he guessed the objections of posterity about his origins. “He says it many times,” Isidro interrupted maliciously, “he repeats it with excessive insistence, to make us believe in his sincerity. He boasts of being Ligurian, but doesn’t add the slightest bit about his ancestors or the kinship that undoubtedly remained in Italy. The only time he mentions family, it’s to hint in a veiled way that he could well be related to the Colombos, famous admirals of Genoa. In this statement, some see the secret of his Genoese ancestry. The vagabond Columbus and Fonterrosa, a Galician, Portuguese, Jewish sailor, or whatever, could have seen great advantages in this kinship due to the similarity of surnames, and even more so if he wished to conceal his origins at a time when Christianity was hitting hard against those of Hebrew descent and preparing for their expulsion from many nations.” This kinship with the Columbus admirals has been shown to be purely illusory , and the stories of his youthful battles on the Genoese galleys off the port of Lisbon, as well as his miraculous rescue on a piece of wood, have also been shown to be false. Why couldn’t the Genoese-ness of this Italian, who ignores his own language and doesn’t remember what his country is like, since he never alludes to it when comparing it with the discovered lands, be equally false?… –Certainly, he was an enigmatic man. His life resembles those towering mountains whose summits receive the sun’s rays, while below the valleys and slopes are in shadow. We know about him with certainty from the age of fifty-six, when he embarked on his first voyage: the previous eight years spent at the Court of Spain soliciting support are in shadow; Those of his life in Portugal are even more uncertain, and everything else, up to his birth, remains shrouded in absolute obscurity, which has lent itself and will continue to lend itself to the most diverse hypotheses. His existence in Spain is a mystery. Since when did he live there?… Biographers make him pass only in Andalusia and Castile during his time as a solicitor; and yet, Columbus, being old, told Las Casas how certain conversations with Pedro Velasco, a sailor who had made great voyages, and whom he met in Murcia, had helped him in his plans . “It must be taken into account, friend Ojeda, that in certain countries the status of foreigner confers great prestige on anyone who offers a new idea. In those times, Genoese sailors were the most famous, those who had gone the furthest in their explorations. Back then, there were no telegraphs or newspapers, and a mobile, well-traveled man could easily change his personality and live for many years without anyone recognizing him.” While he was below, there was no danger of the hoax being discovered; and if success came his way, the country he had claimed for himself would be the first to be proud of this hitherto ignored citizen… I have no desire to maintain that Columbus was Genoese or not: it is all the same to me. What interests me, like you, is the man who, due to his strange mysticism and his contradictory character, is like a summary of the fusion of races in medieval Spain : a collection of fanaticisms, ambitions for glory and greed for… Merchant. I see in him a mixture of avaricious rabbi, a fantasizing Moor, and a romantic warrior, eager to rescue the Holy Places to return millions of souls to their God. But I recognize that, if the hypothesis of his change of nationality is true, this was one of the greatest successes of his life. Isidro recalled the existence in Spain of that adventurer, Colombo to some, Colome to others, but who always used the surname Columbus in his own writings. He obtained lodging and a table at the house of a figure like the accountant Quitanilla, a favorite of the kings; he was protected by the priors of wealthy convents; He held talks with the people of the court, and finally the monarchs listened to him, while Spain was in turmoil in the last wars with the Moors, he had to attend to the political clashes in France and Italy, he had little money and needed time and reflection for more urgent and immediate things than searching for a new route that would lead to the “land of spices”… If only he had presented himself as a Spaniard! The Admiral himself told his friends how in the ports of the Peninsula he had met old sailors who, sailing towards the West, glimpsed unmistakable signs of new lands. In Puerto de Santa María he had spoken with a “one-eyed sailor” who, forty years earlier, on a voyage to Ireland, far from that island due to bad weather, had seen a great land that he imagined was Tartary. In Cádiz and in the port of Palos, people spoke of unknown countries as if they were something indisputable; But the navigators from Andalusia, Galicia, or the Levant, rough and humble people, would have been frightened by the idea of going to court to express their opinion. The Pinzones themselves, who were notable figures in their own land for having become rich from voyages to the East and North of Europe and who were as convinced as Columbus of the possibility of discovery, would not have been heard if they had proposed the great enterprise without biblical prophecies and classical texts, based solely on their experience as pilots. “I am thinking now,” Ojeda interrupted, “of the _Life of the Admiral_, written by his son Don Fernando, the illegitimate son, the love child, had with a lady from Cordoba when Columbus was almost old, and who perhaps for that reason was always regarded by him with special predilection… At the age of fourteen, he accompanied his father on his last voyage of discovery, the most arduous of all. He was at his side on long voyages, whose monotony incites one to talk; he spent hours of danger with him, which are hours of confession; he was able to understand better than anyone the obscurities of his early life, before his celebrity, and yet, when writing about the Admiral’s origins, he displays a visible uncertainty, as if he possessed a secret he feared to make public. Don Fernando himself affirms that his father, even as he rose in fame, was determined “that his origin and his homeland be less well known and certain.” He acknowledges that the Admiral was Genoese, because he himself affirmed it; but a certain mystery is evident in his words. “When Don Cristóbal disposed of his assets,” Maltrana continued, “he ordered that a certain sum be set aside for the maintenance of one of the family so that he could settle in Genoa and take a wife there, so that there would always be Columbuses in the city.” Did he have no relatives left in Liguria? It seems that he and his brothers are the product of spontaneous generation , without ancestors or collaterals, which forces him to transplant a branch of the family to clearly demonstrate that Genoa was his nation… In his will, he distributes his assets among his children and brothers and leaves several bequests to Genoese or people of Genoese origin… but all of them residents in Portugal and away from their country of origin for many years, merchants he met and dealt with during his stay in Lisbon when he was married to the daughter of another Genoese, a circumstance that could well have influenced his decision to choose his nationality. It is guessed that these bequests are restitutions for loans made to him during his years of poverty. He even orders that he be given a He gave some money “to a Jew who lived at the gates of the Jewish quarter of Lisbon,” the only one in the entire will who appears unnamed. He doesn’t even mention any relatives from Genoa, nor does he leave anything for residents in Italy. His memories of being Genoese don’t go beyond the Genoese colony established in Portugal… I have little confidence in the Admiral’s statements regarding his nationality… and many other things. Ojeda greeted these words with a look of astonishment. “I don’t mean to say,” Isidro continued, “that the great man was a knowing liar, but he had the defect or the quality of all those who, coming from below, reach a glorious height. He arranged the events of his previous life to his liking, he distorted the past to suit his convenience. He was like some millionaires of the present, who in their early days of wealth proudly confess the miseries of their youth; But then, when his children grow up and form a dynasty, they begin to feel ashamed of their origins and invent wealthy relatives and illusory capital with which they began their first ventures. The Admiral, when dictating his will, speaks bitterly of how the king and queen only dedicated a million or so maravedis to his work, and that “he had to spend the rest”… And he said this at the time of his death, in a country where everyone had known him chasing the court like a parasitic solicitor, penniless and homeless, staying in convents, begging for small subsidies to be able to move from one city to another… Fourteen years had been enough for such a stupendous memory loss. “I am surprised by how little attention was paid to him during his lifetime by those he called his compatriots. In the collection of his letters, there are some complaining to the Genoese ambassador Oderigo because they don’t answer him from there. ” He sent all his deposit papers to the Bank of Saint George in the city of Genoa , and only after some time did the gentlemen of the Bank respond to him at Oderigo’s suggestion. This response, although kind, does not prove that the Genoese government was particularly enthusiastic about his exploits. It seems natural that, considering that the son of the country had discovered a new route to Eastern Asia, the Genoese Lordship would celebrate this in some way. And yet, the great commercial Republic remained silent, ignored Columbus, and only one of its officials wrote to thank him when he made a valuable gift to the city he called his homeland… That Columbus was a foreigner is beyond doubt; further evidence is the letter of naturalization that the Catholic Monarchs gave to his younger brother, Don Diego, who was a priest, so that he could enjoy benefices and income in Castile. But in that document, there is also something that lends itself to mystery. Columbus the Younger is naturalized as a Spaniard for having been born outside of Spain and being a foreigner, but not a word is said about his original nationality, his birthplace; Genoa is not mentioned at all… What was so strange about the origins of these Columbuses? Everything concerning their personalities always tended toward confusion?… “In recent years,” said Maltrana, “the Admiral was clearly determined to appear foreign, and that is why he insists so much on his Ligurian origins. He sensed the imminent dispute his descendants would later have with the Crown. A shrewd and cautious man, he assumed the breach of the exorbitant rights granted to him in exchange for his discoveries by the good Queen Isabella, generous and improvident like all women of high ideals when they get into business… You already know that Columbus, by the agreement signed by the King and Queen, was entitled to a tenth of everything he discovered and of everything that those who followed his path might discover.” It is absurd to imagine a family, the family of the Colons, absolute owner of a tenth of the entire American continent, and more than that, a tenth of the islands of Oceania, whose discovery was a consequence of that of America… For this reason, King Ferdinand, an expert man In business, he always viewed with suspicion the dealings between the Admiral and the queen . He was not an enemy of the enterprise, as some say, but he found the ease with which his wife had acceded to all of the navigator’s requests to be foolish… And Columbus, in his later years, sensing the difficulties his descendants would face in sustaining the absurd inheritance, repeated in all his documents that he was from Genoa, advised his children to get in touch with the government of the Republic, and used flattery and entreaties to win their favor and that of the powerful merchants of the Bank of San Jorge. “And you, Maltrana, are you also one of those who believe him to be Jewish? ” “I don’t believe anything when there is no proof and only inference. But those who hold this opinion are not relying on nothing. That extraordinary man had all the characteristics of the ancient Hebrew: religious fervor to the point of fanaticism; prophetic inclinations; a facility for mixing God into monetary matters.” To discover India, as he said in his letters to the kings, “I availed myself neither by reason nor by mathematics; what Isaiah had said simply came true…” And what Isaiah had said in one of his psalms was, according to Columbus, that before the end of the world all men would be converted, and that from Spain would come someone who would teach them the true religion. In addition to Isaiah, he appealed to the authority of Ezra, a forgotten Jew, and several of his writings included letters from converted rabbis. Already an old man, he was writing his famous book of _The Prophecies_, a mystical rambling in which he made calculations about the length of the earth, using the biblical prophets as a basis. And the result of his reflections was to announce that the world only had one hundred and fifty years of life left, for it would surely perish in 1656. “One can see in him,” said Ojeda, “something of the ferocious exaltation of the ancient Hebrews, who, whenever they constituted a nationality, persecuted and slaughtered people for religious quarrels. In our history, the most fearsome inquisitors were of Jewish origin, and who knows if a large part of Spanish fanaticism is not due to the Hebrew blood that was ingested in the definitive formation of our people!… The Jew of those times never lost sight of the business in the midst of his mystical reveries, and he appreciated gold as something divine. Such was Columbus. He had divine visions, like the one of Jamaica, in which God spoke to him in person, and at the same time he affirmed: “Gold is most excellent, and with it, whoever has it, does whatever he wants in the world; such is its power that it throws souls to Paradise.” He undertook his voyages in the name of the Holy Trinity, claiming that his work was “the light of the Holy Spirit,” for he was sending him to India to spread the Gospel and save souls, and then he proposed the sale of indigenous people until they yielded an annual income of forty million. He loaded two ships with slaves to sell in Spain and recommended to his brother Don Bartolomé that he take great care with the merchandise and keep a fair account of each one’s due, “for one must look to one’s conscience in everything, because there is no better good except serving God, and all the things of this world are nothing, and God is forever. ” “Furthermore,” Maltrana interrupted, “it is enough to read the description made by Las Casas and other historians of the Admiral’s physical type: red-faced, long-faced, aquiline nose, freckled, quick-tempered, eloquent, and very hard at work. “Greed is notorious in him; But everyone involved in his discoveries was equally greedy . It is true that the others were frankly after gold, and Columbus, in addition to gold, wanted to serve his religion by conquering millions of souls. In reality, no one thought that these expeditions could have any scientific results. They went to India because it was rich; they were in search of the land of the Great Khan, sovereign of China, concerned only with its treasures. Columbus embarked carrying a letter from the kings to the Great Khan, written in Latin, a letter that accredited him as extraordinary ambassador, and barely in the The shores of Cuba, which he believed to be the mainland, he could understand from the mimicry of the natives that a great monarch lived in the interior. He seemed delighted, sensing in this humble chieftain the rich emperor of Cathay. He sent a converted Jew from Murcia inland with his diplomatic papers . Because he knew some oriental languages, he accompanied him as an interpreter. This messenger, after a long march, found only a tribal chief in the shade of his thatched roof, surrounded by tanned concubines. “I admire,” Ojeda continued, “the almost childlike enthusiasm that accompanied Columbus until his death, making him find riches and biblical memories everywhere . The island of Hispaniola is Solomon’s Ophir with its golden mines; a great river must necessarily come from Paradise; a mountain is a pear, the center of the world, and in the nipple is the cradle of the human race; The coast of Veragua is the Áurea, from which King David took three thousand quintals of gold, leaving them in his will to his son. He does not see a new land without singing _Salve Regina_ “and other prose,” as he says in his language… And this same pious dreamer gives lessons in cunning and treachery to his lieutenant, the Aragonese knight Mosén Pedro Marguerit, so that he captures Caonabo, a warlike chieftain, and recommends that he send emissaries with kind words until the latter comes to visit him. “And since, being an Indian, he goes around naked,” he tells him more or less, “and if he were to flee it would be difficult to catch him, give him a shirt and dress him immediately, and a hood, and a belt by which you can hold him and prevent him from letting go.” The American lady, who until then had been reading in her armchair, passed before the two friends, very erect, with the book under her arm . Several times Fernando caught a pair of pale eyes fixed on him above the volume , and when they met his, they returned to the pages. “Tea time,” said Maltrana. “These Englishwomen guess it with chronometric precision… If you don’t mind, we won’t go down until later. The winter garden must be packed.” They lit cigarettes and both stood with half-closed eyes contemplating the spirals of smoke that developed against the blue background. “Another lie that irritates me,” said Isidro a few moments later, “is that of the persecutions that the ignorance of the Church caused the Admiral to suffer. I have nothing to do with the Church, but I recognize that this invention is one of the greatest foolishnesses, if not the greatest, that we who belong to the guild of the impious can count on .” The common foreigner, who has a predetermined standard, always the same for matters related to Spain, thought that since Columbus had discovered a new world of which the God of the Bible had no knowledge, the Church must necessarily have persecuted him with deadly hatred. There are even famous paintings depicting the so-called “Congress of Salamanca,” with bishops wearing mitres and crosiers, something like the episcopal choir in *La Africana*, discussing geography and shouting anathema against the impious, distancing themselves from him. And Columbus appears arrogant and serene, like a tenor who knows in advance that he will triumph in the final act… Ojeda laughs at Maltrana’s words. “Imagine,” he continued, “the leap that the author of _The Prophecies_, the friend of Isaiah and Ezra, would have made if the idea occurred to him that there could exist a new world unknown to the God of Genesis, and whose inhabitants did not proceed from Adam and Eve, nor from the dispersion of the children of Noah. At the very least, he must have believed himself the object of a diabolical hallucination, and had he dared to express his thoughts, he would have suffered no greater penalty than confinement for insanity… But Columbus only spoke of reaching the ancient known world by way of the West, and this was in no way heretical, also basing his opinion on classical authors and Church Fathers. There was no other congress than a controversy commissioned by the king, with the professors of the University of Salamanca, and in this scientific dispute, held in the convent of San Esteban, the The teaching staff was opposed to the discoverer, while the Dominican monks and other religious leaders accepted his plans as plausible. This is understandable. The friars regarded Columbus himself as a close associate of theirs, and they were also priests of a popular life, accustomed to contact with the coastal populations who frequently spoke of new lands. Science was the only one that opposed the discoverer’s projects, as we have so often seen it oppose all innovation… Maltrana paused, as if to reflect better, and then added: “I do not mock the professors of Salamanca for that reason, nor do I consider them ignorant. They knew what could be known in their time and defended their knowledge. A child today knows more than they do and can laugh at their science; but it remains to be seen how the schoolchildren of the 25th century will laugh at the wise men we now venerate. No one has preserved an extract of this Salamanca dispute; We only know that the professors denied that Columbus could travel from Spain to the eastern coast of Asia and back in a few years, as he claimed. And in this they were right: they were correct. They had a more accurate idea of the size of Asia and the size of the Earth; they gave the unknown Ocean a space similar to that occupied by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans combined, and considered it immense and impassable for the navigational means of the time. But the poor scholars of Salamanca, like Columbus, were unaware of the existence of America, and America, tired of living in mystery, confronted the navigator, who died unaware of it. And it turned out that those who had a notion of the Earth closer to the truth were left before History as donkeys, and the visionary who based his plans on the idea that “the world is smaller than they say, and six parts of it are dry and only one with water,” appears as a wise man consecrated by triumph… “That’s right,” said Ojeda. Let’s imagine for a moment that America hadn’t existed; hypothetically, we’d eliminate the New World, and see Columbus, who believed the earth to be a third smaller and the coasts of Asia some seven hundred leagues from the Canary Islands, setting out with his little ships into the ocean, having to sail across the entire Atlantic and the entire Pacific until he reached the islands of Japan or the coasts of China. “Absurd!” Maltrana interrupted. “An impossible task, considering the caravels’ size, their limited supply of provisions, and the need to rest at convenient stops. They would have perished by persisting with the enterprise, or, what is almost certain, they would have turned back. To reach only the Antilles, Columbus himself felt his will falter on his first voyage more than once, which is not unusual, since the most solid faith falters when plunged into the unknown.” When he had sailed seven hundred leagues, he began to wonder anxiously whether Asia might be farther away than he thought, and it was then that the elder Pinzón, the ironclad Martín Alonso, with the stubbornness of energetic men who hope to get out of a difficult situation by trampling everything over, shouted to him from his caravel: “Onward, onward!” ” There you have another lie, friend Isidro: Pinzón’s alleged bad faith toward the discoverer; his schemes to stir up people against him; the attempt by the Spanish crews to throw the Admiral overboard, then return to their country; the three-day deadline they gave him to die if he didn’t find land… ” “What a stupid legend!” exclaimed Maltrana. “The common people like to see historical figures as they please, like heroes in serial novels who brave all kinds of ambushes so that their innocence may finally triumph in the last chapter.” The performance of a traitor, a dark and fatal character, is necessary to highlight the magnanimous greatness of the protagonist through a contrasting effect. And in this Colombian novel, the traitor is the honorable Martín Alonso, who put everything into the enterprise of discovery only to gain nothing and lose his life. You know the true story. When Columbus, A vagabond of uncertain nationality, he wandered around Palos, not knowing what to do. Pinzón listened to him and encouraged him with his information, an old navigator of the ocean, convinced of the existence of new lands. The king and queen granted the adventurer permission for his first voyage, but this did not advance its realization. The royal treasury had, with great effort, raised a million maravedis from the censuses in Valencia, but the amount was insufficient. Columbus carried an order to provide him with vessels in the port of Palos, but no one obeyed him. In those times of barely formed nationality and difficult communications, the power of the monarchs was only true where they were present. Royal orders, when they went far, ended and went unfulfilled. Columbus, with the monarchs’ mandate, attempted to enlist men, but the forcibly recruited sailors scattered and fled. Such was his desperation that he even considered manning the ships with men taken from prisons. And in this predicament, when he saw his enterprise close to failure, Martín Alonso Pinzón, the wealthy man from Palos, the shipowner, who could forever rest from the hardships of the ocean, gallantly offered to take an interest in the expedition and risk part of his assets, half of what the monarchs had given. He sought out and prepared good vessels and “set a table,” in the language of the time, to enlist sailors, offering confidence to those who wanted to make the voyage and announcing that he would go as well. This was enough to attract the best people from along the entire coast, and all preparations were made quickly… We have the account of the first voyage written by the Admiral himself, his Logbook, which could not be more monotonous. Favorable wind, good sea, signs of land, floating timbers, birds singing on the masts of the caravels as if announcing the proximity of invisible shores. But this provided little interesting background for the hero’s figure, and many years after his death, certain historians, eager to give tragic emotion to their stories, invented the story of the rebellion of the frightened crews who wanted to retreat, and the threat to the Admiral of throwing him overboard if he did not discover land within three days. And in all this, Pinzón plays the role of a cautious traitor, who fosters the ridiculous fears of a sailor accustomed to more hazardous voyages… In the account of his voyage, the Admiral, who was suspicious by nature and very given to seeing betrayals and ambushes everywhere, does not say a word about attempts at revolt, and several times during the voyage, he brings his ship close to Martín Alonso’s, calls him, they engage in friendly conversation from the bridge, and send each other the famous Toscanelli letter by rope to clarify their doubts. “Columbus,” said Ojeda, “was more scientifically knowledgeable than his fellow sailor from Palos; but he recognized in the latter greater skill in the art of navigation, in the handling of ships and men… There was, indeed, a three-day deadline; but this deadline was not given to the Admiral by his sailors; rather, it was he who granted it to Pinzón, who requested a change of course. Signs of land could be seen on both sides of the ships , but the Admiral always continued in the same direction, believing himself to be among the islands of Cipango, that is, in the Japanese archipelago. “All that would be seen on the return trip.” He wanted to reach the mainland as soon as possible, the Empire of Cathay, China, to visit the Great Khan, deliver his credentials, and collect gold. But Martín Alonso, less naive, considered it necessary to touch land as soon as possible, and Don Cristóbal finally agreed to change course, on the condition that if they did not find a coast in three days they would return to the original one… And as soon as they followed Pinzón’s route, the small Antillean island appeared, the first stage of the great discovery, which then lasted more than a century… Perhaps no one did as much for the glory of Columbus as his partner in crime. change course. Imagine if the Admiral, in his haste to see the Great Khan, follows the first direction and ends up on the current coasts of the United States. He will certainly not return, and the world will be left without news of his discovery. “Yes; he will not return,” said Ojeda. “It is very likely, it is almost certain. For the small expedition, which numbered about ninety men in total and had made no real preparations for war, it was a stroke of luck to land on the paradisiacal archipelagos of the Caribbean Sea, with their tame populations, timid human herds where the cannibals of the other islands hunted their food. If the three little ships with their handful of crew members encounter, upon touching land, the ferocious Indians of North America or the warlike Aztecs of Mexico, they will certainly not return… and that will be the end of Columbus!” “Only at the end of the voyage,” Maltrana continued, “does the Admiral speak of his companion with a certain bitterness. While sailing along the coast of Cuba, they encountered bad weather, and Columbus took refuge with his caravel in a shelter along the coast, while the other, a more daring sailor and more confident in his skill, continued onward. They were separated for a few days, and this was enough for Columbus to suspect that Martín Alonso had heard from the Indians about a great deal of gold and was going to search for it on his own, like an unfaithful friend. A quarrel between partners who fear and watch each other!… And the fact was that both found equal riches… nothing! On his return, the Admiral, who was sailing a caravel, having lost his main ship in a shoal, had to take refuge in the Azores, where the Portuguese tried to capture him, and then in Lisbon, where he was once again in danger of being imprisoned. ” Meanwhile, Martín Alonso braves the storm without a stopover and arrives directly in Spain, but so defeated and ill that he dies immediately. And no one returns the half-a-pigeon of maravedís he invested in the venture—a sum undoubtedly attributed to Columbus in his will as an expense incurred by him. Silence spreads around his name; then, when it reappears, it is so that some authors attribute to him disloyal attempts; and the common people have imagined, for centuries, the honorable Martín Alonso as a kind of bearded, gloomy, envious operatic baritone who, surrounded by a chorus of sailors, plots against the glory and life of the tenor. “But you won’t deny, Maltrana, that the Admiral was persecuted and mistreated as a result of his governorship in Santo Domingo. Remember Bobadilla, the king’s commissioner, remember how he sent him back to Spain in shackles. ” “Yes; I admit that they treated him “discourteously”—those were the words of Queen Isabella, his staunch protector. They treated him without respect for his age and merits; in accordance with the harsh judicial procedures of that time; procedures that Columbus himself used equally with his inferiors. But whether it was a capricious injustice, as legend would have it, is debatable. One can be a great Argonaut, discoverer of lands, and a terrible ruler. —Furthermore, we must take into account the illusions he had fostered in all those who followed him on the second voyage, adventurous, rebellious people eager to get rich. They went to King Solomon’s mines, to Ophir, to Cipango; all they had to do was bend down to pick up balls of gold. And there they found that everything was lacking, and to collect a little gold they had to suffer horribly. The governor, eager to accumulate riches and frustrated by the obstacles, was sullen, attributing the lack of success to the laziness of the colonists’ individuals. And there were rebellions, battles among the conquistadors; and Columbus, who had a heavy hand and an authoritarian character, harshly punished his inferiors. He punished them as if he wanted to avenge the persecutions suffered by his ancestors… When Bobadilla arrived on the island, sent by the king and queen in response to the colonists’ pleas and complaints, the Admiral had hanged seven Spaniards in the previous week, five of whom were killed. More were in the fortress of Santo Domingo waiting for the moment to die with the rope around their necks, and his brother, the Adelantado, had another seventeen buried in a well, ready to be hanged as well. In his actions, Bobadilla was nothing more than an expeditious enforcer of justice in the style of his time. Las Casas himself, a friend of the Admiral, acknowledged that he was a “person of rectitude.” When Columbus was sent to Spain imprisoned and in shackles, the queen deeply regretted such “discourtesy,” but did not reinstate him to the government of the island, and also forbade him from returning. The matter was hushed up because, according to a contemporary author, Queen Isabella wished “that the true causes of what had happened remain hidden, for she wanted to see Columbus “repaired” rather than mistreated.” And Columbus himself, in a letter, confessed to having committed faults that needed the king’s forgiveness, “because my mistakes,” he said, “have not been intended to do harm.” Maltrana added, after a brief pause: “There is also another legendary lie: Columbus’s death in Valladolid, in utter misery, a poor victim of King Ferdinand’s ingratitude. What more could the latter have done for him? The former vagabond was an Admiral, the most honorary position in the nation, since a monarch had created it for one of his uncles. His son, of obscure origin and uncertain blood, had been married by King Ferdinand to a niece of his. Columbus also enjoyed, through public agreements, a tenth of everything he earned in India. But since nothing came from there, according to Don Cristóbal’s own confession, he therefore possessed no riches.” As for dying in misery, as the common people suppose, suffice it to say that Columbus’s will was signed by seven of his servants, and this luxury of servitude does not mean indigence. “Those were times of poverty,” said Ojeda. “The kings themselves were always short of money, the public treasury was less regular than it is now, and the nation, ravaged by the wars with the Moors and the war with Naples, could not contribute much to discoveries that had only resulted in the discovery of unproductive islands where men died. The Admiral died somewhat forgotten. People, in Spain and abroad, paid no attention to the event: the discoverer had outlived his fame. In the eight years following the first discovery, much was said about him; then, in the last five, silence and indifference followed. He had gone to conquer the riches of the East, and no one saw those riches: he was simply the discoverer of some islands in extreme Asia. He believed this too; and it was only years later, when Núñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean, called the South Sea, that Europe was able to learn that Columbus’s Asia was a new world with another ocean at its back. The ease with which all of Europe embraced the stories of an obscure Italian pilot, Amerigo Vespucci, who, claiming foreign glories for himself, named the new continent after himself, demonstrates how forgotten Columbus had been, not in Spain, but outside of it. This christening of America is unfair, but not without logic. Columbus had only discovered Asia, and he died in this faith. Amerigo Vespucci was the first to let the world know, thanks to the successive explorations of Spanish sailors, that this false Asia was a new continent, and the French, German, and Italian editors of his writings gave his name to the distant lands. A cynical, daring bookstore that has triumphed forever… But the masses, my friend Ojeda, want their heroes to be miserable, in order to love them with the sympathy of commiseration. Consider Goethe, perhaps the greatest of the poets of our time. We admire him, but he doesn’t inspire a familial sympathy in us, because his life was fortunate; he had affairs with great ladies, held high palace positions, governed a country, and lived in plenty. We prefer Homer, blind and vagrant; Cervantes, who, according to people, had nothing to eat for dinner when he finished Don Quixote; Shakespeare, a comic with a tongue and a drunkard in beer halls; Beethoven, a poor deaf man… and Columbus, dying of hunger on straw, without having received a penny for his discoveries. “There’s a lot of that,” Ojeda said excitedly, “but I admire the Admiral, wherever he came from and whatever his blood was, as an energetic dreamer who didn’t rest until he had uncovered even a tiny bit of the mystery that enveloped the world. I admire in him his stupendous errors and the bizarre theories that by tortuous paths led him to the truth. He is the last great man of the Middle Ages, the grandson of the alchemists, of the marvelous travelers, of the rabbinical sages, of the Arab navigators, of the enlightened Christians, who opens half the planet to modern life so that it may expand. I am moved by his candor and his ignorance as he travels through the new world, seeing everywhere the vestiges of the ancient world.” I am delighted by the descriptions he makes in his letters of the lands he discovers: the soil “rubbed” by the paws of mysterious “animals”; the hunting in the jungles of ” paúles cats,” the name once given to monkeys; the visit he receives on board, on his last voyage, from “two very dressed-up girls, the oldest eleven years old, who were carrying hidden spell-powder,” and both, as the old Admiral tells the king and queen, “with such ease that they wouldn’t have made any more of a fuss.” And what energy the man had! Ojeda spoke with a certain emotion of the sailor’s last voyage, always in search of the gold that fled before him; a voyage of tragic pain, in the midst of old age, with an ulcerated leg, his eyes almost blind, having at his side his young son, a poor infant whom he believes he has dragged to his death. The ships are aground, the crews hungry and rebellious, the Indians of Jamaica are hostile; he can no longer expect anything from men, but he consoles himself with celestial visions that appear to him at night on the quarterdeck and speak to him… He also admired him in the perils of his return from his first voyage; perils in which something more than his existence was at stake: the loss of the glory he considered in his hands. A storm that capsized many ships in the Lisbon River reached him in the middle of the ocean, aboard a caravel battered by navigation in the seas of India and taking on water everywhere. He believes that Pinzón has been lost on the other ship and that only he remains to give the world the great news: the great news that everyone will ignore if he perishes. Perhaps other discoverers of the Dark Sea suffered this reversal of fate after exploring new lands. To die with the secret!… And Columbus writes a summary of his discovery on several scrolls, puts them in barrels, and throws them into the waves, without the sailors suspecting what they contain, for they believe it is an act of devotion to appease the elements. The storm rages, and the Admiral orders as many chickpeas to be brought in as there are people on the caravel; he points to one with a knife, and, rolling them in his cap, invites the mob to put their hands in. Whoever pulls out the chickpea marked with a cross will go as a pilgrim to Santa Maria de Guadalupe carrying a five- pound candle… And it is the Admiral who draws the chickpea. Then they draw the same lots to go on a pilgrimage to Santa Maria de Loreto, “in the March of Ancona, land of the Pope,” and since it falls to a simple proel, Columbus promises to help him with his money for the voyage. The storm increases ; The next day they draw lots again to stay awake all night at Santa Clara de Moguer, and once again the chickpea is chosen for the Admiral. But as these promises fail to tame the hostile powers of the Ocean and the caravel capsizes, lacking ballast—a mistake on the part of the Admiral—and the food supplies are almost exhausted, they make a vow that they will all go, as soon as they reach land, in procession and in their shirts to the first church they find dedicated to the Virgin. And when the storm finally drives them to Lisbon, Columbus had been motionless for more than twelve days on his stern bench, dozing off and on, His legs wet from the rain and the waves. That test was the most tremendous of his life. To possess a truth that would shake the world and die with it!… But enough about Columbus, my friend Maltrana. We’ve talked enough; let’s have some tea. They left their seats, and as they headed for one of the ladders to descend to the promenade, they noticed several swift, black curves in the sea that appeared for a moment above the water, then submerged and reappeared farther away amidst the bubbling of foam. “They’re tuna,” said Maltrana. “Or perhaps they’re dolphins… Who knows! ” “Surely they’re not mermaids,” replied Ojeda. They walked a few steps, and he added: “It’s a shame there are no mermaids left. And yet, there were still some in Columbus’s time… Don’t you know that? He saw three of them emerge “very high above the sea,” near the mouth of a river in Santo Domingo. And Las Casas says that the Admiral wasn’t surprised by them, because he had seen many others on his voyages as a cabin boy, along the coasts of Guinea and Manegueta, and that sirens aren’t as beautiful as they are painted, “for in a certain way they have the shape of a man in their faces.” Chapter 4. Standing before their music stands with military rigidity, the musicians intoned a solemn march, which served as accompaniment to the passengers as they entered the dining room. The men wore tailcoats or smoking jackets, holding their traveling caps in one hand. Some paused in the doors in groups to watch the ladies leaving their preferred cabins or coming from those below via the grand double-ramp staircase, their fine underwear rustling. They all glided swiftly, amid greetings and smiles, to plunge, beyond the glass partitions, into a sea of light in which the colors of restless flags swam. A trail of powder and vague scents of artificial gardens followed the fluttering of sagging, flaccid skirts, flecked with glittering gold or silver; the rustling drag of silky fabrics; the sheen of bare backs softened with a layer of bleach; the smoothness of the napes of the neck, over which rose the edifice of an extraordinary hairstyle, the first of a voyage that until then had only been worthy of displaying walking hats and odalisque veils. In the mess hall, a large graffitied sign displayed a dancing couple and a Gothic inscription in German and Spanish: “Dance Tonight .” And the announcement seemed to spread the joy of a free schoolroom throughout the ship . “Dance Tonight,” the grave- looking people repeated, as if promising each other countless mysterious satisfactions. For the first time, people who still didn’t know each other’s names greeted each other with spontaneous nods . During the afternoon, great friendships had been formed on the promenade deck. Girls of various nationalities, who had never met before and perhaps would never meet again upon leaving the ship, gathered together, drawn by the sympathy inspired by their new friend’s beauty or the elegance of her clothes. They began speaking in several languages, eventually expressing themselves in Spanish. They walked arm in arm, as if they were roommates, and before the night was over, they were addressing each other informally, excited by a friendship they considered eternal and that dated back only a few hours. The mothers smiled at one another without knowing each other—drawn by their daughters’ affinities—with the complicity of professional colleagues, and they also ended up forming groups, to talk about the pains and satisfactions that family brings, the brilliant qualities of their offspring, the disappointments and ingratitude that the future perhaps held for the poor little things… as if they pitied and envied them at the same time. Some, dressed in black with a nun-like austerity, launched from the first sentences into praise or lament for their deceased husbands. A general rapprochement took place, as if everyone on the ship had suddenly awakened, recognizing each other as old relatives. Even So, those who had left Hamburg pretended to ignore those embarked in Boulogne, sailing together without greeting each other across the Sea of Gascony and Cantabria, an expanse of livid blue under a gray sky. The sight of small whales splashing in the gulf amidst jets of foam had caused them to exchange only a few words, before retreating into their sullen isolation. Together, they had welcomed with haughty silence those who boarded in Lisbon, suspicious intruders on the tranquility of the original occupants; and so they had sailed to Tenerife. But now the real journey began: life together far from any land, without a new influx of strangers being able to disturb the peace of the floating convent, and everyone felt united by a sudden brotherhood. Even the ocean seemed to kindly reflect the joyful camaraderie of the passengers. The carpet had the consistency of solid ground underfoot ; The objects remained motionless, and the ocean breeze blew in through the windows in gentle gusts; a discreet breeze that didn’t rattle the vellum on the skin or upset hairdos; a regulated breeze, tame like the one that refreshes the salons on fashionable beaches. Stomachs, until then shrunken by the harsh novelty of sailing, expanded with voluptuous relaxation, admiring the lavishness of the service in the dining room. In the cabins, the locks on suitcases creaked; straps and packages were untied, clothes abandoned their confines, and diligent hands calmly shook out folds and arranged items, unafraid of the faintness of fatigue and the movement that throws people and objects from one corner to the other of the restless room. Everyone transferred the contents of their luggage to closets and hangers, then took care of their personal arrangements. Ten days to reach Rio de Janeiro, the nearest stop: ten days of ordinary life! A whole existence whose emptiness had to be filled with amusements and new friendships!… And the Emperor’s birthday party, the first of the voyage, spread throughout the ship the joy of schoolchildren beginning their vacation. The flags of various nations fluttered between the pillars of the dining room . Garlands of misshapen roses and electric bulbs of various hues stretched from capital to capital. At the end of the room, on a column surrounded by plants and against the backdrop of the German flag, stood a large plaster bust of the hero of the party, with a fierce and majestic mustache. Small flags fluttered above the tables , one for each diner: that of their respective nationality. The cult of colorful rags—a religion of the last hour, fanatically adored by the public of cosmopolitan hotels, ocean liners, and international trains, people who happily live outside their homeland—spread throughout the dining room, like a percaline spring, the flowering of its diverse hues. The German flag, shaded by its black sash, mingled with the boisterous tricolor of the French, the purple of the British, the green of the Italian, which seems a reflection of the Latin sea, the white Swiss cross, the bars and lattices of the Scandinavian, and the rocket-like burst of red and gold of the Spanish. On the other tables, like showy daughters who, in the freshness of their youth, do not fear the bizarreness of the striking, shone the green and amber of Brazil, a hue equal to that of tropical fruits; the majestic sun and the bars of the Uruguayan shore; the white and sky-blue spring flutter of the Argentine flag; the white Chilean star against a sky of intense blue, and the great constellation of North America gathering its flock of asteroids at the start of the red septagram. Before the first course was served, protests arose. Some passengers refused to sit down, staring angrily at the flag that covered the pile of plates on their place settings with intrusive colors. They wanted their own, their country’s. They paid the same as everyone else: on board everyone was equal, and their republic was worth as much as any other. America… The waiters, as bewildered as if an international conflagration were about to break out, rushed out to the dining room and returned bringing with them the butler, smiling and confused at the same time, like a fashionable restaurant manager begging forgiveness for oversights in the service. “We don’t have your flag, sir”: devastated, completely devastated… I promise you that on my next trip I’ll make sure to have it… For now, if you please, do me the honor of being content with this other one… After all, we’re all going to Buenos Aires.” And he replaced the protest flag with an Argentine one, which was the most abundant, the one that adorned the cutlery of all the people of problematic nationality. The man ended up acquiescing, perhaps overcome by the scent of the soup steaming in the plates, but he attacked his meal with a grimace of sorrow, like a gentleman whose evening has been ruined. Waiters passed by, holding metal vessels in both hands, the necks of bottles protruding from the mouths amidst chunks of ice. The sounds of sparkling wine resounded incessantly. Many felt they were in a position of misunderstanding if they didn’t accompany their meal with champagne on this night of celebration. Food was the same for everyone, as if the foundations of society had been overturned and they were living under an egalitarian regime. But the desire to stand out by astonishing their neighbors took its revenge in the liquids, and the bottles on the tables were equivalent to titles of supreme distinction: some, white and pointed like Gothic spires, whose labels evoked the image of Father Rhine passing between castles and combing his foamy beard on medieval bridges; Others were black, with their large cork heads held in place by a helmet of wire and sheet metal, wearing over their shoulders, like a royal fleece, the dark collar and the gold lettering of their champagne-colored origins. Ojeda and Maltrana sat at a table in the center of the dining room with two other passengers: a gentleman with white sideburns, a man of limited speech, who always arrived late to meals and spent the rest of his time locked in his cabin. He was Dr. Rubau, an old physician residing in Montevideo. The other, with a gray head and a strangely blond mustache, small of build and with an aquiline profile, called himself French and lived in Paris; but he spoke German so fluently and was so accustomed to Germanic customs that the ship’s crew, believing him to be a compatriot, had placed the flag of the Empire in front of his deck. Every year he went to America to visit the jewelry stores of various countries, to which he was a supplier, and at the same time he imported furs and feathers from Europe. He had been worried from the moment he boarded the ship, looking for companions for a game of bridge, and his sadness grew even greater when he saw that the only game they played in the smoking room was poker. Every day, as he sat down at the table, Mr. Munster remained thoughtful, his jaw still moving, and ended by asking the same question in a nasal Spanish: “But do none of you really know bridge? Such a distinguished game!” Maltrana, who had boldly familiarized himself with him from the very beginning, believing he had found in his vague nationality a certain synagogue aroma, invited him to monstrous games of poker, in which thousands and thousands of francs had to be risked. And he said it with disdainful aplomb, as if he had at his disposal all the millions locked away in the ship’s depths. Isidro took advantage of this extraordinary meal to show Ojeda the people he had mentioned in previous conversations. Above the flags, heads bowed before plates and garlands of vegetables, he reviewed all those he pompously called “my friends.” “No one is missing today; the room is full. It’s clear we’re having good weather… Ships are like old furniture, which, after a shake, when they come to a standstill, release a string of bugs whose existence no one suspected. What unknown faces!… They’ve been hidden like Cockroaches in the hole in their cabins, enduring seasickness, and today is the first time they’ve gone up to the dining room. Look at the abbot of the conferences; a handsome corsair’s head with his black whiskers. No one would guess his cassock, which cannot be seen from here. Look also at the old ladies sitting next to him; with what rapture they gaze at him while he eats!… Look at the table in the center, the largest in the room; it seats fourteen, and Dr. Zurita and his family occupy it. What a generous and down-to-earth man! As if we’d known each other all our lives! Whenever I speak to him, he offers me a magnificent cigar: “Hey, Maltrana, listen, nice little Galician…” And believe me, he’s a man of great sense, who knows how to see things like few others… Take a look at the bishop, with his entire family of tyrannical admirers. They’ve forced him to wear the silk cassock with a crimson sash. And how his cross shines! No doubt they’ve cleaned it together to remove the sea mist… Maltrana continued after a brief pause: “That lady who comes in late, so tall and comely, is a Chilean . What a woman, eh, Ojeda? What a neck, what a queenly gait, how brilliant!… But there are no illusions to be had. The handsome bearded man advancing, treading on the train of her dress, is her husband: two meters tall; he blushes when he has to speak to a stranger, but you can see the muscles of a boxer and a great facility for throwing a “punch,” as he says… Those sitting at the table with them are all from the same country: big, good-natured young men returning from Germany; friendly , open people who love and appreciate me. Whenever they meet me around the café, they greet me in the same way: “Let’s have a drink.” And two nights in a row I hear them talk about “curing themselves” before going to sleep: they are so healthy, they seem to defy disease. I ‘d like to know what the hell kind of cure that is. He was silent for a few moments, while his eyes continued to scan the room among the thicket of multicolored ornaments. The old doctor ate slowly, preoccupied with the functioning of his teeth, of a equivocal regularity and brilliance. The jeweler, between courses, put on his glasses to examine the ladies, as if inventorying the value of their diamonds. Maltrana continued, in a softer voice: “Those three handsome ladies, with majestic profiles, large black eyes, are from the Eastern Republic. Look at their arms, friend Ojeda; how white! What harmonious fleshiness! They are black-haired Titians.” And to think that in Montevideo, men amuse themselves by waging war every two years as if they were bored by living in such good company!… Over there at the tables in the back, the Argentine women remain in a separate group. They seem to have escaped from the pages of a chic newspaper; slender and elegant like the artists of the Paris theaters launching the latest fashion; but less… ethereal, more solid, better nourished, without trompe l’oeil or lies in their construction, like daughters of a young people whose fate is entrusted to the flanks of women … And at the other tables, what blond heads!… The great ladies of the operetta have brought out the best in their theatrical wardrobe. Their costumes could sing The Merry Widow and all the plays that feature a world-class dance. And at the other tables, blond and even blonder, but swollen with fat, with square waists, square hands, and faces varnished by the sun. You’ll see them later upstairs. Ball gowns dating from a distant marriage; white stockings with black shoes; nurse’s collars among valuable jewels… They are the companions of the Germans scattered throughout America; courageous ladies who, after a trip through Europe, return to wash the dishes in the estancia or the store. Some remain in the store in Buenos Aires. Others will go to the Pacific coast, to Paraguay, or to the heart of Brazil to continue their life of thrift. Then he smiled maliciously, pointing to a table near the entrance. “It is the ‘quarantine’ table; and I call it that because it encloses the butler to all the suspicious passengers. There are the French cocottes, so dignified, so modest, so well-bred. They are dressed as always, to show they do not wish to attract attention. Some have not even combed their hair and have their heads hidden in a turban of veils. In addition, they save the best of their luggage for their ventures on the mainland … With them is Conchita, a fellow countrywoman, a woman from Madrid, who eats stiffly and seriously, since the poor woman can only understand her companions’ gestures . Sometimes, turning her face away, she talks to Don José, a Spanish priest who sits at the next table. And mingled with this female flock eat several German boys, blond, big-eared, and strong-jawed, timid children who stand at attention like recruits when they speak, which does not prevent them from valiantly venturing into America to spread the hardware of Hamburg and Berlin, by mule, canoe, or on foot, carrying their samples on their backs like a backpack. “How interesting the German commission agent!” said Ojeda. “Perhaps in time there will be those who will praise him in the same way as the medieval paladins who ran the world to spread the glory of their lady. Today, the lady is industry, and glory is the order form. Wherever, throughout the globe, there exists a newly established group of men struggling with the jungle, the swamps, the fevers, and the beasts, the blond commission agent immediately appears with his sample book; and to avoid wasting time, he learns to babble the language of the country along the way. ” “The cans these boys give me,” exclaimed Maltrana, “and the ones they’ll give me, to avoid paying a teacher!” They have landed in Tenerife solely to buy Spanish books, and they spend hours with them, ruminating on the brief lessons taken in Berlin. When they have a doubt, they look for me all over the ship or consult the grammatical wisdom of Fraulein Conchita, their table companion… Tenacious people, who know neither fatigue nor ridicule! Their obscure triumphs are going to be more positive than the victories of the field marshals of their army. In the long run, it will turn out that we discover and colonize a new world, to the glory and benefit of the general ledger of Hamburg and Bremen. Isidro interrupted his conversation to examine a new plan that the waiter had just placed before him. But after a few moments, he turned his head toward the large white bust. “What a change in our times, friend Ojeda!” What a transformation of values!… Gold and commerce, which in other times were only for the despicable people cornered in the Jewish quarters, now reign as the world’s guiding forces… And if you doubt it, there is the friend with the stiff mustache who presides over us, a mystic and warrior like Lohengrin, a musician and genius like Nero, always wearing a breastplate and a finned helmet , and who, nevertheless, will go down in history as the first traveling salesman of our time. Ojeda listened with distracted eyes to his companion’s conversation. During the long intervals between services, he drank the champagne from his glass, unaware of his insistence. Isidro lovingly cared for the bottle, swirling it around in the ice bucket to cool it. He then hurriedly filled the glasses, as if horrified by their emptiness , and as soon as he felt the weight of the bottle diminish, he would request the shipment of another with vigilant foresight. He managed this extraordinary expense fairly : good accounts maintain friendships. One bottle would be paid for by Dr. Rubau, who had barely taken a few drops mixed with mineral water; another by his great friend Munster; another by Ojeda… and he modestly reserved himself for the next banquet. His eyes, increasingly animated and bulging, followed his friend’s distracted gaze to the next table, occupied by a single woman. “Look at our Yankee neighbor! A real young woman: perhaps the most elegant of all. She doesn’t look like the same one we see upstairs always wearing a big hat and a long overcoat… What a neckline! And what a beautiful tower of hair, somewhere between blond and ashen!… I warn you, comrade, that she She has also looked at him many times, like someone who doesn’t want to look, out of the corner of her eye… You interest her, friend Ojeda, I know. This afternoon, after tea, I spoke with her, if our conversation can be called speaking. She knows a little French and a little Spanish. I don’t know a word of English; but at last we understood each other by guessing. And meekly, like someone who doesn’t want to know anything, she asked me about my friend; and I, imagine!… I told her you were a great poet, a notable personage; I spoke of your family, your great fortune, how you go to America just for the pleasure of strolling, and of the many ladies you leave behind in Madrid, dying of grief… Fernando made a movement of protest. “Don’t get angry, Ojeda; don’t complain. These things do no harm and they give prestige. Leave it to me, I know life… Are you not interested in that lady? It doesn’t matter; It’s always good to gain importance in a woman’s eyes… All right; don’t get irritated. Drink a little. And he refilled Ojeda’s glass, after a quick discussion that his tablemates didn’t seem to notice. An increasingly loud buzz of conversation diluted the sounds of music coming from the dining room. The steam from the plates, human breathing, the radiation from the lights gradually thickened the atmosphere. Maltrana, to dispel his friend’s annoyance, continued speaking: “That couple eating two tables away is also American: the Lowes. They’ve lived in Japan, China, Australia, the Cape. Here on the ship, they live in the gym, and when they leave, they walk around wearing the strangest colored striped jackets: clown jackets, which are, it seems, the uniforms of famous sports clubs.” She sings Italian romances, waiting only to be invited to let us hear her voice. Mistress Power—for I warn you that is the name of our neighbor—only speaks on the ship to this couple of compatriots. She maintains a smiling isolation; a few greetings with the most respectable ladies, and nothing more… And yet, she knows the names and social rank of almost all the passengers better than I do. A most skillful woman! Perhaps that’s why she keeps the other Americans at a distance. And she indicated with her eyes the occupants of the next table. “Good people, but scandalous,” she continued; “cowboys in Sunday best, who are going to study the livestock of the Pampas; commission agents from New York, who take banknotes by the handful from their trouser pockets and need to sing at every moment to get noticed … They’ve already drunk six bottles and broken two.” Now, with the enthusiasm of the champagne, they raise the little flags they have in front of their plates to their lips and roll their eyes, shouting: “_Americain! Americain!…_” At the next table is Martorell, that young man with glasses and a blond mustache: a Catalan, whom I believe I’ve told you about. He’s also a poet: he’s won I don’t know how many natural roses and gold englantines in the Floral Games; but always in Catalan, because this nightingale is mute when it leaves its native garden. In Castile, as he calls all the Spanish-speaking countries, the poet works in banking. A beast, my friend, when it comes to money matters. I advise you not to get into a fight with this poetic comrade in a percentage contest, because he’ll surely steal your lyre. In Madrid, he spoke to us a lot about Buenos Aires, where he’s been twice. It seems there are major reforms to be made in the banking business, new ideas to be implemented so that money can multiply. And there goes Martorell, like a discount Messiah… I’ll introduce him to you too: he’s a good fellow. Who knows what he might become!… Then, Maltrana made an exaggerated gesture of horror, a grimace that was like a caricature of fear. “And next to the Catalan… the mysterious man; that cabin neighbor of mine , whom I’ve spoken to you about a few times. He’s the one who wears mourning clothes, clean-shaven. He doesn’t speak to his neighbors and eats with a seriousness.” priestly, just as if he were celebrating a rite. Who do you think he can be?… He shies away from people, and when I speak to him in French, which seems to be his language, he answers me very politely, too politely, and suddenly he withdraws very stiffly, as if there existed between us a social difference that does not allow for familiarity… And go and guess, with that clean-shaven face, that he could just as easily be a magistrate or a comedian, a priest or a steward of a large house!… I find him gloomy as a doctor in Hoffmann’s stories . Besides, I am worried about the mysterious cabin, that cabin between his and mine, always locked, and whose key he carefully guards. Once a day he opens the door, enters, inspects for a few minutes, leaves again, and until the next day… Not a word, not a cry, not the slightest noise; and yet many nights I put my ear to the wood of the partition, or look in the corridor through the keyhole. “Nothing! Who do you think it could be?” Isidro fell silent, frowning under the worry of this mystery. “Perhaps a diplomat on a secret mission, and that’s why he’s fleeing from people; some financier traveling to buy all the railroads in America in one fell swoop and fears that his secret will be caught; an unfaithful employee who steals the treasury and has his cabin crammed with sacks of gold. It’s a shame not to know for sure! There’s a mystery here, a big mystery , like Sherlock Holmes; and the strangest thing is that when I ask the ship’s steward, he, such a close friend of mine, plays dumb, as if he didn’t understand me… You see, Ojeda, something happens to this man before the voyage is over. In any port, he’s received with music, speeches, and flags, or the police come aboard and handcuff his hands …” He seems proud, and at the same time reveals a shyness incompatible with having a lot of money. Who could it be? Maltrana filled his glass and drank, as if by doing so he wished to accelerate his investigations into the “mysterious man.” Afterward, the champagne and the good food seemed to exert a benevolent influence on him. “I confess to you, Ojeda, that I have never felt better, and if I so wished, this voyage could be extended to the end of the earth. I wish I were Goethe, wandering the ocean, like the Flying Dutchman, provided his supplies of food and drink were not exhausted! What’s missing here? Elegant and beautiful women who can be seen up close and who speak to you as if you were an old friend; good food, parties, dances, and a complete absence of currency. Everything is paid for in bonds, or accounts are settled in the steward’s office at the end of the voyage. And this spring weather!” And this ship, which is an island!… I’ve never been anywhere else: not in Madrid, when second-class politicians invited me to lunch so I’d write well about them; nor in Paris, when I did Spanish translations for publishing houses and snuffed out my hunger in the taverns of the Latin Quarter… And to think that Doña Margarita, my patron saint, with a love that dates back eight years, will be praying for poor Don Isidro as he sails the seas! And to think that at this hour, in our café in Puerta del Sol, those long-haired boys who know everything and haven’t seen the world through a hole will be asking themselves: “What has become of that scoundrel Maltrana?” And the most amusing one will surely answer: “He must be in the belly of a shark…” Poor things! The waiters were serving the ice cream when the loud tapping of a knife against a glass sounded. The servants remained motionless, hisses imposed silence, and all heads turned toward a single point in the dining room. “Friend Neptune is going to speak,” said Isidro. This Neptune was the commander of the ship; enormous as a giant when he sat, and equal to the others when he stood, raising his Herculean torso on short legs. His golden, gray beard curled over part of his ruddy face, then spread over his chest; and in the middle of this cascading river, a A smile of almost childlike kindness. When he passed by the decks , children surrounded him, clinging to his coat, dancing on his knees, begging to be lifted like a feather in his muscular arms. When he met Isidro, his smile grew more intense, as if he sensed a witty wit in him, even though they couldn’t understand each other very well, since their conversations didn’t go beyond a few words of Italian mixed with a few words of Spanish. Wearing a blue tuxedo with gold braid, his sweaty baldness shining , and stroking his beard, he slowly unraveled his oratorical tangle. A large part of the audience didn’t understand him, but everyone kept their gaze fixed on him, with the fixity of incomprehension, which only increased the sailor’s verbal hesitations. “Neptune doesn’t seem to be explaining himself badly,” Maltrana said in a low voice. ” Now he’s talking about his emperor. He said “kaiser” twice.” I understand that … A remarkable breed! I believe German captains are given oratory lessons in Hamburg, and they are also taught to dance. Without such qualifications, the Company wouldn’t hand over a ship to one of these fathers of families… The same goes for the musicians on board. In the morning they prepare the baths and clean the spittoons; before lunch they play brass instruments; in the evening they play string instruments; and they do it all for free, since they receive no other remuneration than the passengers’ tips. Anyone can compete with these people!… But why are the Germans so enthusiastic, Fernando? What is our friend Neptune saying now? –_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt._ –And what is that? –“Germany above all, above all in the world.” The captain raised his glass, thus concluding the speech, and those who understood him stood up, men and women, instantly raising their glasses as well. “Hoch!” cried Neptune; and everyone replied the same way, with a mechanical regularity, like the cry of a regiment responding to the voice of its colonel. “Hoch!” he said again; but this time, trained by example, the passengers responded en masse with discordant jubilation; and the third “Hoch!” was a general cackle, many repeating the word with delight, for the very reason that they were ignorant of its meaning. A roar of warlike trumpets greeted the end of the toast from the dining room , and the servants hurriedly resumed serving. “They’re at their limit here,” said Maltrana after dessert. “Let’s go up to the winter garden for coffee.” The two friends occupied a small table near one of the doors. From there, they watched everyone leaving the dining room ascend the wide staircase. Dr. Zurita’s eldest sons passed before them, along with other young Argentinians returning from Paris. They all greeted Maltrana with friendly familiarity. They smiled at the sight, perhaps remembering the stories he used to liven up their get-togethers in the smoking room late at night, when they had finished their poker games from exhaustion. “Beautiful young man,” his companion said to Ojeda. “Look at the guys: tall, muscular, slender, and with great agility of limb. They must be famous tango dancers. Excellent young men, all my friends! Look at their healthy, young wolf teeth; their hair, so abundant that it needs to be pressed down with pomade into two lustrous pads. There’s nowhere left on their heads to plant another hair . ” They are beautiful examples of intensive hair cultivation… And the delicate hands, even if deformed by strength training; and the small, narrow feet, high instep, meticulously cared for; by day always encased in patent leather with colorful heels, by night with openwork silk lining and pumps that would torment many ladies. They are feet that seem to have a life of their own, wise feet that can follow the most difficult dance combinations without error… And they too, what delicacy of limbs!… In this Noah’s Ark, Friend Fernando, you can recognize one’s ethnic origin just by looking at the ground… Look at those others coming up. And they both smiled as they watched a few feet of masculine size ascend the steps, even though they were sticking out from under a corolla of gathered skirts. Behind them came enormous men’s shoes, polished and with strong noses, which left a heavy imprint on the carpet. Many merchants who had donned tailcoats in honor of the sovereign kept their thick gold chains across their abdomens, loaded, like a reliquary, with medallions, charms, pencils, and fetishes, and on their feet the sturdy boots they wore every day. Ojeda accepted with an incredulous smile his friend’s considerations about the superiority of one race over another due to the slenderness of their limbs. “We ‘Latinos,’ as you say, Maltrana, are beautifully light, more ‘winged’ than these people from the North.” The aristocratic influence of the Andalusian conquerors can be seen in the short, graceful feet of South American women. The Indian also has small feet… But who knows if the world isn’t destined to be a prey for big feet! Look with what insolent and noisy authority these leather and cardboard vessels advance. Wherever they stop, they become embedded, and the heavy will that inhabits them has to make an effort to move them. They move gracelessly and slowly, but what they cover is theirs, and they don’t abandon it. Our feet are more graceful; they have something of a bird’s leap, but they leave little trace. A feminine laugh sounded, loud, petulant, in which one could discern a desire to turn heads. A blood-colored dress ascended the stairs, and behind its majestically flowing train, several tailcoats seemed to be running to catch up with it and dominate it. “Nélida, our friend Nélida, with her escort of admirers,” said Maltrana. “All the nations on board are represented in this amorous retinue. Only we are missing; but I am certain that if you do not go to her, she will seek you out.” He admired her mouth, like a “tigress in heat,” as he called it; a mouth of moist crimson, in which the mother-of-pearl of voracious teeth shone luminously. As they opened with the stretching of laughter, her somewhat sharp teeth seemed to emerge from this red case, like nails from a feline’s paw. She occupied a table by herself, and her companions immediately surrounded her. She spoke to them all in German, English, French, and Spanish, holding an unlit cigarette to her lips. One of the adoring men bowed, offering her the flame of a match. “That’s the one they call ‘the Baron,'” said Maltrana. “A Belgian who overwhelms us with his Antinous beauty, petulant and insufferable, like those girls who win the beauty prize in a contest… For the moment, he’s the favorite. ” “Nélida!… Nélida!” cried a woman’s voice. It was the mother, who, from a nearby table, intended to correct her daughter’s audacity with this appeal. Artists could be tolerated for smoking, but not a young lady traveling with her parents. It was enough to see the attitude of the ladies in the winter garden: they pretended not to notice her, but one could discern in their eyes an impression of scandal… The mother seemed to say all this with her look and her brief appeal. But Nélida simply answered coldly: “Mother!” and, shrugging her shoulders, continued smoking. The mother retreated, defeated, crossed her arms over her stomach, and remained as motionless as a copper sphinx beside her husband, who was talking to a neighbor. “That father is admirable,” said Isidro, “as admirable as the girl. Look at his patriarchal air, his gray beard and locks of hair, the gentleness with which he speaks and the deference with which he listens. He declared bankruptcy twice years ago; but in America such things are quickly forgotten, and it seems he is now returning to resume his old jobs. He had lost a large part of his fortune in Europe, for what is successful on one side of the ocean is not on the other, and he was returning, After fourteen years of absence, he intended to exploit several splendid businesses, according to him, that he still had left over there. “I think it’s a mine,” he continued, “in the north of the republic, near Bolivia, I don’t know if it’s for oil, diamonds, or newly minted pounds sterling. He’s sensed that I’m poor, and he doesn’t deign to tell me his plans; but you’ll see how he’ll approach you as soon as he realizes you want to work in America and have the money for it. He’s going to propose some business to you, just as he’s proposing it right now to Pérez, the one sitting next to you; Pérez the Anglophile, who was indignant this morning in Tenerife; the “friend of civilization.” And if Mr. Kasper deigns to interest you in his affairs, it’s useless to tell him that his fortune is already made. Extraordinary father! And Maltrana contemplated the kindly patriarch with ironic admiration. “From time to time, he realizes that his daughter exists, and he caresses her kindly. ” The mother, with what common sense she has managed to salvage from the wave of fat invading her body, draws her husband’s attention to Nélida’s behavior. The scruples and concerns of an upbringing received in a Pacific republic make her protest at the scandals of this girl, who has nothing of her own, who physically and morally belongs to her father, and who looks down on the mulatto woman who carried her in her womb with a certain superiority, as if she were a wet nurse or an old servant … And the father is moved and embraces Nélida. “Poor thing! Backward people don’t know how a modern young woman should be raised. It’s the ignorance, the fanaticism of people who speak Spanish…” And Nélida, who in turn remembers that she has a father, strokes his hair with the caresses of a loving cat and sighs gratefully: “Dad… Dad…” The most interesting family on the entire ship. And there’s still the other one, the “bodyguard.” And she pointed to a dark-skinned, rosy-cheeked young man sitting among Nélida’s adorers. “He’s the younger brother, the only one who resembles his mother. He accompanies Nélida throughout the ship, and she accepts him as an extension of the family, because this honorable vigilance allows her to go alone among the men. The boy is somewhat imbecile; he suffers from epileptic fits and speaks incoherently. When she is interested in being alone, she sends him to the cabin to fetch something, and the boy resists, reminding himself that he must obey his mother. But his sister’s adorers intervene , friends who give him champagne and good cigars, and he ends up leaving, until he bumps into his mother, who scolds him for forgetting his duties… ” Ojeda, feeling a sudden interest in this story, looked at Nélida. “The two brothers,” Maltrana continued, “hate each other with a hatred of race, and at night they argue and fight.” She shows her friends the marks of the blows; he hides the scratches under a layer of powder, but declares with stammering resentment that he will tell everything to his eldest brother, the only balanced one in the family, a centaur from the Pampas, a rancher respected by the father, adored by the mother, and horribly afraid of the beautiful Nélida. When she talks about him, she turns pale. It is clear that this country lad does not believe in “the modern education of a young woman,” and he settles matters of honor with blows. The girl trembles at the thought of the future interview and what her little brother might say, threatening her with his revelations; for she would never reach Buenos Aires… But her terrors soon pass: she forgets them as soon as she is surrounded by men. When she caresses her lips with her cat’s tongue, she is capable of leaping over the avenger of the Pampas who inspires so much fear in her. Once again the mother’s dark eyes, bulging and gentle, reminiscent of the tearful gaze of the so-called Andeans, fixed themselves upon her daughter with hesitant severity. “Nélida!” she called again. But Nélida did not deign to reply, and after drinking the rest of her cup , she stood up and lit another cigarette. The group of faithful rose after her. She was going to stroll on deck until it was time for the dance. They left in a crowd, and the brother wanted to join his mother, but she became indignant: “Go with Nélida, you great fool. Why are you coming here?… Don’t lose sight of her. ” With this man, who was of her color and blood, the good lady showed herself authoritarian, forcing him to run after Nélida. Doctor Zurita, leaning back in an armchair, followed the spirals of smoke from his large cigar with half-closed eyes. The ladies of his family were talking with other Argentinian women at the nearby tables. “My good doctor misses me,” said Maltrana. “He’s getting bored with the ladies’ chatter… I also miss the magnificent cigar that he’s surely saving for me… Are you going out on deck, Ojeda?… I’m going to get the tribute.” As he approached the doctor, he seemed to wake up, at the same time rummaging in his tuxedo pockets. “Hey, Maltrana; come here, nice little Galician…” Here’s a leaf cigar. And he handed him an enormous cigar, adding in a low voice: “Sit down, friend, and let’s talk… Tell me what you thought of this gringo party . It’s a load of rubbish, isn’t it?” Ojeda went out onto the deck. The light from the spotlights embedded in the ceiling of the two streets illuminated the strollers from top to bottom, without their bodies casting a shadow on the ground. They walked hurriedly, with the mobility of caged beasts, the same way one walks in schools, convents, and prisons, seeking to make up for the limited space with the speed of movement. The women paraded manfully, with long strides, fearing the fatty exuberance of an immobile digestion. The groups challenged each other to see who could take the longest strides, and they circulated with the speed of flight between the saloon windows and the groups leaning on the railings. Beyond the halo of milky light in which the ship was enveloped, the sea and the night extended the mystery of their dark blue dotted with phosphorescence and starry flashes. Some gazed at the stars, discussing their names. People from the other hemisphere scanned the horizon impatiently, thinking they saw the famous Southern Cross rising just above the water … It was not yet visible; but in four or five days they would see it rise majestically in the firmament. And many seemed enthusiastic about this hope, as if, gazing at the constellation they had admired since childhood, they already felt at home. The night was hot. Many caps had been left abandoned on the hooks in the dining room. Their heads rose uncovered above the white triangle of their shirtfronts, shining as they passed by the streetlights with the reflections of black lacquer. Not the slightest breath of breeze disturbed the harmony of their women’s hairstyles. As the groups passed each other in their hurried march, they greeted each other as if they hadn’t seen each other for a long time. They exchanged smiles and winks, just as on a city promenade. All the tables in the smoking room were occupied. Some groups had a small green tablecloth and decks of cards before them. Ojeda, on one of his turns, saw Mr. Munster at the door of the café. He was finally going to get what he wanted; his bridge game was already half-formed. He had won over Nélida’s mother in the drawing room, and he believed he could count on Mrs. Power as well. Despite this, he repeated again, with the tenacity of a maniac: “How strange that you don’t know, sir!” Such a distinguished game!… Fernando, tired of moving among the groups, who, when they met in their turns, stopped and blocked the path, stopped at the bow, leaning on the railing. His eyes experienced the voluptuousness of rest as they sank into the dark blue filled with soft lights. Behind him, human movement circulated, accompanied by vivid flashes; before him, the silent calm of the tropical sea, asleep like a shoreless lake. He was sad. The joy of the champagne that had accompanied him when he got up from the table, now, as he was alone, became a Inexplicable melancholy. Ojeda compared himself to certain vessels inside which the sweetest liquids turn sour, losing their fragrance. Oh, the painful memory of what he was leaving behind! A confusing feeling of spite and envy joined his sadness. As the ship entered the calm, motionless emerald seas, the warm nights filled with flickering foam and light, it seemed to transform. An atmosphere of sweet complicity, of kindly protection, extended from the luxurious salons to the deepest cabins. Men and women of different languages, who had boarded the ocean liner in different ports and would leave it in different lands, sought each other out, greeted each other, smiled, and ended up strolling together, speaking out loud, words of no interest, while simultaneously staring into each other’s eyes, tilting their heads toward each other as if driven by an irresistible attraction. Obscure instincts guided the great masses in selecting their affections, dividing them into groups of two, according to the affinities of their tastes or the hidden attractions reflected in their eyes. That night, the outline of what this society would become, far from the rest of the earth, wandering on a steel shell in the desert of the seas, was being shaped. This ephemeral world, which could only last ten or twelve days, would offer the same incidents as a world that lasted centuries. Ten days would represent as much in the lives of many as ten years. Someone had jumped ship during the last stops. Headless hope with wings was not the only intruder. He came hidden in the deep holds—like those vagabonds discovered upon leaving Tenerife—and, finding himself in the midst of a sea of romance, tranquil and luminous, he would stealthily slip from his hiding place, examine the faces of his fellow travelers, equip them according to his tastes, and, invisibly and benevolently, push them toward one another. A new atmosphere spread through the bowels of the ship. Their breasts breathed a different air, provoking inexplicable sighs. Those who until then had slept peacefully, lulled by the undulations of the ocean, would from then on toss and turn restlessly during the calm, starry nights, unable to fall asleep. Women’s eyes would discover unexpected attractions in the same man they had regarded with aversion or indifference during the first days of the voyage. The women transformed with increasing valor, appearing more seductive with each sunset, as if the tropics were infusing the fading beauties with new life, as if the prow of the ship, breaking the waves in search of the solitudes of the Equator, were approaching the legendary Fountain of Youth dreamed of by the conquistadors. Ojeda knew this invisible, playful intruder revolutionizing the ocean liner, and the intruder had also known him for some years. Perhaps she would brush against him, like the others, with her restless butterfly wings, but upon recognizing him, she would continue on her way. She had nothing to do with him… And this certainty of remaining on the sidelines of the passionate life that was about to unfold in the middle of the ocean embittered Fernando. A traveler for love, he would have to contemplate the happiness of others as desert hermits contemplated the rosy and fantastic nakedness evoked by the Evil One. Oh, who could give him in living reality the somewhat faded image that throbbed in his memory!… To walk feeling the sweet arm in his arm; to dream up above, on the top deck, the two of them hidden behind a boat, mouths together, gaze lost in infinity; to live an entire life in three meters of space, between the partitions of a cabin, awakening from the amorous amazement of the bridge bell, which rang, in the oceanic immensity, discreet and timid, like the other nun’s bell!… And Fernando, sinking his gaze into the gushes of foam speckled with points of light that slid down the side of the ship, moaned mentally, with an anguished call: “Oh, Teri! Joy of my existence!” A light cough made him turn his head, and he saw Mrs. Power, his neighbor in the dining room, leaning against the railing next to him. A green tulle covered the bareness of her cleavage. She was bringing the golden end of a cigarette to her mouth , and a jet of smoke rose from her lips, taking on the glimmer of irises in the electric glow before disappearing into the darkness. Ojeda’s first movement was one of annoyance and anger, like someone awakened from the middle of a sweet dream. He loathed this beautiful woman for her manly stiffness; he couldn’t bear the gaze of her clear eyes, their insolent fixity, which seemed to challenge him to a duel to the death. He wanted to turn his head toward the ocean, but she didn’t give him time. “Is that the moon?” he asked in English, pointing to a faint milky patch just above the horizon. “Perhaps,” Fernando replied in the same language. “But no… I think the moon rises later.” And after this brief exchange, reminiscent of the incoherent dialogues of a language-learning method, the two suddenly found themselves approaching each other. Ojeda didn’t know if it was he who moved forward instinctively, or she with the manly intrepidity of her race; but their elbows touched on the railing and their heads were separated only by a thin layer of atmosphere. Mrs. Power asked Fernando about his friend, smiling as she remembered his mobility and the hybrid, picturesque language with which he greeted her every morning. An interesting fellow, Mr. Maltrana; too bad she couldn’t understand many of his words! And the memory of the language difficulties they suffered on board served to justify her approach to Ojeda. She needed a friend who knew her language. She occasionally conversed with the Lowes, that couple of her compatriots; But… And she made a haughty gesture to indicate that they were not her kind. She kept the noisy troop of Americans at arm’s length. They were traveling salesmen , prairie cattlemen, ordinary people. She was bored by the ladies of other nationalities who spoke English. She had always enjoyed the society of men… Then she interrupted the conversation to ask Ojeda how long he had lived in the United States; and upon learning that he had never been there, she burst into an exclamation of astonishment: “Ahó!” She drew back, as if she had just been offended by an unforgivable lack of respect. But she immediately recovered from this impression of distaste. “All right!” You will teach me Spanish, and I will perfect your English. It’s obvious that you learned it in London. We Americans speak it better; everyone knows that. And convinced of her country’s superiority over all existing things, she proposed to Fernando that he be her friend with the same gesture as if she were hiring a good servant for her house. Inspired by her domineering frankness, she did not hide the fact that she had learned his story, as well as that of everyone on the ship who caught her attention. “You are a poet, I know, and I am not at all poetic: I warn you… My father was; my father was German and very given to sentimental things . I was born for business, and I help my husband. If it weren’t for me!” A passerby interrupted the conversation. It was Mr. Munster, who, putting a hand to his cap, humbly implored: “Madam, remember your promise… We will be waiting for you in the drawing-room for our game of bridge. You are only a few minutes away before we begin. ” Mrs. Power smiled with fierce kindness. “I’ll come later.” »
And Munster, understanding the annoyance of his presence, discreetly withdrew before the lady could turn her back on him. She continued talking about her character; a practical character, incompatible with poetic illusion. She fiercely attacked the hated phantom of poetry, as if she saw in it a source of error and misfortune. Then she spoke of her husband with a tenacious enthusiasm, annoying to Ojeda. He was taller than him and of a distinction that earned everyone’s respect. He was born on Fifth Avenue in New York, the son of a famous banker; but the family was ruined. “You, sir, are one of the most distinguished on board, and that’s why I’m speaking to you… But you’re not even close to Mr. Power. You’re missing something. You wear your tie one color and your handkerchief another. My country is the only one where a man can call himself elegant. Mr. Power won’t go out on the street unless he wears his tie, handkerchief, and socks of the same color. It’s the least a self-respecting gentleman can do. ” But Ferdinand barely listened to these lessons, presented with scientific gravity. He felt disturbed by an ascending intoxication, as if the wine that a short while before seemed to contract sadly inside him were exploding again, overwhelming his senses. He stared into the American woman’s eyes, her liquid, trembling pupils, which stood out against the mother-of-pearl of her corneas with the brilliance of a shifting light, a mixed reflection of malice and candor. A perfume caressed him, wafting from her like a distant, familiar music. Perhaps it was an illusion of his senses, excited by memory; perhaps a mistaken similarity upon finding himself for the first time since embarking, next to an elegant woman. That American woman smelled the same as the other; she spread one of those indefinable perfumes that cannot be acquired because they lack a name; an unreal perfume, like the intangible uniform that envelops women of all countries accustomed to a life of comfort and refinement; the scent of lovingly cared for flesh, of epidermis polished by hygienic scrubbing; “the smell of water,” as Ojeda would say. “Oh, Teri!… Teri!” His eyes also found a fraternal resemblance in her slender, slightly tilted neck, like the stem of a flower that bends gracefully under its weight; in her hands, as white as a host, with curved, shiny nails, resembling rose petals. It was Mrs. Power; one only had to see her tearful eyes, hear her icy businesswoman’s words, to be convinced of her identity; but at the same time, she was the other woman, because of the majestic line of her body, the loose and carefree gesture of an elegant woman confident in her power of seduction, and the halo of luminous perfume that seemed to envelop her. Ojeda listened to her voice without knowing what she was saying, thinking of Teri, seeing her beside him in a new form. He looked at Mrs. Power as if she were a mask he had just found at a dance and whose secret he knew despite the fake voice and disfigured face. For several days he had been populating the solitary life on board with the image of Teri. He had strolled with her through the deserted top deck, squeezing her arm, listening to the faint creak of her invisible footsteps, murmuring sweet nothings that only elicited a mental response. She sat in an empty armchair next to his books during long afternoons of reading, and at night, when he unlocked the cabin, she slipped behind his footsteps, mysterious and smiling, so as not to abandon him during his sleepless hours and be the last thing his eyes saw, vanishing like a vision that fades when sleep finally touches him. Now, the intangible and luminous woman who followed him everywhere had disappeared, but it was undoubtedly to hide within that other, real and tangible woman at his side. This reincarnation made itself felt with a less illusory contact; but in the mystery of her confinement, her scent betrayed her. “Oh, Teri! Teri!” His only concern at the moment was that the American woman wouldn’t stop talking, that she wouldn’t run away, taking her fragrant halo with her. Ojeda wanted to know her birth name, free of her marital surname; and upon hearing that she was called Maud, he felt a certain discontent. He was waiting, he didn’t know why, for another name, a revelation that would justify his hopes. Maud continued talking about her husband, praising his physical condition and at the same time pitying his overgrown simplicity. versed only in elegance and athletic games. She was the strong man, the directing head of the matrimonial association. She had gone to New York in search of new capital for a rubber business they had in Brazil. Her husband served only to admire and obey her, and she had to cope with the vicissitudes of commerce, using honeyed words, an enigmatic smile, and an angry expression in this fight for the dollar. The fifteen days spent in Paris upon returning from the United States had been the best of her trip. A life of a dazed young man with several compatriots free like herself from the old ties of sex; a student’s existence; theaters, dinners until late at night, with no men other than some old gentleman, who accompanied this troop of emancipated women the way a harem guard follows odalisques on vacation. And no more visits to banks or fierce conferences like the ones she’d had at a desk right next to the clouds, on the thirty-fourth floor of a New York skyscraper. How hard it is to hunt down a dollar, so essential to life!… But she returned satisfied from her trip, thinking of the sigh of relief Mr. Power would breathe when, on the dock in Rio de Janeiro, he explained to him that the danger of ruin was averted thanks to her. Adorable big boy! What would the poor man do in the world without his wife?… And in this conversation, praise for her husband, tender enthusiasm for his conspicuous uselessness, aroused Fernando’s certain irritation… And was this what that lady had approached him with such a flirtatious air for ?… A trumpet sounded like a summons, the arrogant and provocative blast of the hero Siegfried. The passersby ran with the jubilation that every extraordinary event arouses in the tranquil life on board. It was the signal for the dance. Mrs. Power and Ojeda also went to the smoking room, around which people were gathering. The musicians lined up in pairs, and behind them the captain bustled, giving orders in several languages, stroking his broad beard and greeting the ladies. He asked everyone to pair up . He was going to begin the festivities with the traditional polonaise, a solemn parade around the decks before reaching the dining room, which had become a ballroom . “Friend Neptune”—as Maltrana called him—seemed to hesitate for a few seconds before choosing his companion. He wanted to dedicate this honor to the highest lady on the ship, and his eyes fluttered uncertainly from the pearl necklace of the gringo millionaire’s wife to the glasses and majestic corpulence of Dr. Zurita’s wife. But his holy respect for authority and social standing cleared his mind. The doctor had been a minister in his country, and this was enough for the sailor, bending over his short legs with Versailles-like gallantry, to offer his arm to the Argentine matron. Behind them, the line of couples formed, choosing each other according to previous preferences or by chance of proximity, with bizarre contrasts that provoked laughter and shouts. Old ladies, children, and servants witnessed this procession, crowding at doors and windows. Isidro linked arms with the noble soprano of the operetta troupe, a voluminous duet with a herpetic face, who displayed a Turkish decoration on her breast. Maud regarded the formation with an ironic look, but suddenly felt swept away by the general joy: “Us too!” And taking Ojeda’s arm, she joined the line. The music began to play a solemn march, one of the many ” Torchlight Marches” written for the births and weddings of little German princes, and the procession began to move, the couples swaying to the beat. The chambermaids in lace caps and the stewards in white ties ran from inside the ship to witness this parade, laughing with a genuine Germanic sense of humor at the sight of the gentlemen arm in arm and marching with swaying hips. The head of the procession disappeared. Suddenly, the brass clang grew fainter. The polonaise, leaving the open-air promenade, entered the salons, winding between tables and chairs until it reached the promenade on the opposite side, where the instruments recovered their original sonority. At other times, the music gradually faded away, as if absorbed by the bowels of the ship, and the procession descended the wide stairs to the lower floors. In front of Mrs. Power came Nélida, the only one leaning simultaneously on the arms of two men. A young German who passed himself off as a relative, and the “Baron,” the handsome Belgian, escorted her, speaking affectionately to each other like friends who drink together and play poker, but with the rancor in their eyes of well-bred men who consider it the greatest distinction to know how to hide their feelings. And she seemed pleased by this double desire that tugged at her arms and enveloped her in an atmosphere of muffled strife; She allowed herself to be led almost at a crawl, her slender figure hunched over, laughing at something she didn’t know about, her mouth dry, encompassing both men in the gaze of her moist , avid eyes that seemed to engulf them in an identical predilection, without being able to distinguish one from the other. Fernando’s companion was transformed as she marched amid the shouts and laughter of this general jubilation. He now perceived with greater intensity the mysterious perfume escaping from the depths of her neckline. He even thought he felt a slight tightening of Maud’s hand on his fist, a perhaps unconscious movement, a faint awakening touch that spread in waves of emotion to the extremes of his organism, and sometimes made him walk as if he were flying and at other times seemed to pin him to the ground. It was perhaps an unreal caress, imagined rather than felt, but identical to others that lingered in his memory… Moreover, the same brush of harmonious curves as they walked; the same encounter with hard, lightning-fast contact. The heaviness in his arm grew more noticeable by the moment. A bare shoulder rested against him, leaving faint stains of velutina on the black cloth of the tuxedo. When he turned his avid gaze toward her and met her eyes, he felt no surprise, as if he had known them long before. They were gray; the ones he carried in his memory were black, with amber reflections; but both looked at him in the same way, with an inviting expression. Fernando felt the tremor that warns of the arrival of fortune, the emotion that precedes great triumphs… Life is beautiful! And a shudder of her adorable arm seemed to respond, silently extolling the beauty of an existence that can rise, thanks to love, above all realities. They suddenly found themselves beneath the flags and electric garlands. The music, crowded at one end of the dining room, had changed rhythm, and the couples, just as they entered, twirled entwined, following the caresses of a waltz. Instinctively, Maud gathered the train of her dress, Ojeda rested an arm on her waist, and they experienced a certain surprise at finding themselves among the overly numerous dancers, who clashed with harsh encounters of elbows and rumps. The excitement, the champagne, and the desire, dully fermenting within him, seemed to suddenly explode, stirred by the twists and turns of the dance. His arm held Maud’s waist tightly, as if afraid that she might flee; they stared into each other’s eyes with an aggressive fixity, like wrestlers who want to recognize each other clearly at the last moment, before falling into each other’s arms. Ojeda stammered, not quite knowing what he was saying. He spoke now in Spanish, and his incoherent plea was a kind of wordless music , whose vagueness produced a certain emotion in him. “Say yes… say you want… I would be so happy… so much!” She smiled, perhaps grateful that he spoke in her language, which saved her the need to understand him and blush. At the same time, her eyes narrowed to look at him with an expression of caress. early. The music stopped; the couples withdrew arm in arm. Maud bent for a moment to correct a disorder in her skirt, and when she stood up she displayed a haughty gesture, as if she had remembered something that restored her to her icy serenity. She went to the door, followed by him, who in his excitement was unaware of this sudden change. He continued speaking in Spanish, repeating the same plea with a passionate informal address. And she, twice , smiling at the difficulty of her pronunciation, gave him the answer in the same language: “No compregndo… no compregndo.” In the dining room, she extended her hand to say goodbye. She was retiring to her cabin: she liked to go to bed early; this evening had been extraordinary. Ojeda leaned to one side as if trying to block her way, at the same time that his voice grew more pleading. Leave? Leave him in the solitude of that party, where everything was strange and unpleasant to him? He felt sick. But she cut him off with her icy irony. “It must be my stomach. See the doctor… I’m not impressed by such complaints; you know I’m not poetic.” Fernando insisted. A horrible night awaited him: he wouldn’t be able to sleep. “I’ll send you some stamps with the maid that make you sleepy. Oh, if only she would! If only she would allow him to retrace her steps to find happiness! ” “I don’t understand… I don’t understand.” He repeated his plea in English, and she looked him up and down, without hatred, without scandal, with surprise, as if witnessing an attack on good social manners, amazed at the speed with which this man intended to suddenly suppress all the prudent expectations established by custom. “Good night,” she said coldly. And she turned her back on him, walking away down the corridor that led to the guest cabins, upright and majestic. Disconcerted by this scene, which no one had seen, Ojeda felt an urge to flee, as if an explosion of laughter were about to erupt around him . Up on deck, only the tenacious strollers remained, and in the café, the poker players, for whom no music or dancing could draw them away from the green table. The Italian family surrounded their prelate, pushing him affectionately. “Cheer up, Your Grace!” He had to go down to the saloon to take a look at the festivities and show off his gold cross. They weren’t on land here, and life on board allowed for greater freedoms. Even the abbot of the conferences was wandering around the ballroom, sticking his bearded face out. “The sea… is the sea, Monsignor.” The same feeling of bewilderment and fear persisted in Fernando as he bumped into the strollers, as if they could guess what had happened below. The music bothered him, because he thought it was just like mocking laughter. Once again, he needed to flee in search of darkness and silence. And he took one of the stairs that led to the boat deck. Up there, he thought he’d awaken in the cool of the night, like drunks suddenly hit by a draft. Up until then, he’d been accompanied by a feeling of spite; the anger of his manly pride, wounded by failure; the sting of a ridiculous situation. But now he was tormented by remorse; he felt ashamed of himself; he wanted to shrink away, to disappear, as if an angry gaze were spying on him in the shadows. “Very well, Mr. Ojeda,” he murmured ironically; “you’re behaving like a gentleman.” And, sinking down onto a bench, he added angrily: “You’re a scoundrel; a scoundrel who deserves death!” Only a few minutes had passed, and he wondered with surprise if it was he himself dancing below, driven mad by the perfume of a lady he had only known for a few hours, stammering like a lad daring propositions. Ah, miserable wretch without will!… He was abandoning with a rude pull his former life, he was adventurously marching to the other hemisphere, all for a woman, already in the first days, when the same stars still shone above their heads, he dragged himself with Vile entreaties to a stranger, driven by a lightning-fast desire that made her laugh. He felt ashamed when he remembered the words he had written the previous afternoon, imitating the firmness of Wagnerian heroes. “And when we are far apart, who can separate us?” A single day had been enough for him to forget his vows. His letter from Tenerife had not yet left, and already he was like Siegfried, forgotten by Brunhilde, humbling himself in love at the feet of a Gotunda who mocked him. And he had done this spontaneously, without needing any filters of forgetting. He clenched his fists, threatening himself; but a feeling of sadness and despondency succeeded this indignation. He wanted to hide, as if in his shame he needed more shade, more silence, and he fled again , always upward, climbing the ladder of the last quarter-deck, near the bridge. Here, absolute calm; The lack of light made the deep blue of the sky more visible, the brilliance of the stars more intense. The chimney tower stood out with its dark mass against the space dotted with gleams; the wisps of smoke, escaping from its mouth, briefly dimmed the brilliance of the constellations. The rocking of the ship made the stars pass from one side of the masts to the other, like playful fireflies jumping between poles and rigging. Ojeda experienced the sensation of peace that descends from the night sky upon great sorrows. There were moments when she wanted to cry, like a child begging for forgiveness. “Teri!… Teri!” She surely lived through those hours thinking of him. Perhaps she was already in Paris, and amid the noise of the boulevard, at a theater or a party, her imagination turned away from the immediate to anxiously follow the progress of a ship she knew only by name. Oh, if only she knew! If only she could see!… Ojeda analyzed himself with cruel thoroughness. He wasn’t worthy of the happiness that had accompanied the best years of his existence. And yet, he didn’t believe himself responsible; it was his soul, the sex of his soul, completely distinct and divergent from his material sex. A man like any other, agitated and dominated by a swift virility in his impulses, a beast of prey capable of trampling and killing, just like prehistoric males when disturbed by the intoxication of desire, he nevertheless recognized that his soul was feminine, like those of most humans. The sight of unfamiliar flesh, a smile, a glance, was enough to make him forget oaths and commitments. He coldly insulted himself, and to lessen his guilt, he included all his fellow men in this shame. “We consider ourselves very much men, and we have the soul of a courtesan. We wait for what will come, credulous and fatuous enough to accept as fortune the first woman who looks at us, agile and ready for new desires, forgetting yesterday with the unconsciousness of a professional… Again the memory of the letter with Siegfried’s oaths returned to her. That strong-willed hero, who with his sword broke anvils and slew dragons, also had the soul of a woman. As soon as he separated from Brunhilde, he forgot her, fixing his eyes on another. On the other hand, she, the feminine Valkyrie, was the man in this amorous association. His manly and strong soul belonged to the aristocracy of those who prolong a unique love to the highest idealism, thus ennobling the instincts of the flesh. He was the androgyne of remote legends, man and woman at the same time; The personification of true love, who masters the thirst for new desires, ignores the curiosity inspired by the strange, and yearns to merge with the one he loves, until all duality is suppressed and the two are eternally one. And Teri was like that. With his birdlike chatter and seemingly frivolous nature, he was the strong and unshakeable man. Exposed to the temptations of other men who desired her, she had never wavered. And he was the woman without will, the weak soul vulnerable to all desire, the instinct A capricious creature who had to be closely watched and always held by the hand like a sick child. When he swore to be faithful with the most solemn oaths, calling love and life as witnesses, he was never sure he was telling the truth. He suspected that the next day a glimpse of whiteness, a flutter of skirts, the harmony of a line, the rhythm of a step, the simple novelty of something unknown, could make him run away from his path like a beast in heat. And that was him: that was the majority of his fellow creatures. And this animal, which, crazed by what it considers love, has, at the supreme moment of its happiness, simian movements, demonic gesticulations, the swipes of a beast, is the noblest of creation, the sole repository of truth. What would the tranquil stars say of men if they had ever followed their actions with their luminous winks!… Ah, misery! Time passed without him having the strength to leave that bench far from the light. He feared returning to the noise below. He delayed the moment of entering his cabin, as if the walls might fall away , the memories he had fixed with the fixity of his eyes during the melancholy night hours coming out to meet him. Three times the bell rang while he stood there, immobilized by dejection , and three times he answered the stern-mast’s stern-mast ‘s stern-mast from the foremast, announcing that the position lights were still on. An officer paced the bridge with his back slightly hunched and his hands in his pockets, pausing at each turn to scan the darkness with his eyes. Fernando found him somewhat monkish as he walked back and forth with the same number of steps through his steel cloister . Beside a hidden light, which cast a faint reddish sliver—the glow of the binnacle—stood another man, his arms crossed, grasping the ship’s steering wheel. Huddled in his minaret, amidst the darkness pierced by luminous flickers, existed the invisible sentinel, the hoarse singer of the hours, an advanced spy scrutinizing the hostile mysteries of the night and the sea. Ojeda contemplated them with respect and envy, immersed in their silent gravity, which had something of the priestly quality about it; insensitive to the music and the festive murmurs coming from below; fleeing the luminous reflections that the ship scattered over its sides like a halo of glory; leaning their heads forward into the night to better sniff it out; indifferent to the joyful and varied world that invaded the bowels of the ship on each voyage. firmly attached to the forehead of the monster whose march they guided, like a cornac guides the elephant mounted on its forehead. They were men engaged in something more important than babbling desires at the passing of a female. Life had imposed an obligation on them, and they fulfilled it sternly, without regret or shame. Work disciplined by responsibility appeared to him to be the most noble and enviable function. These hermits of the bridge and the crow’s nest would, no doubt, have their life of passion like everyone else; they would know love, which is indispensable to existence; they would carry in their souls the flower of memory. Perhaps the officer was accompanied on his walks by the image of some sensitive, blond fraulein counting the days in an Hanseatic port awaiting the ship’s return; perhaps the sailors contemplated in the mirror of their rudimentary imaginations their pot-bellied, ill-shod companion with her group of fair-faced, white-haired children. From his seat, through a window frame, he also saw the telegraph operator writing with his head bowed, interrupting his writing to listen to the creaking language of the devices. He mechanically attended to other thoughts lost in the night hundreds of miles away , and barely finished the conversation would he retrieve his pen. It could well be that he was writing to his beloved, filling the paper with naive and simple verses, like the little blue flower that blossoms in the soul of every Germanic passion. And divining the love in these slaves of responsibility who watched over the fate of the floating village, he saw it as unique, noble, straightforward, as was the duty and discipline that kept everyone in their positions. He heard footsteps on the quarterdeck. A silhouette was hesitantly advancing, exploring the corners. It was Maltrana, who, upon recognizing him, went toward him, lamenting his disappearance… What was he doing there? Why wasn’t he below?… And he accompanied his words with loud laughter and affectionate clapping. Fernando saw in his eyes the gleam of extraordinary agitation. When he spoke, an alcoholic vapor spread from his mouth. “It’s a great night, friend Ojeda; and we’re still, so to speak, at the beginning. Those boys are charming. We’ve arranged a small get-together with several girls from the operetta for when the dance is over and the serious people go to bed. And Nélida? A brave one.” She slipped out of the lounge while her little brother’s friends from the gang were getting drunk. Her first flirt, the German who calls himself a relative and comes with her from Hamburg, is running around the ship, unable to find her. I’m the only one who knows where she is: I know everything! I saw her cautiously enter her cabin, like a shivering cat, and after her, reach the Belgian baron… And the other one is searching and searching. The funniest thing!… What’s the matter with you? Why are you so sad?… Fernando felt a selfish desire to communicate his discouragement and bitterness to this delighted friend. “I’m a miserable person who feels disgusted with himself. A truly miserable person.” Maltrana remained undecided, not knowing what to do in the face of such an unexpected statement… Then he shrugged his shoulders and laughed again , as if reading Ojeda’s thoughts. A miserable person!… So what? He was one too; and everyone on the ship was equally so. And as the voyage grew longer and the _Goethe_ advanced its prow into the luminous and warm seas, everyone would feel possessed by this misery that shamed Fernando… Who knows if any of them would come to roar and walk on all fours, like the libertines of legends transformed into beasts!… “We’ll cleanse ourselves of sins when we reach land, my friend. Here we must live in accordance with the environment. The responsibility is not ours. The guilty one is that one… the great impure one, the eternal fertilizer who still holds within his entrails the genetic secret of the first beats of life.” And Maltrana, drunk, pointed at the dark sea, rebuking it with comical fury… They passed over his back, cruelly scratching him with their keels, well fed, their thoughts at rest, their limbs on strike, and he took revenge for this rude awakening by sending them an exciting breath that spread desire and madness. –Ah, great tempter!… Galleot with seaweed mustache!… Celestine with green wrinkles! There was a reason why the peoples who worshipped Aphrodite had flourished on the Mediterranean islands, making all the strings of the harp of voluptuousness vibrate; there was a reason why the white colonnades of the sanctuaries of love had risen on the coasts, with their flocks of sacred courtesans; there was a reason why the priestly poets had made Venus rise from the foam of the waves. Chapter 5. At ten in the morning, the musicians were placing their music stands at the end of the deck, between the smoking room and a railing, on the esplanade at the stern. The promenade widened at this point, offering the appearance of a café terrace with open-air tables and round saplings planted in green boxes. The band would begin to play a “Grenadier March” from the time of Frederick the Great, accompanied by thunderous trumpet calls, and little by little, people would swarm onto the promenade. The ship, damp, shaded, and clean, seemed to smile like a sleeper awakening from the cold morning ablutions. The early risers had been walking along the blue gloom of the deck for a long time, greeting each other as they passed and sharing news of the previous night. Some, dressed in pajamas or half-naked under a long coat, They descended from the gym and quickly glided toward their cabins. The first ladies appeared, taking a short stroll to settle into the armchairs. Gangs of boys took advantage of the adults’ absence to take over the entire deck. Nannies of various nationalities, with a child in their arms, formed friendly groups, looking at each other smilingly without understanding one another. Others pushed cribs on wheels, inside which a bulging head of soft hair appeared half asleep amidst lace and ribbons. A troop of children with brass rifles circled the ship, kicking the damp floorboards martially . They were blond, dark-skinned, or tanned, displaying in their variety the ethnic amalgamation of the American continent, where their parents had given them birth. A son of Dr. Zurita, who led the way, saber raised, marking time, shouted with the authority of a triumphant household: “Come on, gringo, move forward a little… One… two.” One… two. You, Galician, step back.” Fernando, leaning on the railing a short distance from the musicians, followed with his eyes the slow rolling of the stern deck, over which a group of seagulls flapped. They were enormous birds laden with fish and ship debris, with powerful, white, warped wings, like sails. They followed the ocean liner from the Canary Islands, accustomed to this blue solitude, immense to human eyes, and in which their instinct sniffed out the invisible proximity of the African coast and the Cape Verde archipelago. They flew in a spiral over the stern, sometimes fanning the third-class passengers with their wings. Others lay in a row on the whitish, foamy path left open by the propellers on the plain of the ocean. They seemed motionless on the steamer, which moved forward and forward with the panting force of their iron lungs, and when they were left behind, a couple of flaps of their wings were enough to bring them back upright. The sound of an object splashing in the sea—a basket of kitchen scraps, a piece of wood, an empty tin can—and they immediately plummeted, their feathers tucked in, bobbing on the oceanic undulations like swans on a lake. And as soon as they finished their exploration of the floating object or swallowed the scraps, they returned to the ship, impetuously like projectiles. A murmur of invisible people rose to the promenade during the brief pauses in the music. Ojeda, leaning over the railing, caught the scent of sour food in his nostrils. The vast esplanade at the stern, free of awnings at that hour, appeared occupied by northern emigrants . They sat in squares in the hatches’ recesses. Others, above them, occupied the horizontally positioned masts of the cranes, like benches. Some, with a stately air, slept sprawled on folding chairs made of old canvas, relics of previous voyages. Bands of half-naked boys scampered about, seeking refuge between women’s knees in the midst of their pursuit. Old men with long beards, sheepskin hats, and hairy overcoats squatted, gazing out to sea, like fakirs in ecstasy. Young men , lying on their stomachs with their jaws in their hands, listened to a comrade reading aloud. Beside the railing, other bearded men smoked long pipes, and from time to time their red, scaly hands sank beneath their fur-lined cassocks to rattle the invisible rags with loud scrapes. The sailors had to make their way through this compact, motionless crowd, which was soaking up the sun and air outside the confines of the soldiers. On a pile of cables, a shaven-headed emigrant was moving the bow of his violin, without the slightest sound reaching the promenade where the brass instruments roared. On the platform of the sterncastle, among boats, ropes, and life preservers, the third-class passengers who enjoyed priority swarmed: street vendors; Russian and German women with large straw hats, who, holding each other’s waists, talked about their academic diplomas and of the possibility of entering the bosom of a New World family to teach languages to the children; long-haired young men in well -cut but threadbare suits, always with a book in hand. They were the aristocrats of this part of the ship, who, isolated on high, looked with disdainful pity at the flock below and with revolutionary envy at those in the central castle. Rows of clothes laid out to dry swayed on the esplanade above the groups of heads. The floor, thoroughly watered shortly before, was covered with fruit peels, throat secretions, and food residue. Women’s hair hung in the sun received the stalking exploration of combs. From the uncertain whiteness of some shirts, stiff and stiff with the dried liquid, udders emerged like rags, adapting their wrinkled flaccidity to the weeping mouths of the little ones. Other mothers, with their children on their knees, calmly unwrapped their swaddles and diapers, revealing the stinking oblivion of childhood unconsciousness. Fernando had only to tilt his head slightly, turning his eyes toward the interior of the deck, and his nose immediately received the scent of the liqueurs bubbling with soda water on the café tables, the perfume of cologne scattered by the women, like a reminder of their morning bath. Life unfolding four meters above the emigrant crowd seemed to be from a different planet. The waiters went from group to group offering large trays laden with sandwiches and cups of broth: the second refreshment of the morning. The ladies displayed with affected modesty their summer dresses recently taken from the chests and exchanged mutual compliments. Many passengers were dressed in white from head to toe , as were the ship’s servants, musicians, and officers. There were times when the central castle seemed invaded by a crew of Pierrots. Mrs. Power passed by, alone as always on her morning strolls, upright and looking at no one, wearing an elegant and showy tulle hat. Fernando sensed hesitation and shyness upon seeing her; but she, pausing for a moment, came to his aid. She greeted him, asking with an ironic undertone how he had spent the night. She smiled protectively, implying that she forgave Ojeda his big-boy prank. All was forgotten… And she extended a hand before walking away, continuing her manly gait. Time passed without the deck appearing as crowded as on other mornings. Many armchairs remained empty. The serious ladies drew their daughters away to converse among themselves in mysterious voices and with indignant gestures, as if discussing something scandalous. None of the young men whose friendship Maltrana spoke of with enthusiasm had yet appeared. He too remained invisible, and so did Nélida with her escort of adoring followers. Dr. Zurita passed by Ojeda, inhaling the smoke of his third morning cigar. “Not many people,” he said. “Last night, it seems, there was a long revelry. There must be a trail of dead and wounded down below… What lively young people! Things that come with age!” And he continued on, smiling with the tolerance of a veteran as he thought of the madness of the “young people.” He was reassured by the fact that his Andalusian valet had told him that the older children were snoring in their cabins with the fatigue of a night spent in the dark, but without any visible damage. The music continued its morning program as if playing in a vacuum. The young ladies passed by in groups, just as in the squares of small towns around the concert kiosk; but in this constant round they lacked the encounter with the young men, the accompaniment of a friend, curious and sympathetic glances to follow them. Only they remained on deck. The serious men were sought out by the steward, who, by dint of invitations and entreaties, managed to get them into the smoking room. The committee was to be formed there by acclamation. organizer of the festivities celebrating the crossing of the equator. The concert ended, and the musicians withdrew with their music stands and instruments, and then Maltrana made his appearance. Fernando saw him timidly poke his head around a stairway. After long hesitations, he finally advanced with a certain reluctance. He was wearing a dazzling, majestic white suit, against which the grandiose ugliness of his face seemed to stand out even more, a face that some found somewhat resemblance to that of the old Beethoven. As he walked cautiously, he turned his face toward the sea, lowering his eyes as if afraid of being seen. In front of the groups of noble matrons, his courtesy won out over his fear. “Good morning…” But the ladies answered his greeting with their lips, following him with stern eyes and then looking at each other… “This one, too, was one of the guilty ones.” And the full weight of his indignation fell silently upon Maltrana, the first to dare to appear before them. Ojeda, as he shook his hand, noticed his tendency to turn his face toward the sea, avoiding the left side, and with a sudden movement made him face forward. “What the hell is wrong with you?” He pointed, laughing, to a livid swelling on his temple that extended to one eye. “It’s nothing,” Isidro stammered; “a small thing… I’ll explain.” And to divert the conversation, he looked from his feet to his chest with a gesture of pride. “Huh? What about that little suit? I have another one in addition to this one… Anyone would guess that it’s the work of Doña Margarita, my employer!” But Ojeda didn’t let such words derail him and he continued laughing, his eyes fixed on the bruise that disfigured his friend. “When you tire of laughing, let us know,” said Maltrana, somewhat annoyed. “But don’t you see those worthy ladies are watching us? I know them, and I don’t want to lose their friendship. They speak with great ease about the scandals of Europe; they are determined not to be frightened by anything, so as not to be taken for backward; but it’s all pure exterior, and when they strip off their Parisian clothes and additions, they look exactly like our provincial ladies. As I pass by their cabins, I sometimes look through the half-open door: in the washbasin, portable frames with miraculous images, both domestic and imported; in a bowl by the bed, a rosary and more holy cards… I’m afraid they’ll blame me, I’m the most unhappy. I’m afraid that, in order to make their children and their children’s friends look good , they’ll say it was me who organized what happened last night… And I’m interested in being on good terms with everyone, in keeping my friendships.” Fernando couldn’t contain his impatience. “But what was that last night?” Maltrana smiled, as if remembering something, and said, imitating his friend, with a dramatic intonation: “I’m a wretch… A wretch who feels disgust with himself. ” But before Fernando could get angry at this memory, he hastened to add: “Last night was a lesson; a lesson in things and names: a “party,” a “grinding,” as my friends from various republics say. Last night I also learned what it means to be “cured,” and I cured myself so thoroughly that here I am with an infernal thirst and this ornament next to one eye… But I don’t regret it: what nice fellows! It’s a joy to have such affectionate friends . Some called me “Galician,” others called me “Gothic.” Have you noticed the variety of affectionate nicknames we Spaniards enjoy in Spanish-speaking America? ” “Yes.” and in other republics they call us _gachupines_, _patones_, _saracens_ and I don’t know what else. An Apodesque geographical treatise could be written for greater clarity in Spanish-American relations… But these are family jokes that don’t deserve attention: go ahead. And Maltrana described the intimate party in the smoking room after the dance, when the serious ladies with their daughters had retired to their cabins and only the occasional gentleman remained on deck, absorbed in his stroll. usual before going to bed. The poker players had prudently finished their games upon seeing the room invaded by a gang of madmen shouting speeches while climbing on the tables, practicing gymnastics on the chairs, or lying on the couches with their feet between the glasses. The poor bartender, friend Ojeda, that blond man with a Kaiser-style mustache, moved incessantly from one table to another, uncorking bottles of champagne, filling glasses, picking up broken glass from the floor. At first they were in groups: on one side the South Americans, on the other the Yankees and the English, further on the Germans, each trying to outbid their neighbor in generosity. One table ordered two bottles, another three, another four; and everyone sang, interspersing the cries of familiar or fantastic animals with their music… We awaited the arrival of the ladies: a few chorus girls who had promised their interesting presence to I don’t know who, perhaps to no one. Time passed, and they didn’t come. Some friends seriously discussed going to Nélida’s cabin to bring her to the party and beat her brother up a notch, a proposition that made the Belgian and the German grim, as if each of them, for his part, believed himself the custodian of the girl’s honor. Maltrana fell silent, as if afraid of saying too much; but, given his friend’s curiosity , he continued. “A strong Chilean, a great friend of mine, stood up resolutely. ‘Listen, _godito_: let’s see if we can bring some of those ladies back. ‘ Down below, in a corridor, we caught two Polish chorus girls who were calmly walking from a certain place to their cabin, and my athlete friend practically carried them up without understanding their words. Great success! They are both dark-skinned, thin, with the air of gypsies, but they will never be so admired and honored in their entire lives . And when the poor little things were carrying I don’t know how many glasses, looking at us all with the superiority that comes from the scarcity of the item, and struggling among the gentlemen crowded around them, squealing and squirming in their seats as if a troop of rats were tickling them under the table, the butler, the oversteward, came in, staring at them fixedly, without seeing us, as if we didn’t exist; and a few words of his in German were enough for them to leave, heads bowed and fearful, like little girls after a teacher’s reprimand… They say that the society of women softens the rudeness of men. We were barely alone… battle. Some scolded others for being too bold, blaming them for scaring the two innocent pigeons and causing them to flap their wings. Suddenly, a punch… and the smoking room was the Don Quixote inn. Everyone felt the need to hit without knowing who: two brothers thrashed each other without realizing it; glasses and cups flew through the air. I was hesitating between running away or making peace, and in the midst of my hesitation, this caress reached me… Believe me, it hurts, but the spectacle was worth seeing. It’s a shame you weren’t there. Ojeda bowed with ironic thanks. “Thank you very much.” Tranquility was restored thanks to the intervention of some sailors cleaning the deck and the steward’s threat to thrust the sprinkler hoses through the windows… With the calm, a good understanding was reborn; everyone asked for the same thing: more champagne. And since it was the bar’s closing time, many were stocking up, stashing bottles under the tables. A touching tenderness took hold of the crowd. Everyone scratched their bumps or fixed the scuffs on their suits, glancing lovingly at their neighbors. Argentines and Chileans exchanged glasses with noisy fraternity. “No more Andes! They alone were enough to take on the world!” And suddenly united, they glared at each other fiercely. “And what were the others saying?” Ojeda asked. “Friend Pérez and others from various republics, glass in hand, demanded entry into the confederation. Brothers, all brothers!” And they embraced each other with tears of tenderness, cheering the Spanish-American lands. The Brazilian gently hinted in measured and courteous language: “If you give the gentlemen permission….” And Brazil likewise entered the great alliance. Long live Latin America! Someone noticed my humble person and the ornament I wear next to one eye. “Ah, poor, nice little Galician!” And they burst into cheers for the “mother country,” for old Spain, praising her melancholically, as if they were speaking of a grandmother who had died years ago. Drinks flowed to my mouth by the dozen, as if they wanted to drown me. Some embraced me, wetting my neck with drunken tears. They have I don’t know how many relatives in the Peninsula, dukes and marquises; They still keep old papers of nobility at home , and they asked me for my address in Buenos Aires to send them to me, as if this could interest me… Then, I don’t know how, the Yankees came to clink their glasses together as well. Hurrah to the United States ! America over the rest of the world!… But this hurricane of brotherhood had been too impetuous to remain within the limits of a continent, and across the seas it spread throughout all of Europe. In the end, the English, Germans, French, and Belgians entered the great alliance. Long live the universal confederation! “And a tiny Englishman,” Maltrana continued, “whom you must have seen with his checked suit and his pipe, was shedding tears into his glass, repeating with the obstinate incoherence of a drunkard: ‘I entered the ship with a pure heart, and I want to leave it pure…'” The butler kept coming in to tell us it was two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, and the smoking room had to be closed; but no one understood him. Some people were snoring, stretched out on the stools; others staggered away, only to return a little later, pale, their shirtfronts stained. Suddenly the lights went out, and we pushed out amidst a din of protest. There was some talk of killing the butler, but he had disappeared. “And did you go to sleep?” Ojeda asked. “No, sir; a party like this doesn’t end so quickly. I found myself, somehow, in a lower corridor with two bottles in my hands and a friend on either side. As we left, our legs as soft as cotton, we knocked over all the shoes left at the entrance to the cabins… We saw a few friends knocking on some doors, stooping to talk through the keyhole. They were the cabins of the French women, tidy, well- behaved young ladies, who had gone to bed without witnessing the ball and were sleeping with the honorable tranquility of an industrialist on vacation. “One hundred marks,” one proposed. “Five hundred and fifty,” insinuated another, enraged by the silence. “One thousand… Two thousand… ” We left them rattling off figures in front of the dark, motionless doors. It was as if they were making proposals to a cemetery. Isidro spoke more and more slowly, as if he were approaching the greatest difficulty of his story and considering a way around it. “Then we met a German friend who was going to wake the doctor, his head dripping with blood. He had fallen down a ladder, hitting the edges of the bronze rungs…” I too felt drawn to the doors and began knocking on the door of my neighbor, the mysterious man, the Hoffmann character. I needed to talk to him: I invited him to get up so we could have a drink together and introduce him to my friends. “Come out, don’t be afraid: I know you. You’re Sherlock Holmes…” A drunken obsession that took hold of me at the last minute. And then I started banging on the neighboring door, the one of mystery, struggling to open it. I’d gotten it into my head that my friend Holmes was hiding in this cabin a Russian princess who’s traveling incognito and is going to marry a tribal chief from the Gran Chaco. Alcoholic fantasies, dear Ojeda. And my two companions, less drunk than I, tried to dissuade me by dragging me away. “My friend, don’t be silly…” “Comrade, don’t be stubborn.” And finally they were able to get me into my cabin and put me to bed, and there I stayed until the music woke me… A bath in a hurry, already slipping into this amorous little sailor suit that I’d been impatiently guarding since we embarked. I had little desire to show it off!… Eh? What do you think of my landlady’s little suit?… Ojeda looked at him with feigned severity. “Very well, Isidro. A fine way to go in search of a new life. You’re training yourself for work. ” “Bah! It’s the sea, the demoralizing influence of the sea. You heard me last night. Here we are different than on land; perhaps more spontaneous, more true. Isolation, life together, strip us of our wrappings, and the beautiful beast appears as he is, excited by boredom, eager to amuse himself with something. And as the voyage continues , we will feel more equal, more brothers, with a greater amount of “animality”… Man has always been the same at sea. Remember the old voyages to the Indies and Oceania. The masters of the ships would collect the swords of the noblemen, not to return them until the end of the voyage. Any challenge arranged during the voyage was of no validity upon landing. Those voyages lasted months, and ours are days; but they represent the same thing, for we live and feel with greater speed than our grandparents… Don’t worry : I’ll recover my sanity when I reach the last port, and everyone will do the same. Perhaps that’s why you say that friendships made on a ship rarely last on land. People see each other with too much intimacy, and then, when they meet, they greet each other from afar with the smile of a fond memory; but at the same time they avoid each other, as if they had met on a dishonorable adventure. A monstrous roar startled many ladies in their seats. It was the ship’s whistle, signaling noon. “Lunchtime,” Maltrana said cheerfully. I’m so hungry!… Have you noticed how bad behavior whets your appetite? In the dining room, the passengers crowded around a long table covered with various dishes: bowls of salads; hams and sausages displaying the black mosaic of truffles on their ruddy faces; enormous eels buried in jelly; pink German sausages with a faint drugstore scent; anchovies floating in liquid salt; jars displaying the granular green of caviar between their freshly cut brass prongs. A cook’s hand, armed with a fork, moved from one end of the table to the other, arranging these luncheon hors d’oeuvres on the plates to suit the passengers’ taste. Many curious onlookers paused in front of a large clock regulated from the bridge by an electric current and adjusted their chronometers according to the time the hands had just leaped backward. Every day, when the sun reached its maximum height, time had to be set back ten minutes. Other passengers argued over a small board containing the navigation chart, examining the blue patch of ocean dotted with pins bearing small Germanic flags. Each pin was placed at noon, and the open space between two represented a voyage, twenty-four hours of sailing. The flags emerged from the North Sea and were lined up along the coast of Europe until they reached the Atlantic. The last, recently planted, rose up: between the Canary Islands and Cape Verde. Below, the clear sea, the immense sea, the blue patch no bigger than the palm of a hand, but crossed by the black degree lines, which represented days and days. There were so many more days left until each one reached its destination!… And dominated by concerns about speed, they criticized the ship’s progress, accusing the Company of avariciousness in spending coal, arguing over the number of miles the ship should travel, and placing bets on the next day’s voyage. Upon entering the dining room, Maltrana was greeted by his tablemates with malicious winks. Old Dr. Rubau, always dressed in black, seemed to pity, with a weary expression, the false illusions. of life. “Ah, youth, youth!” They had kept him from sleeping peacefully for most of the night. They had also knocked on his cabin, going through the wrong door, to propose something monstrous through the keyhole , which he failed to understand in the clumsiness of his interrupted sleep. Munster concealed his anger with a smile of resignation. He had given up bridge the night before for lack of companions, forcibly taking refuge in poker, and just when, after losing a hundred marks, he was beginning to recover his money, an invasion of a troop of lunatics expelled him from the café like the other “serious people.” “And you, Mr. Maltrana, are not a child, and you should leave these exploits, unbecoming of your age, to the boys. ” The jeweler, dully irritated by his white head and wrinkles, liked to age others, believing himself to be rejuvenated in this way, and so he insisted on increasing Isidro’s years, ignoring his protests. Little by little, all the young men who had been hidden in their cabins until then entered the dining room . Some moved forward quickly, pretending to be preoccupied with some important thought. Others defied curiosity, arrogantly flaunting the abrasions the hairdresser had barely concealed with rice powder. The Americans opened champagne at lunch and shouted the same things they had the night before, impervious to fatigue and the sloshing of liquids. At the family tables, mothers welcomed their children with stern eyes and tightly pressed lips; but the former got by by greeting “their parents” with an indifferent air, as if they had seen them moments before. After lunch, Fernando met Mrs. Power on the conservatory steps, and together they went to sit in the place she usually occupied with the Spanish couple. Ojeda, after being introduced to the Lowes, remained there as if he were among the family. “The Yankees have already cornered him,” Maltrana thought. “Now the lady shows him a fan and invites him to write on it… She wants verses; perhaps love verses. Let’s leave our friend Ojeda to follow his destiny.” And when he was hesitating between occupying a free table or going to the smoking room in search of his Spanish merchant friends, he found himself called by Dr. Zurita, who, sprawled in an armchair, showed him a piece of paper. “Hey, Maltrana, come here. Have you seen how funny these gringos are?” He showed him the list of the organizing committee for the Ecuadorian festivals, which had been formed an hour earlier under the butler’s instructions. An opportunity for him to sell at a good price, as prizes, all the junk he had foresightedly acquired in Hamburg. “Look, man, at the honorary presidents. What an abundance! They were Dr. Zurita, the bishop, the French abbot, the Italian lecturer, and Ojeda. And what titles! The bishop was His Greatness, Zurita His Excellency, and Ojeda, because he was something, appeared with the title of doctor. ” “How funny these gringos!” Zurita laughed with a mixture of democratic mockery and childish satisfaction. ” Look, Maltrana: I was a minister, you know… a provincial minister, back in my youth, when I was mixed up in the hustle and bustle of politics. Besides, I’ve been a national deputy. Now I don’t interfere in anything; just my business, now I can live quietly. But maybe that’s why they call me Your Excellency. What the hell are these Germans! They find out everything… Well, sir,” he said. This is going to cost me a few more pounds. And he laughed again, contemplating with a look somewhere between irony and love “that mischief of the gringos” so fond of categories and honors. Maltrana, in his restless mobility, left the winter garden to go to the café. Around a table he saw his three compatriots sitting, the serious and honest merchants who gave him good advice. “I greet your respectable social signatures,” he said, taking a seat next to them.
But since he was interrupting an interesting conversation, he only merited several Grunts in greeting. Speaking was Mr. Goycochea, a light-eyed, muscular, short Basque with a gray head and a mustache and chin dyed blond with a certain carelessness that left the white of his hair roots visible. Maltrana considered him the richest of the three. It was enough to see the respect of his companions, who fell silent as soon as he coughed, indicating his desire to speak. Aside from the prestige he owed to his fortune, he enjoyed a certain social consideration among his friends for his marriage and his lifestyle. His wife was an imposing lady, with a triple chin and gold glasses, who , before settling into the promenade deck, would have her maid find her proper seat, an armchair bought in Paris, the only one on board that could accommodate the breadth of her respectable motherhood. Born in Argentina, her origins and surname seemed to radiate a halo of glory over her offspring, erasing the insignificance of her paternal origins. The family lived in Paris, and every two or three years returned to America so the leader could closely monitor the progress of their business. They lived in their own small hotel near the Champs-Élysées and owned two estancias in the province of Buenos Aires, in addition to the large commercial house in the capital, run by a former clerk who had become a partner. An important figure, this Basque… The lady inspired respect in her husband’s two compatriots, always holding her head high, sparing with her words, calling Goycochea by his last name, as if he were a visiting friend, looking at everything insolently with her nearsighted eyes. The three girls spoke English and German and were escorted by a red-faced, freckled governess who regarded the gentleman’s friends with as much disdain as the lady did the gentleman. Of the entire family, locked in their triumphant haughtiness, he was the only one who was communicative and straightforward in character… when his family were not present. “I was nineteen years old then,” Goycochea continued after Maltrana interrupted, “and I went on foot with another boy from my town to Bayonne, where we took passage on a French brig. We lacked papers to embark in Spain: we were afraid of the fifth… A voyage of sixty-five days. And to think that now we complain if the steamer is a couple of hours late! I came on a frigate from Barcelona loaded with wine, forty years ago, and it took us two and a half months on the voyage,” said Montaner, the resident of Montevideo. “They brought me on a schooner from Cadiz with a cargo of salt,” declared Manzanares, an old friend of Goycochea. “I don’t know how long we were stuck in the line because of the damned calms.” And what food!… I was the one who got off the best, since, being a boy, I helped out in the kitchen and could scrape up the leftovers from the cauldrons… And now, gentlemen, we have the pleasure of coming here. We have known the hard times; we have worked hard for our money. Not like others, who arrive with all kinds of comforts and suddenly want to make a fortune, as if fortune were there, waiting for them on the dock. And she looked at Maltrana with sudden resentment, as if irritated to see him surrounded by the luxuries of a great ocean liner, while they, rich men, had gone to America suffering from hunger on sailing ships. A grumpy gentleman, such as Manzanares, of skeletal thinness and a gray mustache drooping over his protruding jaws. His cloudy eyes only grew animated with flashes of rage. A stomach ailment soured his temper even more and made him undertake frequent trips to Europe, always in search of new healing waters. He was a scholar of specific medicines and pharmacy catalogs: he knew all the remedies, and always had one, the latest released, that earned him hyperbolic praise, while at the same time overwhelming with his verbal ferocity the “thieves” who invented the others. This chronic patient ate with a pantagruelian voracity, and to overcome his indigestion, he walked around the ship at all hours, extolling the advantages of travel. Only in the café was he seen. He would sit down; the rest of the day he spent wandering around the deck; and when the crush of people made his tenacious wandering difficult, he would wander below through the cabin corridors. When he met Maltrana, he invariably greeted him with the same offer: “I invite you to take a walk…” “Thank you very much,” he would reply; “it’s the only thing you offer.” Isidro felt an irresistible hostility toward this gentleman. He was the one who offended him the most whenever he tried to give him good advice. “You journalists, you’re half-mad…” “You, who won’t do anything in America because you’re a writer…” Manzanares admired brutality as the greatest of faculties, and he praised a ruler when he threatened to persecute “the popular rabble.” “You don’t play with him,” he would say enthusiastically; He has a firm hand… He hits hard… And he demanded the immediate execution on both sides of the ocean of all those who write in the papers, an occupation that only serves to make the workers demand shorter hours and a higher wage. “When I paid my passage,” Goycochea continued, “I had nothing left, absolutely nothing, not two reales. What good would that money have been to me on that ship!… The food was little and terrible; the biscuit had worms in it and had to be swallowed without looking at it; at first, some scraps of bacon swam in the mess; later, plain beans. I had no other luggage than two shirts and a pair of pants, besides what I was wearing; A new pair of blue trousers with many buttons: the only garment my mother could make me… I can still see them!… And at the same time that Goycochea seemed to imaginatively admire with the tenderness of memory these trousers, the sole luxury of his poverty, he contemplated in one of his hands the sparkle of a brilliant, limpid and trembling stone like a drop of light. “I had a great friend on the ship, a boy from Aragon, a bedmate and steward, clever, very clever, and yet he couldn’t read… Poor thing! He died two years ago, after having made a good fortune and raising the family properly. One of his sons is a doctor and teaches at the university. I’ve read his name many times in Paris, when I take a walk to the Avenue de l’Opéra and glance at the Argentine newspapers in the Banco Español. I think he’s a deputy or is going to be one: perhaps one day we’ll see him as a minister…” His father seemed stupid because he wasn’t educated, but he kept something in his head. We slept under the same canvas, at the foot of the mainmast; we helped each other wash our clothes ; we were like brothers… And one day, he fell in love with my trousers. “I’ll buy them from you… I’ll give you three pesetas for them…” And we haggled from Cape Verde to the River Plate. The millionaire smiled at the memory of his stubbornness. “He was from Aragon, a real Baturro, imagine! But I’m Basque.” “I’ll give you three and a quarter… I’ll give you three and a real… Three and a half…” Friends intervened in the sale of the trousers. From bow to stern, experts mediated, examining the stitching of the garment, the solidity of the buttons, the durability of the fabric. And with the praise of the intelligent, my friend’s desires grew. “Remoño, don’t be so stubborn!… Give it to me for four, that’s what it’s worth.” He wanted to look nice when he went ashore; He was talking about a girl from his town who was serving in Buenos Aires… As we entered the River Plate, he was almost crying with rage. “I’ll go up to five. Look, Aragonese, I don’t have any more.” And the deal was sealed for one duro, a “napoleon,” as they said back then, the only money I arrived with in Buenos Aires. And thank goodness I had brought it in!… You remember how people disembarked in those days. There was no dock; from the ship to a launch, and from the launch to a cart sunk in the water up to its axle, which dragged you to the shore. It took me fourteen reales to disembark, and I entered Buenos Aires with a peseta and a half and a pair of old trousers that even a poor man wouldn’t have wanted… Then many years went by without my friend and I seeing each other. One day we met at a meeting patriotic message of Spanish merchants. Goycochea grew sad remembering his companion. “When he passed by my shop on business, he would come in to greet me. He had a way of announcing himself: a club on the counter. ‘Who’s here?’ And as I left the desk, the same question: ‘How are you, Maño? How are you doing, Maña and your puppies?…’ The last time I saw him was before I retired to Paris. We were both on the Board of Directors of a bank. Don Mateo would arrive leaning on his cane, limping one leg because of his rheumatism. The bank’s employees and waiters adored him, even though at the slightest anger he would call them ‘mangy’ and raise his club. But at the Board of Directors, he always demanded a raise for them and cuts in the furniture. He got irritated with the directors’ armchairs, the board tables, the electric lamps. He said they were marksmanship unworthy of men. He was well off and didn’t need these things in his house. It was better to distribute the money to those who opened the doors: scamps loaded with children. He felt like dying. “Maño, things are going badly; soon, we’ll be off to the pigsty.” But he quickly consoled himself. “The truth is, Maño, we’ve made progress. We’ve educated our little families, we’ve left them a crust of bread, and we can go in peace. Who would have told us on the ship that we ‘d find ourselves here! Do you remember the pants? Do you remember the duro you got out of me, Basque with a bun?…” And I saw him no more. Manzanares, who had listened to his friend’s story with class pride, then looked at Maltrana. “Learn, young man. There are men of merit in the world even if they haven’t written down their papers. There’s the example of Don Antonio Goycochea. He entered Buenos Aires with a peseta and a half, and today he has eight million pesos… maybe ten… maybe twelve.” Goycochea interrupted him modestly. A middling income, nothing more: a decent situation for the family. “The house is indeed strong: the firm of Goycochea and Mazpule has some credit . We turn over about twenty million a year. But they owe us a lot… There are so many bankruptcies! ” And the three of them burst into exclamations, raising their gaze to the ceiling to express the risks and adventures of commerce in America, only offset by the enormous profits, far greater than those in the Old World. Maltrana felt humiliated by the isolation in which those gentlemen left him. Heated by the commonality of their interests, they didn’t see him; they had forgotten about him. He was a layman who dared to interfere in the Freemasonry of the business. He wanted to stand up, but stopped when he noticed that Manzanares felt compelled to speak of his efforts as well. Commercial life had begun in the Argentine desert, when the Indians occupied the territories now crossed by the railroad, and the “malón,” with its trail of looting, arson, and kidnapping, devastated the small encampments, now transformed into important cities. The white centaur of the plains, with his poncho, knife, and large spurs, was as dangerous as the copper-colored rider with a long lance. Manzanares had been a clerk in an isolated tavern, serving glasses of beer through a strong grille that protected the counter from the greedy hands and knife-wielding customers. Perhaps women, children, and herds ran past with the speed of terror, followed by the men, who were preparing their weapons and anxiously gazing at the horizon. Shortly afterward, a cloud of dust appeared in the far reaches of the Pampas. Inside it, the warriors of the indigenous horde rode bareback in an insolent advance on the centers of pastoral civilization boldly nestled in the desert. They were copper-colored demons, with straight , oily manes held in place by a ribbon, eager to increase the fortune of animals and slaves kept in their tents with new cows and white females. The establishment was closed like a fortress, and the owner and his employees armed themselves with blunderbusses and old rifles stored underneath. from the counter as professional tools. This garrison was joined by the patrons of the nearby ranches, who ran to take refuge with their families in the tavern, the only brick building for many leagues around. With them entered the crews of the carts, surprised by the raid on its slow, creaking march, which lasted for weeks and weeks. Sometimes the coppery waterspout passed by, attracted by cattle from distant ranches; other times it laid siege to the warehouse, coveting barrels of sugarcane more than money. The horde swarmed around the tavern, shooting bolts of lead through its barricaded openings. The assailants, crawling along, tried to set fire to its doors. During their rest periods, they killed mares stolen nearby and drank their blood amid the shouts of a ferocious drunkenness. And this situation lasted for days and days, until news reached the forts and another troop appeared on the horizon, composed of horsemen in old uniforms, worse armed and mounted than the swarm of Indians, who fled only out of boredom, eager to save their loot. And so Manzanares had gathered his first few hundred pesos, enduring blows and dodging the knives of drunken patrons, more fearsome than the Indians. Upon returning to Buenos Aires, through one of those professional detours so common in new lands, the servant of sugarcane cups and pieces of charqui had entered a luxury clothing store. His employer sent him on trips throughout the country, and thus, traveling by stagecoach, he had experienced robberies on the roads, sometimes by bands of Indians, other times by “montoneras” of guerrillas who robbed people in the name of a provincial leader or a political party. The nation was then seething with civil unrest before finally crystallizing. He had slept outdoors, with no bed other than his horse’s “recado,” in the cold of the southern lands, or surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes in the northern fields. He had often helped, with his traveling companions, pull the stagecoach stuck in a mud puddle they called a highway. On other occasions, he had been caught in a flood of waters, drowning the draft animals. “I believe, gentlemen, that then I caught this stomach ailment for the rest of my life, which will finish me off…” I ended up settling down, and I have my warehouse on Alsina Street, you know where; one of the best wholesale warehouses for fine women’s clothing; and I have clients throughout the Republic and three hundred girls working in the workshops. We don’t make what you do, friend Goycochea: six million a year, no more, but linen is an item that earns more than others.” I go to Europe frequently, visiting our suppliers in Hamburg, Milan, and Paris, learning about the latest developments, and every five or six years I pop into Spain and live in my village for a few days. The priest gets a few pesetas from me under the pretext of church repairs; the mayor asks me for money for the school, for the washhouse, for a road; the bagpipers stay up all night in front of the house, playing and playing, waiting for the cider. The nieces, of whom I don’t know how many, always have a little boy ready to unleash upon the world when I arrive, and they want their uncle from America to be his godfather. They all seem delighted that my wife hasn’t had any children. When I was there last time, the mayor was talking about naming a street after me and a tombstone on the shack where I was born… I don’t hold your position, Mr. Goycochea, but I’ve made mine and it’s cost me as much to work for it as you have. I can retire whenever I want; For the children I have to support!… But I have a law for my establishment, which started out as a pittance and now occupies a quarter of a block. In addition, I have a partner who does all the work: a former clerk to whom I gave a stake. You already know the firm: Manzanares and Mendizábal. The lack of children seemed to sour his success, placing him in a resentful mood. inferiority to the prolific Basque. But as compensation, he praised his wife, a courageous companion in his early years of poverty and thrift. She could not be compared to Mrs. Goycochea, whom he viewed as a great lady of imposing majesty—another cause for envious resentment. She was a girl of the land, who had governed the house with fierce economy, ensuring that each employee ate only what was strictly necessary to stay afloat, without overindulging that was detrimental to one’s health. Her habit of thrift persisted even though she lived in a state of plentiful wealth, with a fondness for mingling her rolled-up sleeves with the most menial tasks of the house. And Manzanares, who had “seen the world” and every year on his trip to Paris would see Montmartre at night, because “a man must see everything,” was beginning to believe that this companion wasn’t on the level of his commercial triumphs, and for this reason he had to refrain from showing her off—as Goycochea boasted of his— fearing certain slips of the tongue. But an old feeling of gratitude and his own aesthetic tastes made him burst into praise for her physical personality. Besides being very good-looking, she still looks like a real young woman . “She’s somewhat similar to your wife , friend Goycochea. Mine weighs 100 kilos. And yours? ” Goycochea made a sad gesture. She had weighed a little more, but in Paris she had gone on a diet. Slimness was now in fashion. “Mine weighs 106 kilos,” declared Montaner, the merchant from Montevideo. “Good!” Manzanares stated with authority. It must be good! This skeletal man admired with concentrated, almost religious enthusiasm the overflowing feminine exuberance as a sign of health, good honor, and domestic virtues… But Montaner, who considered himself humiliated by the silence his companions left him with, interrupted Manzanares. He too “had done his part.” The Eastern Republic was less amenable to the fluctuations of fortune and rapid triumphs than Argentina. Money advanced more slowly, and perhaps for this reason, it was more solidly built: people thought of retaining rather than acquiring. He couldn’t talk millions like his companions, but he was doing well, and when he died, his children, if they weren’t ungrateful, would remember that “the old man” had worked… “That is a great country, smaller than Argentina, but rich, very rich.” It’s a pity it’s the land of revolutions!… The Uruguayan is good, chivalrous, fond of things of thought, but too brave, too handsome, convinced that he’s failing in his duty if he goes a few years without going out into the countryside to kill himself. We’re all “white” or “red” there; and I don’t know what the hell is in the air, that those who arrive, wherever they’re from, barely learn to speak and take sides for one or the other. I myself, gentlemen, am “white,” whiter than paper, whiter… than milk; and my children are too. Two of them went to the countryside with me during the last revolution. And if you ask me what this “white” thing means, I’ll tell you that after so many years I’m still not fully informed… Perhaps I was made “white” by force. And he recounted his arrival in Montevideo, forty years earlier, with no more fortune than a letter of introduction for a Catalan living in the interior. The country was in revolt, but the city presented its normal appearance. People approached each other in the street, smiling: “What’s the news of the revolution?” It was as if they were talking about the rain or the good weather. And Montaner left in a stagecoach, the only passenger, for the town where his compatriot was. A few hours later, some men on horseback, armed with lances and wearing red scarves around their necks, surrounded the stagecoach. It was a patrol of “colorados.” The leader spoke to the foreman. “What have you got there?” And upon learning that it had no other passenger than a poor Spanish boy, some of the riders leaned their heads out the windows. “Ah, little Galician; “White shit! Let your hair grow so we can cut your head better when you grow up!” They said it laughingly; but I, who was only thirteen, curled up in a corner and wanted to get under the seat. They left, and two hours later, near a ranch, we met another group of horsemen, also with lances, and with those baggy caragüelles that look like petticoats tucked into their boots; but these ones wore white handkerchiefs around their necks. And the same question: “What are you carrying there?” And when they learned I was Spanish, they smiled at the door as if they had known me all my life. “Get out, young man, get out and rest, you’re among friends. Have a glass of caña…” From then on, I had no doubt: I knew what I was meant to be in that land: white, always white. Now, the years have brought a certain confusion, and people of all origins figure on both sides. But in my time, the gringos were all “red,” and the Galicians and Basques “white,” perhaps because many Spaniards from the First Carlist War had fought in their ranks… The blood that has been shed! The battles without quarter, in which no prisoners were admitted!… I have seen dozens of men slaughtered like sheep.” Montaner remained silent, as if haunted by his memories. “Things have changed now,” he added. “The old squadrons with lances are armies equipped with artillery; prisoners are respected, war is waged with more “civilization”; but the war continues, and people kill each other, I think, just to pass the time… The country has grown accustomed to this life, and it develops and progresses despite the revolutions. It’s like some sick people, who end up coming to terms with their illness and live with it quite happily.” But to the one who is closely affected by the consequences of these struggles!… He spoke with resignation of the setbacks in his fortune due to the wars. “Whites” and “Colorados,” in their raids, had eaten up the best animals on his ranch. Many went to war for the pleasure of commanding, saber in hand, as if they were owners, on the same lands where they worked as laborers in times of peace, for the lordly pleasure of killing a steer and eating its tongue, abandoning the rest to the crows. He had spent many years building a herd of fine horses on his ranch, with expensive breeding stock acquired in Europe. When he rested, satisfied with his work, one of many revolutions would break out, and a group of supporters would bivouac on his lands, exchanging the exhausted horses from the band for the best specimens from the herd. And the purebred animals would die in the war or be abandoned on the roads, just as if they were rustic beasts of little value. “In short, a few hundred thousand pesos lost in a few hours,” he said sadly. “Many are enthusiastic about the exploits of both sides, and see in them a continuation of Spanish valor. ‘It’s the heritage of Spain,’ say ‘whites’ and ‘reds’ to justify their felt need for revolutions and coups. And I say to myself: ‘Sir, other American republics are also descended from Spaniards, and they live without considering a revolution every two years necessary…’ Have you noticed that in the America of Spanish origin, all the bad things are always ‘things of Spain!’ and it rarely occurs to them to attribute any of the good things to the poor old woman?” “That’s right,” Maltrana interrupted. ” I have met Americans of Spanish origin in Paris from all heights and latitudes, and except for a minority who have studied, they all think identically; as if this way of thinking was instilled in them in elementary school. Spain is to blame for all their defects, responsible for all their faults.” She is the author of her revolutions; of the laziness typical of hot climates ; of the drunkenness that cold climates incite; of the excessive fondness for gambling in people who have never enjoyed the pleasure of reading; of the improvidence and lack of thrift in countries accustomed to Abundance. Some even rebuke her because their republic has few railroads… The three listeners nodded, suddenly reconciled with him. These men of the pen! How pleasant they were when they weren’t meddling in business! –On the other hand,–he continued,–if they praise a good quality of their race, they attribute it to the Indians, and those who say so are grandchildren or great-grandchildren by father and mother of Galicians and Basques who arrived in America at the end of the 18th century… And if the Indians aren’t the authors of the good, they attribute the miracle to the “Latin race,” which is nothing more than a historical fiction. The “Spanish race,” something positive whose reality everyone perceives in the language and customs as soon as they set foot in America, only exists and deserves to be remembered when it’s necessary to anathematize the bad of the past. The glory goes to the “Latin race,” which no one knows what it is or what it consists of. I know of a Latin civilization; but a Latin race? Where is he outside of Italy?… Anyway, gentlemen, there’s no need to get irritated. Perhaps these injustices are nothing more than an instinctive manifestation of old affection… misguided, of filial love turned inside out. Isidro interrupted himself, jumping from his seat when he saw the white cap of the ship’s doctor pass by the windows. The bruise on his temple made him suddenly remember, with a painful stinging, his intention to consult him. He left the café, bidding farewell to his compatriots with a quick nod, and caught up with the doctor to show him the livid bump. The German laughed kindly upon examining him. Had he also gotten his share of the evening’s revelry? He had treated some passengers who had remained invisible in their cabins. Maltrana’s case was insignificant. After tea, she was waiting for him in the pharmacy. Left alone, he approached the winter garden, peering inside through one of the windows. Everyone remained in the same seats: Ojeda with Mrs. Power and the Lowe couple; Dr. Zurita talking with two of his compatriots about “the country’s affairs.” Nélida’s father smiled through his patriarchal beard, explaining things to a group of friends with insinuating, gentle gestures. Perhaps he was outlining the great business deals that awaited him in Buenos Aires, and of which he wanted to generously share with the others. Some passengers were leaving, their eyes squinting from the excessive light, in search of their cabins for a siesta. Maltrana was attracted by the wasp-like murmur that buzzed under the large awning of the midships, between the central deck and the bow. Through the gaps in the canvas, people could be seen lying on their bellies, dozing with their heads in their arms; women mending old clothes; children chasing each other. In the distance, a sweetly muffled bagpipe sounded, resembling a pastoral lament that lamented the melancholy of their exile far from the green pastures. “Let’s pay a visit to our friends, the Latins.” He went out onto the bow esplanade through a corridor on the lower deck. When he opened the gate, he had to push aside a group of emigrants who were crowded against the ironwork. They were young people, boys who were attracted to this obstacle, a visible symbol of class separation. They spent much of the day glued to it, exploring the long, red-carpeted corridor, with its long intervals of shadow and whitish patches of electric light. The doors of the first-class cabins opened on both sides of this passageway, which seemed endless and magnificent to them , like a boulevard inhabited by millionaires. From there, they spied on the arrivals and departures of the passengers. They followed with admiring gazes the rhythmic march of the ladies emerging from the small dwellings to disappear into a maze of carpeted streets, ascending to the upper floors of the ship, which none of them had managed to see, and from which came rumors of music and parties. Respect for the social hierarchy prompted them to crowd against the railing, as if a higher world could be glimpsed through it, maintaining an envious silence every time a lady passed by them without look at them. When the needs of service forced the blond waitresses in clean aprons and white caps to pass by this barrier, the contemplative waiters seemed to despair, and a murmur of mumbled words and stifled whinnying shook their bodies. A German nanny frequently appeared near the gate, looking after a white-haired, big-headed little boy, who was playing on all fours on the carpet with a stuffed bear. Upon seeing her, the boys smiled with sudden confidence. She was from their same social class, and this was enough to loosen their tongues and light up their eyes with the glow of desire. “Beautiful!… So cute!… Come closer, darling, I have something to tell you!” “Oh, my darling, so beautiful!” Each young man used his own language to express his enthusiasm. Some tanned, nervously thin Arabs remained silent, but thrust their necks forward like racehorses, their glowing, flaming eyes flashing with a murderous gleam, their teeth eager to bite. The fraulein, straw-blond, plump, white, and taut, smiled naively, keeping her distance from the gate, through whose bars the wild beasts groped. But this did not decide to flee, preferring to the upper walkways, open to the air and light, the permanence in this half-dark corridor, where she received the trembling and exacerbated homage of virile desire. Her gray eyes and her face, a tender whiteness like a meringue, welcomed with visible complacency these words of brutal homage in languages she could not understand. Some of the young men, who were Spanish, treated Maltrana with respectful familiarity, for he believed himself to be “the most popular man on the ship.” “Don Isidro, bring us that fine young woman here… You sly girl!… Horny girl!” Others, who had lived in Argentina, joined in this chorus of enthusiasm, murmuring rapturously: “Beautiful! Beautiful! ” A Neapolitan humbly begged Maltrana, as if he were the owner of the ship: “Sir, let’s throw her out!… Order her to be thrown out!” Isidro closed the gate again and advanced among the young men. “Order, boys!… Order and formality. Let’s see if one of those big Germans comes and gives you a couple of thrashings for being scoundrels.” The enraged beasts once again crowded around the gate, while the naive fraulein turned her back on them and knelt on the carpet to play with the little one, displaying the whiteness of her stockings, full of firm flesh, the sinful curve of her skirt, puffed out by hidden spherical shapes. Maltrana’s advance produced among the emigrants a movement of sympathetic curiosity and obsequious greetings: something similar to what the entrance of a political orator awakens at a popular gathering. “Don Isidro, good afternoon… Come this way, Don Isidro.” And all eyes, even those of the “Latinos” from Asia, who couldn’t understand him, caressed him with the gentleness of gratitude. That was a man! A rich man who liked to mingle with the poor; Unlike the other gentlemen, who only appeared on the balconies of the bridges to cast a pitying glance, fleeing as soon as a few heads turned toward them, as if they didn’t want to grant them even the pleasure of curiosity. Some women were mending their clothes; others, slack-legged in their dirty dressing gowns and sprawled on poor canvas armchairs, clutched the high backrests with their hands. Some complained of pain in the arm that had been vaccinated. The Arabs huddled in the hatches’ bowels, staring out at the sea with thoughtful expressions… without thinking about anything. A group of men were playing cards. Several Italians, with loud hand movements and shouts, as if commanding a military army, were training other Spaniards in the game of _la morra_. Off-duty stokers , blond lads dressed in white, stood upright in the middle of this crowd, looking from afar, shy and smiling at certain dark-haired beauties, as if hoping to make themselves understood by their silent immobility. In the background, next to the foredeck, the invisible bagpipe continued to play its pastoral lilt. A woman came out to meet Don Isidro, greeting him familiarly. She was tall and fat, with a broad face shaded with a reddish patina. The great abundance of short dresses and skirts made her size even more imposing . She had a certain air of determination and always looked straight ahead, accompanying her words with an authoritative movement of her arms, like a woman accustomed to being the first in her house. “You’re from Astorga, aren’t you?” said Maltrana, who was trying to remember the names and origins of everyone on the ship. “Wait… You’re Señá Eufrasia. ” “Exactly,” said the woman, satisfied and proud of that personage’s good memory . “I am Ufrasia, and this is my husband.” And she pointed to a man sitting near her, also a large man, his abdomen held in place by the complicated twists of a black sash. His full face, with drooping cheeks, appeared majestic, like a prelate’s, from under the brim of his large hat. Señá Eufrasia, a tireless verbosity in her forties, spoke with a protective air about her traveling companions. Her compatriots, “those from the land,” inspired pity in her. “You poor fellows! We have people here in great need, Don Isidro. Look how those women carry their children… We, although it’s wrong for me to say so, aren’t going to the Americas because of hunger. We had a good life back in the village; but no one is bitter about going up there, and this one, pointing to her husband, said to me one day: “Ufrasia, why don’t we go and see that Buenos Aires they talk so much about?” And since we don’t have children, I said: “Come on, let’s go!” And he sold the four clods of land and the house, and, thank God, we’re taking something with us, just in case we don’t like it here and want to go back. This way, on the ship we can live a better life than the others and sleep apart, and buy whatever we want at the bar, and even make a fortune, so you’ll believe there are people coming here who are in dire need of help. And off we go, Don Isidro!… They say that Buenos Aires is very beautiful, and that you only have to bend down in the streets to find an ounce of gold. He said this with a smile, but through his disbelief one could see a certain respect for the distant and mysterious city, the city of wonders and treasures the emigrants talked about constantly. Her husband shook his head authoritatively, and his eyes seemed to say to her: “Woman, you’re tiring the gentleman… You women don’t understand a thing.” “You know so many things, Don Isidro,” Eufrasia continued, “this man and I had a disagreement this morning. He says that in Buenos Aires there is no gold or silver coin, nor anything except little pieces of paper with figures, like prints, with which everything can be bought… And that can’t be, ca n’t it, Don Isidro? Such rich land and no money!… Come on, it can’t be. ” “Well, that’s how it is, Miss Eufrasia,” said Maltrana. And the husband, awakened by this extraordinary triumph over his ever-dominating wife, said solemnly: “You see, woman! You women don’t know a thing about anything, and you want to get involved in everything. ” But Eufrasia, paying no attention to her husband, lowered her head as if to better follow the course of his thoughts. “So there are no pesetas… or duros… or even large perras?” Bad; I don’t like that.” Maybe he’s right, and women don’t know anything about anything; but I say I don’t like this. Money is always money, and papers, papers. And after this indisputable statement, she sighed resignedly. “Well, we’ll see how it turns out, and if we don’t like it, the door is open to us… The others are worse off, they’re going as blindly as we are and are forced to stay there, since they don’t have the chance to turn around.” She praised the poor people occupying the prow. The “Moors,” as she called the Syrians, were good fellows, and her companions poor women who inspired pity. The Italians deserved no less sympathy in her, for they accepted a certain superiority in her, seeing her spend and live better than the others, and they called her “senora.” Her ill-fated affections, that of an infertile woman, went toward all the children of various nationalities who lived near her, treating them with manly harshness of speech while caring for and caressing them. “Where are you going, stubborn one?” she shouted, stopping a little boy who was running around being chased by others. “Look, Don Isidro, how handsome! Baby Jesus looks. His mother is an Italian with eight children, and she’s in bad shape, lying in corners, unable to care for them. If it weren’t for me! Ah, thief! You’ve already got another seven in the pants I mended you yesterday. What have you done with the fat bitch?” Did you buy more candy at the bar?… But look here, Don Isidro, how dirty and how beautiful! Dirty!… Swine!… Ham!… Ham! Let him bite those milk-pig snouts of yours. And holding him up in his powerful arms, he kissed him, pressed him against his enormous breast, while the child defended himself against this avalanche of caresses and unintelligible words, shouting: “Mama… mama” and stamping his feet on the abdomen that served as a support. The husband, motionless in his seat, looked at Maltrana as if begging forgiveness for these noisy expansions. “I would steal him!” cried Mrs. Eufrasia. “If I wanted to, we would take him as our own… I would take all the children I see.” The voices of the big woman made other distant groups turn their heads , and some men broke away from them upon recognizing Don Isidro. They approached him, waiting for the cigarettes he used to accompany his appearances, and little by little they led him toward the forecastle. A burly man stood up from the ground, extending his hand with that protective air of certain jaques who speak and act as if they were sparing the life of the listener. “Bless you, Don Isidro,” he said with an Andalusian accent. “We were a little surprised not to see you here this afternoon.” He sat down again among a group of young Spaniards, some wearing berets, others with wide-brimmed hats, who listened to him, smiling admiringly. He was from Malaga, he said, and it took only a brief conversation with him to learn his name, place of birth, and nickname from the first words. All his statements, even the most insignificant, were signed with the same declaration: “And this is delivered to you by your faithful servant Antonio Díaz, a native of Málaga, also known as Señor Antonio el Morenito.” And he accompanied this verbal signature with a look of superiority and commiseration that seemed to say: “Whoever maintains otherwise, I’ll cut his throat.” El Morenito, who was already over forty, felt a certain respect for Don Isidro, “a gentleman as God intended, and not like those other fantasists who shied away from associating with the poor.” Spurred by this sympathy, he had come to consider Maltrana a man of great courage, almost as courageous as himself, and every time he thought about the possibility of doing something foolish to take revenge on the ship’s crew or the proud passengers, he would state his argument in the same way: “Between Don Isidro and me…” And Don Isidro listened and approved these destructive plans with a smile, flattered deep down that this beast considered him worthy of its collaboration. He terrified many of the emigrants with his threats and outbursts of temper. Others admired him for the insolence with which he loudly protested the quality of the food and all the ship’s services, daring to insult the officers, who couldn’t understand him. Despite such bravery, Maltrana noticed in him a certain shrinking tone as he raised his hand to his cap to show a certain feline timidity in his eyes when a superior addressed him. “This guy greets in a bad way,” Isidro thought. “It’s the same fearful and vengeful shrinking tone with which the convicts greet their superiors. ” His dealings with the Arabs on the ship reminded Morenito of the Moors of Morocco, recounting some of his forays along the coasts of Africa. In the mornings, when he washed in the open air, naked from the waist up, one was amazed by the welts and deep scars that dotted his body, reminders, he said, of heroic battles on sea and land against the tyranny of customs. Another reason for respect was knowing that he possessed a large knife, despite the searches the ship’s crew made of dangerous individuals; a knife that no one had seen, but which he frequently mentioned in his boasts. Maltrana, familiar with the customs of the prison, imagined where the bully might keep this weapon, which was like the scepter of his threatening majesty. “Sit down a bit, Don Isidro, and rest… You, give the gentleman a seat …” He was proposing a business to these boys; a sure way to get rich. From his canvas armchair, Maltrana saw all the admirers of Morenito huddled around him, jaws in their hands, like a tribe of warriors in council. The man from Malaga spoke with his mouth twisted, words spilling out of one corner of his mouth to impress upon the audience the full grandeur of his goodness as a teacher. “These lads are pigeons, Don Isidro, going to America to ravage and make others rich… just like in their own country. But come here, crawl, you puppets! Is that what you’ve come here for? Look, Don Isidro: some of them think they’re going to the countryside to work hard; others want to become servants in a big house… And I propose to these good people that we organize a partía: a partía like the ones we had before. You’ll never have seen that before; it’s something new.” “What’s up?” He explained his plan enthusiastically. “One way, we grab some rich guy from there and kidnap him; we ask the family for a few million, threatening to cut off his ears; they give us the millions, we divide them like good brothers, and within six months we’ll be rich and free. A way that would have a lot to do with it. You, Don Isidro, would be the captain. ” Maltrana bowed his thanks, excusing himself with a gesture of modesty. “No; the little guy doesn’t bother us. I know you’ve got your stuff pretty well put together… and believe me, I understand these things. Besides, you’ve got talent for everything, and I’m a man who respects wisdom… The Morenito, Antonio Díaz, a servant, would be the lieutenant; all these lads would be smart enough with such good managers. Eh? What’s up? Isn’t this a real business?” Isidro nodded with imperturbable gravity. Yes; a good business worth studying carefully; the exploitation of a new industry. One would almost have to apply for a patent for the invention, to avoid imitations. And the credulous boys, who listened to Morenito in silence because they were at sea, far from any possibility of action, but inwardly abhorred these plans that conflicted with their concerns for integrity, looked uncertain when they saw that a gentleman like Don Isidro wasn’t scandalized. “Do you hear it, you fool?” exclaimed the bully. “Look how a gentleman who knows everything finds my idea a good one… But if you don’t have the guts to get money from a rich man, we can join forces to chase the Indians. There are many there, many! In America, they attack railroads and stagecoaches and even streetcars on the outskirts of towns; I’ve seen it many times on the sinematographs. And Buenos Aires is in America, and there they need men of determination who can tell those chocolate-colored jerks with feathers in their heads: “All right, that’s it; you two won’t bother the meeting any more, because we don’t feel like it.” And we hunt them down like rabbits, and the government, grateful, pays us so much in the head, and in a few years we ‘ll each have a fortune to return to the land. You won’t get rich as quickly as with kidnapping, but it’s a long way, and it’s always better than gutting lumps of earth or serving chocolate in bed to the Gentlemen. Don’t you mind, Don Isidro? And Don Isidro approved again. An idea as good as the previous one; it would also be necessary to request a privilege, so that the government would only allow the killing of Indians during the departure of Señor Antonio el Morenito. He admired the heroic expedients devised by this man to become rich without appealing to the vulgarity of ordinary labor, reserved for other mortals. And so Isidro remained for some time, listening to the plans of the disoriented adventurer who was going to America four centuries late. The alarmed honesty of his listeners formulated timid observations. “But there are prisons over there,” said one. “There are police officers over there. ” “They will be no braver than the Seviles and the Carabineros of our land,” replied el Morenito arrogantly. “I know what that is… Bah! I’ll eat them!” “But the Indians won’t let themselves be beaten just like that,” argued another. They must be brave people… savage people. “Those,” said the bully contemptuously, “I’ll eat them too.” A new listener approached the group, greeting Maltrana with a thin smile, in which there was something of a mockery for the bully. “Here we have Don Juan,” said Isidro. “He’s not in our party: he’s no good for the job. ” “No, sir, he’s not in,” replied the Morenito. “Don Juan, if you take him out of his books, he’s no good for anything… A very fine person, a very fine gentleman, but he’s not going to earn two pesetas in his life.” He was tall and lean, with a long beard that, despite his youth, gave him a venerable appearance. He spoke with a sweet voice and calm gestures, interspersing a discreet laugh between his words, which was the eternal accompaniment of his conversation. According to Maltrana, this friend exuded optimism and confidence in life, spreading an atmosphere of contentment around him . And yet, he lived in the steerage, mingling with the immigrant flock, with no consideration other than that granted to him by his fellow travelers, captivated by his sweetness of character and superior education. His suits, old and threadbare, were well-cut; the vestiges of a more prosperous situation were evident on his person. An antique ring, saved from the straits of poverty, remained as a family memento on his fine hands. The curious Maltrana knew something about his life. Juan Castillo was an agronomist who had tried, on the farmland inherited from his parents, to implement all the advances he had learned at a great school in Belgium; the dreams of an agricultural poet realized with the impetus of an enthusiastic and credulous will. Usury had provided him with a small capital for his enterprise, and after struggling for a few years with the peasants’ routine, accustoming them to living peacefully with machines, and extracting liquid veins from the depths of the subsoil to spread them in irrigation networks, just when the land was beginning to respond to these efforts with its first fruits, the creditors had fallen upon him, executing him with icy ferocity. “I know the procedure,” Maltrana had said upon hearing him for the first time. “It’s the same as the cannibalistic tribes. They gave you food, left you alone to rot, and when you were ready , boom! The throat was cut and the cannibalistic banquet began. He was fleeing ruin, losing his parents’ inheritance, losing his credit, dishonored by debts that his creditors considered criminal; all this because he wanted to innovate, in accordance with his studies, a stationary agriculture almost identical to that of the earliest times of humanity. And in his flight he had looked south, like all those who sailed in that steel shell, sensing beyond the daily renewed oceanic circle a land renewing existences, where shattered lives contracted virginally like buds to begin the course of a new evolution. Hope had also touched him with its illusory fluttering. He almost celebrated this ruin that had uprooted him from his paternal land. Who could know what? that awaited him on the other side of the ocean?… Leaving Morenito’s group, Maltrana and Castillo advanced toward the bow. A plaintive voice made them stop. “Don Isidro!… Good afternoon, Don Isidro and company!” A man sitting on the floor, his back against the railing, his pale face poked through the folds of a blanket. “Is that you, sick?” Maltrana asked. “How are you feeling?” In a pained voice, he murmured an interminable complaint to the sea. Since he had entered the ship, his health seemed to have fled from his body. Others sang at all hours, as if the salty air and the vast blue waters gave them new strength, stimulating their appetite. He had embarked feeling strong, and suddenly all his energy abandoned him. “I am very sick, Don Isidro. Yesterday I was still able to climb on deck alone; today some friends had to push me up the stairs.” I must be as white as a sheet, aren’t I, sir? I don’t have the strength to walk, nor any desire to eat. This isn’t going well… The others are complaining about the heat; they say the sun is getting hotter and hotter, and I shiver if I take off my blanket… And what makes me even more angry is that the doctor, Don Carmelo the officer, and others are looking at me as if I’d tricked them, and they say that if they found out about this , they wouldn’t let me board, because they don’t want sick people in Buenos Aires… But sir, I boarded the ship healthy and well! This damned sea doesn’t test me! Thinking he saw Maltrana’s face reflecting the same expression of doubt as the ship’s employees, he hastened to add: “I’ve been a rock, Don Isidro. Rheumatism, nothing more, according to what my town doctor said, from sleeping out in the open in the fields many nights. But other than that… nothing. I swear on my name: Pachín Muiños.” And now, suddenly, I find myself a wreck, and I’m drowning, sir. My legs can’t hold me, and I don’t have the strength to move from one corner to another. I’m so desperate to get out of here!… I’m sure that as soon as I land I’ll be a different person, I’ll feel as strong as I did back in my village… Tell me, sir: when do we arrive in Buenos Aires? He asked the question eagerly; he sat up to look beyond the side of the ship. As he spread his gaze across the immensity, he hoped to find on the horizon the black outline of the longed-for land. “Will it take us two days?” he continued. “More, a little longer,” Maltrana said gently to deceive his impatience. “About how many more?” the sick man continued tenaciously. And sensing from Maltrana’s evasive words that there were still many days of travel left, poor Muiños once again sank into despair… Buenos Aires! He longed to reach the end of the journey as quickly as possible , and he repeated the name of the city, as if he found in it a miraculous power equal to that of the ancient Kabbalistic words. Isidro, after consoling him with deceptive affirmations, assuring him that within a week they would see the longed-for land, retreated with Castillo toward the exit gate. “Hope!” he said sadly. “That poor man is very sick; he lacks the strength to stand, and yet he moves from one hemisphere to another in search of health and money. What dreams he carries in this shell with all of us!… ” “And if he were alone!” Castillo replied. “But he is accompanied by his wife and three children. The hope of health had caused him to uproot himself from his village. Back in Galicia, he couldn’t work a full week without the effort attracting illness. The image of America had passed through his misery like a glimmer of hope. In that land of fortune, where everyone was transformed, he would be a different man.” And having recovered from a few months of rest and relaxation, having sold his shack and some cows, Muiños entered the ship with the deceptive appearance of a healthy man. The atmosphere of the sea and life on board had been fatal for him: each passing day marked a decline in his health. “What he believes to be rheumatism,” Castillo added, “is, according to the ship’s doctor , heart failure, which is beginning to become complicated by a Alarming bronchitis. Who knows what will happen next! His wife and children, accustomed to his illnesses, take no notice of him. She gossips with the other women, and the boys play or impatiently await the time for dinner. And poor Muiños, when he’s suffocating in the steerage, comes up on deck wrapped in his coat to lie down in the sun, and asks how many days until we arrive, when we’re still at the beginning of the voyage… It’s useless to tell him the truth. His excitement, which has focused on Buenos Aires, makes him forget time and distance. He thinks he’s being deceived when they tell him there are still many days to go. When he sighted Tenerife, he excitedly asked if we were already in Buenos Aires. Tomorrow, when he sees the Cape Verde Islands in the distance, he’ll once again believe we’ve arrived… Unhappy man! Of all of us on the ship, he’s the one who thinks most about Buenos Aires, and it could well be that he’s the only one who never sees it. Maltrana said goodbye to Castillo next to the class-dividing fence, an inviolable boundary that divided the floating microcosm into two distinct states. Upstairs, on the promenade deck, he found Fernando standing next to one of the saloon windows that gave light to the interior platform, occupied by the piano. Isidro wanted to speak to him, but his friend placed a finger to his lips, imposing silence. He then looked out the window and saw a woman sitting at the piano. At the same time, he heard muted music and the whisper of a song sung in a half-voice. “It’s from Tristán,” Ojeda murmured softly in his ear. ” Iseo’s desperate lament . ” The two remained silent on either side of the window, listening to the singing that came from within, with dreamlike remoteness. Maltrana, less sensitive to musical emotion, examined this woman from behind, focusing on the nape of her white neck, slightly shaded like antique ivory. The shell of her hair was a tender golden color at the roots , gradually coloring until it took on the reddish hue of scrubbed copper on its surface. Her neck leaned forward with an anemic slenderness, a fragility that highlighted the tendons and arteries beneath the skin , dilated by the faint utterance of her voice. Suddenly, the invisible face turned toward them, as if it had just noticed their presence. They saw eyes whose ash-colored pupils were dilated with surprise; a face of greenish pallor, somewhat emaciated, that instantly colored with a flush. She seemed afraid that someone might hear her. With a gesture of shyness and annoyance, she closed her instrument, stood up, and walked toward the living room door to escape the two importunate players. Ojeda followed her with his eyes. She was tall, and her sickly thinness was partly concealed by the strength of her skeleton. Her hips showed off her bony firmness beneath a light denim skirt. Her hair piled up with graceful carelessness, her slightly worn white shoes, her modest homemade blouse, and her complete lack of jewelry gave her figure an air of courageously endured poverty, of bohemian uncertainty borne with resignation. “You know everyone here,” Ojeda asked, “who is she? ” “You would have known a long time ago if you’d let me talk… She’s the wife of the operetta troupe’s conductor: a pimply-faced blond who spends day and night at the café drinking bocks with his troupe. A good sieve; sometimes the felt roundels pile up on her table like a column… And when she’s not drinking beer, she’ll take whiskey or whatever else falls into place. Her only occupation on the ship is to tip her elbows. ” “She’s an interesting woman,” Ojeda murmured. And so shy!… Every afternoon she waited for the saloon to be deserted. The families went down to their cabins for a siesta; other passengers lay down on the long chairs in the promenade; only a few remained in the winter garden. Then, almost on tiptoe, she went to the piano, and as soon as she placed her fingers on the keyboard, she seemed to forget her shyness. isolating herself from the outside world, with vague, lightless eyes, as if her gaze were focused inwardly and her singing were a faint escape, a distant echo of another music of memories that sounded within her. Seeing her at the piano, Fernando had been curious to know her music. Perhaps a sweet, sentimental operetta romance!… And the surprise he had experienced upon hearing Iseo’s grandiose phrases of grief still lingered in him. “She must have a magnificent voice, don’t you think, Isidro?… I’d like to be her friend… You must know her.” Maltrana excused himself, somewhat annoyed that this time he couldn’t boast of a friendship. He had barely noticed her: damn! The wife of that drunken orchestra conductor!… She was somewhat unsociable; she shied away from people; she barely interacted with the other ladies in the company. She lived for her son, a little boy with an enormous head, always clinging to her hand. He always responded to Maltrana’s greetings with a nod and a clear desire to escape. Besides, she wasn’t much of a woman : she looked ill. The first time he noticed her was because of the teasing of some elegant girls who commented on her greenish pallor: “There goes that operetta girl. Her gall has burst and it’s all over her body.” “But that doesn’t matter, Ojeda; since the lady is interested in Wagnerian singing, I’ll introduce you. I know her husband a little; we’ve had drinks together. His name is Hans… Hans Eichelberger, that’s right; Maestro Hans. And her name is… wait, her name is Mina. I remember now that her husband calls her that, and according to what he told me, it’s a diminutive of Guillermina. The maestro speaks some Spanish: he’s been to Argentina and Chile on other musical adventures. I think she doesn’t speak much.” The two friends advanced toward the stern, stopping at the railing near the cafe, on the third-class deck. The sailors had raised part of the awning, and below them could be seen the bustle of the northern emigration, long-haired people who, despite the heat, kept their fur coats on. The twang of an accordion sounded with the hurried rhythm of a Russian dance. A girl in a short skirt, polonaise boots, and a green scarf, from the tip of which peeked a braid of red hair , twirled to the music. Around her, a young man in a purple shirt danced on his knees or stood in prodigious balance with his legs almost horizontal and his buttocks close to the floor. The shouts and clapping of the other Russians accompanied these agile, mad gymnastic dances. The Polish and Galician Jews, wrapped in their priestly robes, contemplated the spectacle, scratching their long beards and contracting the bushes of their almost joined eyebrows. “The people who come here!” said Fernando. “And to think that it’s the name of an unknown city, the vague prestige of a distant land, that has brought us together, people of such diverse births!” “Twenty-eight towns, according to Don Carmelo from the police station, are coming on the ship; and the same thing happens on other ocean liners. Isn’t it true, Ojeda, that this is similar to the mass advance of the peoples of Europe during the Crusades?” A little while ago, I was remembering, below, the crowds that followed Peter the Hermit. They marched sick, faint from hunger, and every time they sighted a small city they burst into cries of joy: “Jerusalem! It’s Jerusalem!” And they were still in the center of Europe: in Germany or Hungary. Down below, on the prow, you have an heir to those heroes of hope. He’s seriously ill; it’s possible he won’t make it to the end of the voyage, and every time we see an island, a coast, he galvanizes himself and asks if it’s Buenos Aires. “Humanity lives on hope, Maltrana. We need to place our desire far away, in unknown lands, because distance erases doubt and gives certainty to the most unlikely. For Europeans, the place of wonders was Baghdad, the place of _A Thousand and One Nights_; on the other hand, on my travels in the East, I have seen Jews and Muslims suppose Treasures and magic in ancient Toledo. When the poets of the South imagine something prodigious, they set the scene in the fortresses of the Rhine or the Scandinavian fjords. When Wagner dreams of the castle of Monsalvat, he places the mansion of the Holy Grail in the Spanish Pyrenees and gives an Arab palace to Klingsor the Enchanter. The environment that surrounds us is too real for us to cultivate our illusions in it. “That’s right, Fernando. But human hope, which in other times was purely mystical and perhaps for that reason looked to the East, is now positive, focuses its yearnings on material well-being and turns toward the West. We all want to be rich, we need to be, and this hope communicates to distant lands the prestige of illusion. Centuries ago, people of substance went to Peru; yesterday humanity dreamed of the treasures of California, and men of adventure flocked there; today, the radiance that emerges from a new city of hope: Buenos Aires, begins to mingle with the splendor of the United States. Tomorrow,” Ojeda interrupted, “the pilgrims of wealth, twisting their paths, will spill out onto the islands of Oceania, and perhaps the Jerusalem of the future will be thousands of years from now somewhere in the Pacific where sharks are now scuttling and solitary waves swell and deflate. Human desire would place the city of hope on some land lifted from the depths of the waters by a planetary convulsion; perhaps on atolls that madreporic infusoria were petrifying at that moment with slow and patient labor spanning thousands of years… There would never be a lack on the globe of a place that would attract restless and energetic men , dissatisfied with their fate, eager to change their minds. “This pilgrimage will grow larger and larger,” Maltrana said. “We feel the imperative need for money in a way our grandparents did not; and those who come after us will experience it with greater impetus than we did.” I want to be rich: I have no shame in confessing it; it’s the only thing that worries me. I need to know what this wealth thing is, I’ll get it… no matter what. And you, Fernando? He smiled faintly. He also wanted to be rich, and his imperious desire had uprooted him from the old world, launching him into the midst of an adventure, like the wretches who crowded into the barracks of emigration. He needed a great fortune to believe himself happy. And yet… who knows! Wealth isn’t bliss, it never has been; at most, it can be accepted as a means to affirm it… Perhaps even this wasn’t true. He remembered the Wagnerian legend of the Ring of the Nibelung, the miraculous Rhinegold, symbol of world power. Whoever possessed it was lord of the universe, absolute owner of all riches; but to conquer it, one had to curse love, renounce it eternally. “And love, Maltrana, and other feelings, are worth more than a treasure.” I am poor, and I go in search of money because I see in it a guarantee of security and rest, allowing me to quietly pursue other endeavors of my liking. But if someone were to make me believe that wealth must be paid for by renouncing love, I swear I would jump ashore at the nearest port to return to Europe. Isidro shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. An artist’s fantasies! A poet’s musings! What did love and wealth have to do with each other that they should be placed side by side, as antithetical and unmistakable? He wanted to be rich for the sake of it, to know the sweetness of the most irresistible of powers, the proud and selfish satisfactions provided by the so-called “power of domination.” And if that meant renouncing the pleasant foolishness of love and other sentiments that the world regards with traditional respect, he was ready to make the sacrifice. He was irritated by the contempt with which religions and peoples had treated wealth for centuries and centuries , as if it were something diabolical and vile, incompatible with the elevation of the soul and the nobility of life. “You say you’re poor, Fernando, and others like you say the same. Everyone who isn’t a millionaire believes they’re poor, and talks about it as if they were poor.” of her as something pleasant and beautiful that should provide you with an aura of sympathy. No; you have never been poor, nor do you know what that is. You need to be rich, content; but you have no idea what misery is. You may have needed thousands of duros, but never have you put your hand in your pocket but felt the touch of the silver slivers… I have been poor, I still am, I have been all my life. And since I have seen true poverty up close, ugly and bald as death, I detest it, and I hope it does not follow me tenaciously, as it has until now, beyond the reach of my hatred. I want it to approach me one day, to stand by my side, so that I can strangle it, so that I can break its ribs with my fists , so that I can turn the scaffolding of its skeleton to dust. Fernando began to laugh at these words, but he stopped when he noticed the sincere vehemence with which Isidro spoke and the vapor of tears that suddenly clouded his eyes. “I know better than anyone what poverty is, and that’s why I get irritated when in Spain and other countries they call, I don’t know why, “chivalrous” and “idealistic,” I hear people say with pride: “I am poor, but very honorable.” And such prestige must this phrase have that many who are not poor boast of being so, as if this were a testament to honesty… Lie! No poor person can consider themselves honorable, since poverty is a disgrace, a certificate of incapacity. It’s true that there will always be poor people, just as there are ugly, deformed, or imbecile people in the world. But those with a physical or intellectual defect don’t flaunt it; rather, they try to remedy it; and the poor person who resigns himself to his lot and doesn’t seek to become rich, by any means, by fair means or foul, is a coward or useless, and cannot turn his vileness into a merit.” Ojeda greeted these words with gestures of comical terror. “Repeat such things to those in third class, Isidro, and we’ll surely never reach Buenos Aires. They’ll revolt and take control of the ship.” But Maltrana, overcome by emotion, didn’t listen and continued speaking: “Misery!… I know what it is, and I want to prevent those I love from knowing it. You, Fernando, are ignorant of my life. Perhaps they’ve told you that part of it is out there in fictional stories… But the truth is always harsher, more unpalatable than the small realistic fragments in books, seasoned with sauces of fantasy… The woman who brought me into the world perished like an animal, tired of working. A poor man who served as my father was murdered, due to the carelessness of some contractors, in a work-related catastrophe, and his corpse served as a revolutionary banner for others as unfortunate as he. I have eaten the filth that dogs eat. ” My noble ancestors were ragpickers and lived off the leftovers from the kitchens of Madrid. I grew up knowing the pangs and cramps with which the stomach warns of the pain of its emptiness… I suffered deprivation and shame, until one day… Note 1 _See The Horde_ He was silent for a moment. His voice trembled, suddenly hoarse. He put a hand to his eyes as if the light bothered him. “One day, when I was a man, an unfortunate woman listened to me: a companion in misery, eager for an ideal in her own way. The poor woman thought she had found it in me, a hungry young gentleman who spoke of things she could not understand. My life flourished for the first time; I knew joy, true joy, for a few months; then the idyll ended in the hospital.” And that graceful body, a poor man’s body, in which youth struggled with hereditary rickets, came down to earth torn to pieces: they cut it into quarters, like a slaughterhouse cow, on the marble of the dissection room… You, Ojeda, must love someone as I loved. We all find an inn of love on the path of life: even the most unhappy. Imagine the body you adore, with the pride of possession, naked on a table; the white intimacies, known only to you, exposed to youthful insolence; the epidermis ripped from her muscles like the cover of a book; her hands moving from table to table; her breasts like rags, swimming in a bucket; her head to one side, her legs to the other… I can’t, I can’t think about it! It’s a memory that embitters me many nights… But why do I talk about this? Ojeda frowned, moved by Maltrana’s words. He was wrong to remember the past; it was better to move forward without looking back. “That’s how our love ended,” Isidro said after a long pause, raising his forehead from his hands. “That’s how it ended, because we were poor… I was left with one son, and the first time I held him in my arms, in a shack on the outskirts of Madrid, I thought I was born again, but stronger, with a will I had never suspected… The poor roll of butter, with his little eyes like two pinpricks, made me feel the impression of a mysterious force that numbed me inside. Since then, I’ve been made of something very hard: I’m made of steel, I’m made of bronze. “You can only count on me, poor thing,” I told the little one. “You have no one else in the world, but I’ll work for you.” I was timid and weak in defending his mother; but the little one gave me the fierceness of a tiger… You know this second part of my life better than the other. It’s no secret. “Isidro Maltrana: a likeable little scoundrel, a scoundrel who knows the way to live…” Ojeda tried to protest. “Don’t shake your head, Fernando; don’t say no, out of kindness: let me have the glory of my bad reputation, which is very just and makes me proud. I thought about being a thief, since I had good connections to launch my career; but I’m a coward; I couldn’t hire out my arms as a bully, because they’re weak. But I hired out my pen and my bile, and such was my shamelessness that I even have admirers.” I have fabricated books for the signatures of important figures and laudatory studies by those same authors, upon whose noble heads I would gladly spit. I have insulted men I respect and admire, heaping infamy and lies upon them, when, had I had my way, I would have knelt to beg their forgiveness. I have received blows and quietly kept them to myself when the offended party was stronger than me. At other times, cornered like a cat with no way out, I have played the role of a tiger, fighting like a Knight of the Round Table in defense of things that didn’t interest me. I have lived in prison for newspaper articles I didn’t have the curiosity to read. Whenever a just opinion needed to be addressed with an insolent and discordant note, Maltranita took care of it, always “because you contributed.” What haven’t I done to earn money?… I’ve even lent myself to being an intermediary in the secret loves of certain personages and served as an honorable companion to their lovers… Don’t be surprised, Ojeda; convince yourself that you have as a companion one of the most notable scoundrels Madrid has ever had. Despite the tone of this statement, which made Fernando smile again, the bohemian continued, with a sullen expression and tender eyes: “And don’t think that I regret my past. I don’t know blush or shame: they are luxuries that only the happy can afford… Every time I committed a bad deed, all I had to forget it was a visit to the wealthy school where my Feliciano is educated thanks to the efforts of his father, as noble and heroic as those of any ancient duke who went out lance in hand to rob at the crossroads. My son thinks I’m a great personage because he sees my name in the newspapers; His teachers admire me no less and allow me to sometimes delay paying my obligations. For them, I am a gentleman of some power, who is familiar with the ministers and walks the halls of Congress every afternoon. And this devotion from my son and his associates compensates me for all my vile acts: even the numerous slaps I have received for my daring behavior… I want my Feliciano, the son of the bohemian and the woman with the cap torn to pieces in the hospital, to be rich, very rich; and for this, and for this alone, I have enlisted in the crusade to the New World. All my affections have contracted and shrunk, leaving room only for that of paternity, which occupies me entirely… You, Fernando, don’t know what paternal feeling is and how far its holy ferocity reaches. “Let the world perish and save the flesh of my flesh.” “Not so much,” said Ojeda; “don’t exaggerate. ” “Yes: ‘Let us steal from other people’s children so that our son may be rich…’ And I am a father. I know well that this paternity is nothing more than a selfish feeling, like love, like patriotism, like so many respectable and indisputable ideas that wreak havoc in the world… But life is nothing more than a web of selfishness, and I lack the strength to reform it.” I’m going to work for the little one, and in the name of my sacrosanct tenderness as a father, I will, if possible, destroy other fathers who get in my way, willing, like me, to all kinds of filth to ensure the well-being of their offspring. I want to make my son rich… come hell or high water! “When you get rich,” Ojeda interrupted, “it’s very likely that your son will be like the children of almost all rich people: a being useless to society, a luxury who will recklessly spend what the father accumulated through sacrifice. ” “I’ve thought about it many times; so what?… I have as much right as any bourgeois to produce a useless and decorative son. Not everything in the world should be useful. It’s a satisfaction for paternal selfishness to have worked yourself to death at one end of the world so that the son can go to the other hemisphere to maintain high-priced coconuts and sustain gambling in elegant clubs.” A pride as legitimate as that of racehorse breeders , beautiful and useless, unfit to plow a field or pull a cart, yet they run and run aimlessly among the enthusiastic epileptics of the crowd… Besides, Fernando, I love money for being money with an almost religious respect. I, who have never believed in anything, believe in its irresistible majesty, in its beneficial power, which revolutionizes our existence, making it more comfortable and easier… Money is also poetry, a sober, energetic, intense poetry , more human and moving than the insincere and hackneyed poetry you have been repeating for centuries in your verses. This statement provoked a hearty laugh from Ojeda. “Now, go on: that interests me; let go of your baggage of paradoxes. It’s amusing, and it will make you forget the memory of your past sorrows.” But Maltrana, insensitive to his friend’s joy, continued speaking. A universal movement, similar to the birth of a powerful religion, was taking hold of the world’s destiny. But very few realized this event, which was about to open a new era in history. “It has always been this way. It takes centuries for men to understand the recent forces that move them; several generations must pass before they one day realize that they are completely different from their grandparents… If a Roman from the first two centuries of our era were resurrected and we asked him what was said in his time about Christians, he would look at us with surprise. He would know nothing about them; his time was focused on other, more important matters. And yet, beneath his feet, in the shadows, beat a force unknown to him, which was about to transform the world… Eighty years ago, a new god came to earth: money.” And that god has his apostles: the hundreds of great millionaires and captains of industry scattered throughout the world, ministers of a mysterious power, who remain in the shadows, as if the greatness of their mission imposed incognito on them; men whose surnames are known throughout the world, just like those of kings, but whom very few have seen in person, because they shun publicity. Ojeda listened with growing interest to these words of his friend. “Modern Caesars visit them aboard their yachts and seat them at their tables; it won’t be long before the emperors, when writing to them, tell them Call them “dear cousin,” as is customary among crowned heads. You would have to be blind not to see the power of these world monarchs, whose grandfathers were lumberjacks, boatmen, or miserable moneylenders. Before, the leaders of the people waged war at whim or over family disputes, whenever they felt like it. Now they have more soldiers than ever, prodigious tools of destruction, and yet they remain in a forced quiet, armed to the teeth. To draw their swords, they must first consult these new “cousins” on the left hand, whose help is indispensable. “The operation is not convenient for us,” say the modern apostles in the mystery of their bank retreat, where they plot world dramas. And the sword must return to its scabbard, or at most, it is used in some colonial expedition, beating up blacks or yellows, all for the greater glory of the god who thus subjugates new peoples to his worship… Maltrana continued, praising the greatness of these modern magicians. The activity of men ran channeled across the globe’s crust at any point they deigned to point a finger at. Sovereigns of thousands and thousands of kilometers of railways or fleets such as no empire ever had, a telephone call was enough for them to change the course of human progress. Pacific islands, where fifty years ago the natives were still roasting human flesh for their own consumption, had achieved centuries of evolution in such a short period of time and were even testing out a socialist regime. They transformed a deserted country in five years. They created cities with promenades, statues, and electric trams on a land not long before inhabited by ostriches. To accomplish this miracle, they only needed to lay a railway line. Inhospitable, deserted coasts suddenly shone with the electric lights of their ports. They were establishing a new line of navigation, and the great flock of emigrants, the restless adventurers who transform everything , reached wherever the miraculous magicians hidden in the shadows willed… Isidro looked at the dancing crowd below on the esplanade aft, and added: “We ourselves go where we are going because the apostles of the new religion have opened a path for us and push us along it without our realizing it… You who are a poet, remember, Ojeda, what old Spain gave to these American countries… The conquistador gave them a hero as great as those in the _Iliad_, a superman, who in less than a century explored half the globe, carving out his home in the Andean heights at four thousand meters, next to the nests of the condors, or in equatorial valleys that are cauldrons of fire. He engendered the present-day peoples of America, bequeathing to them a predisposition to heroism and a high concept of honor. The priest, the missionary, also gave, who with the spread of Christianity softened customs and suppressed an idolatry that required human sacrifice… What a beautiful gift to be sung by poets! The sword and the cross, heroism and piety!… And yet, the Spanish-American peoples slumbered in the colonial era, producing only what was strictly necessary for their maintenance, and after their independence, they slumbered equally under the feet of courageous despots who replaced the meek and lazy tyranny of the metropolis with an immediate and tangible tyranny. And everything remains thus, until the new god appears… Money, vile money, cursed by poets, arrives on their shores, and only then is everything transformed in a few dozen years. The locomotive advanced over virgin soil before the plow; stations sprang up in the desert like signposts of future towns; the steamship was soon in the harbor to take the surplus of the harvest to another part of the globe; The tiny, timid, and miserable consumer market grew into a gigantic producer; the small groups of emigrants who arrived every two months on a brig, like a single drop of life, were replaced by towns. whole tons that ocean liners dumped daily onto the new land… “And this whole revolution,” Maltrana continued, “has been carried out and continues to be carried out by the mysterious apostles of my god; those magicians who hide in an austere office in the City of London, on a twentieth floor in New York, or on any elegant avenue in Paris or Berlin. ” “Money!” Ojeda exclaimed with a contemptuous expression. “Money is nothing more than a means, and it has always existed. Human activity, the progress of science, the desire for well-being, are what together have brought about these marvelous transformations. Precisely, that dormant colonial America you speak of was a great producer of money. Remember Potosí and other famous mines that loaded Spanish galleons with precious bars for centuries. And what good did all that money do us? It was our death.” Maltrana protested: that wasn’t his money. He spoke of modern money, of money animated by life, winged and intelligent, incapable of entrapment, ceaselessly circling the earth, penetrating everywhere in the form of paper, irresistible and triumphant beneath the mystery of printed characters, just like human thought. This omnipotent money had not yet existed for a century. Its lifespan extended no further than that of an octogenarian. It was true that it had always existed; but before the victorious act that made it lord of the world, its life dragged shamefully amidst contempt and vileness. Pluto was a somber and cowardly god, yellow and sallow like buried gold . Religions related him to the devil, seeing wealth as a temptation. The perfect man in all nations was the ascetic gnawed by poverty, insensitive to earthly grandeur. Multiplying gold was considered the business of merchants, relegated to the lowest strata of society. The noble way to conquer it was by waving lance in the middle of the road, robbing caravans, or raiding cities taken by assault. The precious metal, sought in secret and despised in public, had no other use than lending and usury; it attracted crimes and curses. It hid in underground hiding places, afraid of the light, like the reprobates of a shameful religion. It was heavy and bulky in the confines of its purses, and could not move beyond the urban group where savings had amassed it. Those who dedicated themselves to its handling seemed afflicted with a moral illness: they turned yellow with anxiety, trembling with every step, as if the air were filled with enemies. The starving crowds believed they could remedy their ills by entering, slaughtering, into the neighborhoods populated by the sordid devotees of the yellow god; The great lords, in their monetary straits, hanged merchants to raise funds. And as morals softened, the stigma that marked the gold priests was not erased. They were flattered in moments of anguish, and then repelled with the foot in the name of chivalry and nobility of soul. But one day, the harnessing of steam changed the face of the world. It almost happened in our time: we have known people who witnessed this great revolution, the most transcendental and positive of all. The locomotive existed, and thousands upon thousands had to be manufactured, opening roads all over the planet. The industrial machine could not fit into small family workshops, and monstrous buildings had to be built, larger than the cathedrals and temples of paganism. No monarch or potentate was capable of undertaking this gigantic enterprise individually … Then the yellow god changed form, emerging majestic and triumphant, like the sun, from the hauberk of the usurer who had hidden him. In his glorious awakening, he was no longer metallic, heavy, and individual; he no longer lived in his hiding place of terror, and he gathered the multitudes for the common work by means of those documents called shares and bonds. Paper, which is the wing of thought modern, was the sign of their power. Men who had never ventured beyond the outskirts of their villages gave their savings for titanic tasks carried out on the other side of the planet. Courageous captains of the desk, poets of arithmetic, with the audacity of conquerors, placed themselves at the head of these armies of anonymous soldiers whom they will never know… And in eighty years they have made the world their own, in a way no illustrious ambitious man has ever dominated it. Maltrana spoke in an oratorical tone of the great miracle of modern money. The globe bristled with chimneys; the immensity of the ocean always offered on the horizon a black dot and a puff of smoke; waterfalls and rivers created strength and light as they rolled; the great stone barriers whose summits reached the clouds felt their insides pierced by a string of ferrous ants sliding on steel ribbons; In the underwater darkness, the cables conducting thought vibrated like intelligent drones; mysterious and hostile forces worked enslaved for the common good; ancient famines had disappeared thanks to the immense fleets that sailed the ocean at all hours, compensating with the surplus of some peoples for the scarcity of others; man, weary of his recent dominion over the earth’s crust, launched himself into space, learning to fly. “And all this, my friend Ojeda, is the miracle of my god. You will say it is the work of man; but man, without the hope of money, would accomplish very little in the present social regime. No one performs arduous work for pleasure, no one risks his life gratuitously in inglorious undertakings. If you tell someone who drills a tunnel or builds an embankment over a swamp that he is serving his fellow men and deserves gratitude for this, he will shrug his shoulders. He suffers and grieves so that my god will reward him immediately. ” And if my god fails him, he abandons his work, caring little for the sublimity of his labor… Open your eyes, Fernando, and do not be impious toward the great divinity of our time. The ancient gods declare themselves defeated by him, and they flatter and fear him. The despised Pluto, once horned and sad as a goat, now occupies the throne of the noble Zeus, declared useless. Apollo and Mars speak ill of him, lamenting the loss of their former majesty; but this gossip is behind his back, for as soon as my god fixes his golden eyes on them, one offers him his sword to uphold the holy order, without which there are no good deals, and the other preludes a hymn in his honor on the harp to the stanza. Ojeda laughed openly at these words. “Hercules and Vulcan,” continued Isidro, “two good-natured brutes, follow him like faithful dogs.” The strongman hero carries under his biceps the dynamite cartridges with which to blow up isthmuses and mountains, and the one-eyed blacksmith hammers day and night to serve his master’s incessant requests… Mercury the trickster, who leisurely stole for centuries behind counters, now stands in the waiting room at banks and humbly removes his winged helmet to beg the manager for a discount on a promissory note… Even capricious Venus ushers her former Olympian lovers out of her chamber through the escape door, like shameful entertainers, and then opens wide the door of honor for the despised god to enter. “But that god has treated you badly,” Ojeda said mockingly. ” You have always lived in poverty. ” “My god doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know anyone. He is blind and deaf to humans, as are the forces of nature. The volcano erupts its fire without caring that men have built a town on its slopes; Rivers and seas overflow without realizing that tiny beings have created their anthills in the wrinkles that serve as fences; the earth, when it wants to tremble, doesn’t ask permission from the parasites that nest in its epidermis… God ignores our existence: humanity only appears as zeros in his high arithmetic combinations. Therefore, When my god decides to bestow blessings, they almost always fall on the lucky brutes or the malicious ones who snatch them up in passing. And when he deals out blows, they are true blind blows that rain down irrevocably on the innocent… But this god, like all divinities, has a church that thinks for him and administers his interests: the church of the great millionaires, directors of the world. And I have embarked on a change of life, to attempt the conquest of wealth, to enter that church, even as a simple altar boy, and see the mysteries of the sacristy up close. Fernando shrugged his shoulders when speaking of wealth. To be happy, it was enough for a man to have his needs assured . He, unfortunately, needed more than others for a peaceful existence, but as soon as he had acquired what he deemed indispensable, he thought of fleeing this fight for money. Life offers nobler occupations. “You, poet,” said Maltrana, “don’t know the grandiose poetry that emanates from money handled by a man of genius. All poetic fantasies, however beautiful they may seem, are cold and fruitless, like solitary pleasures. Action is more beautiful, the embrace of facts, the carnal squeeze of reality. I admire those modern demiurges of capitalism who, when they fix their attention on a desert on the map, transform it from their desks in a few years, and if they ever deign to go there, find railroads, cities, well-dressed crowds, and can say: ‘I did this , this is my work.’ A satisfaction I envy; a truer source of pride than having imagined a great poem. ” “Maltrana, don’t talk nonsense,” interrupted Ojeda, somewhat annoyed. ” Although, in truth, I don’t know why I pay attention to your assertions. Tomorrow you will say just the opposite.” Every time we’ve spoken in Madrid, you’ve defended a different opinion… I’m familiar with this malady of thinking people. You, whom I’ve seen as almost an anarchist, now burst into hymns of wealth, only because you think you’re on the way to conquering it in a new country… You’re mistaken, Isidro. When we get there, you’ll be convinced that labor represents as much or more than capital. Your paradoxes may have some plausibility in old Europe, where labor is plentiful. But in the American plains, which are almost unpopulated, you’ll learn the value of man and how money can do nothing when it lacks its aid… Besides, I despise money, do you understand? I seek it because I need it; but from there to paying it a religious cult, there’s a long way to go. It’s something that debases and diminishes us, and if it were possible to suppress it, humanity would live better. The crimes that capital, so adored by you, commits to aggrandize itself and succeed in its endeavors! Now it was Maltrana who burst out laughing. “Sensitive and short-sighted poet!” I was expecting his objection at any moment . “The crimes that capital commits in its great global enterprises!” Yes, I recognize them: they are the same crimes of the great conquerors that have upset the course of history; the crimes of the revolutions that gave us freedom. Man passes and the work remains. It matters little if a few fall if their death benefits all humans… Besides, what today appears as a crime is tomorrow a heroic sacrifice… He was silent for a few moments, as if searching for an example, and then added: “Recently, a railroad was completed in the interior of equatorial America through unexplored lands, swamps where death sleeps, inhospitable forests. Workers have fallen by the thousands on this project: every kilometer has a cemetery beside it; the fevers of the disturbed earth, the poisonous reptiles, the alligators of the marshes, have killed more men than in a battle.” The families of the dead and the sensitive souls burst into cries of indignation against the construction company. “Exploiters without conscience, who for “Doing good business and increasing their dividends drive men like beasts to the slaughter.” And they were right; their protest was just. They were speaking the truth. But the capitalists, who live far away and perhaps will never bother going to contemplate this work of theirs, can respond from their desks: “Thanks to our cold, hard audacity, men have a way to reach new countries that hold enormous riches. We have put the forgotten entrails of an entire continent in communication with the rest of the world.” And they are right too; they are also speaking the truth… Because you know, Ojeda, that this idea of a single, indisputable truth is a human illusion. Each one has his own. There are as many truths within us as there are interests.” Ojeda remained silent as if he were not interested in contradicting his friend, and the latter continued: “Literature is to blame for that contempt shown for money by all those who are incapable of conquering it. It seeks to educate the common people, and to do so it uses old ideas, patterns that were cut centuries ago. ” Every self-respecting novelist, every playwright who possesses the secret of making the audience squeal with enthusiasm, knows no bounds when gauging the attractive sympathy of their characters. The sinister man, the “traitor” of the play, is already known to be rich, a manipulator of wealth; and if he holds the title of banker, all the better. Bankers are guaranteed a success in literary works of hatred and ridicule. Sympathetic characters are poor, and they say very beautiful things about the infamies of “vile metal” and the need to idealize life. Literary art had only had, according to Maltrana, four springs to move its creatures: love, hate, hunger, and fear. Money was sometimes shown in certain authors, but as an accessory, like a black curtain to better highlight the figures of the sympathetic characters. Love, with its countless and always consistent combinations and conflicts, was what completely filled books and plays. “And so we’ve gone centuries without realizing that there’s more to the world than love; and even the most foolish among us are beginning to tire of so much printed paper and so many brightly lit rooms trying to make us aware of the anguish and conflicts of two people who want to sleep together and can’t find the means, or the emotional crises of a woman who wants to be unfaithful to her husband and doesn’t know how to begin… No; in the world, love isn’t everything. We dedicate a few hours of our existence to it, which certainly aren’t the most contemptible, but we spend more time worrying about money and the titanic struggle to win it. If literature were a reflection of our existence and not flattering entertainment for the idle, modern money would have figured years ago as its principal element, having created an aristocracy of the will, heroes more noble and interesting than those poor gallants who whine about love, say pretty words, and are incapable of earning a little money so that the lady of their thoughts can live more comfortably. ” “Go on,” said Fernando. I think I’m in Madrid, in a painter’s studio , in a small salon at the Ateneo, in a café gathering… This rejuvenates me. –Laugh, but know that I’m infuriated by the hypocrisy of the “priests of the ideal,” who curse money in public and then chase it like a bank debt collector. There are still a few lonely people who write like birds sing, without caring what it might be worth to them. But these count for nothing, and little by little they fall into oblivion. Today, literary fame is judged by the number of performances and the quantity of volumes; or, what is the same, by the money the author earns. Before writing, the taste of the masses is consulted, so that the print run of the book is large or the theater is packed many nights. And then, these inventors of resounding curses to the yellow god, when the reckoning with the editor or the entrepreneur comes, are capable of to beat each other for a peseta or so… No, Ojeda; I prefer brutal frankness. Money is vile, but only for those who don’t have it. It has made me, a poor servant of the pen, commit great deeds. One day I wrote one thing, and months later, for a few more pesetas, I moved across the street to write the exact opposite. That’s why I want to make it mine: to feel worthy and free for the first time in my existence. My god takes revenge on those who call him vile by subjecting them to humiliation, which is the greatest of all debasements. He looked at Ojeda for a long time with surprise, and then continued: “And a man of your talent should not believe that money is the motive for the greatest actions!… Remember the first navigators who explored the mysteries of the sea: our venerable forefathers, the Argonauts. They accomplished dozens of centuries ago what you and I are now seeking.” They were going to conquer the Golden Fleece, just like we, Argonauts in trousers, when we boarded this ship… And when the ship _Argos_ was about to set sail, the first to jump on board with his lyre in tow was Orpheus, the divine singer, the first of all known poets. You will tell me that he was going to see wonderful things, tempted by the heroic novelty of the adventure; and I, who know life, will tell you that he was going for all that and also to play his part when the time came to distribute the profits of the expedition… And the same thought the romantic knights clad in iron who rode in the Crusades fleeing from their castles mortgaged to the Germanic and Frankish usurers. “Jerusalem! Let’s go free the tomb of Christ!” But once the conquest was accomplished, eager to avoid being further separated from the blessed tomb, they expanded the scope of their raids, carving up the land of the vanquished into counties and kingdoms, and led a life as oriental satraps such as they had never dreamed of in their meager European lands. The memory of Columbus resurfaced in Maltrana’s mind. “You know,” he continued, “what our friend Don Cristóbal’s dream was when he went as a petitioner to the court of the Catholic Monarchs. Imagine the disappointments and discouragement he would suffer for eight years, when monarchs and ministers, preoccupied with immediate wars, could not listen to him.” Upon returning to his lodgings, he saw the gold of the Great Khan, the fleets of Solomon, the riches of Marco Polo, marvelous treasures that he would one day sink his teeth into, and this was enough to bolster his spirit, insisting on his quest… Believe me, Ojeda: money is the driving force behind great actions, the companion of sublime dreams, the ultimate goal of the greatest idealisms. Look at those people at our feet. They go in search of money from one end of the globe to the other. And do you think they don’t dream? Do you imagine that in their pilgrimage toward bread there isn’t much illusion, idealism?… Ojeda nodded affirmatively. “You’re right about that. Some nights, when I look over this railing, I notice the emigrants sleeping in the open air, fleeing the heat of the battlements.” They offer the appearance of an encampment, and perhaps for this reason I recall Napoleon’s grenadiers, who were nothing more than simple soldiers, but as they slept on the hard ground, they saw all kinds of greatness parading in their dreams. Each one believed he carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and this was enough for them to run tirelessly across Europe from battle to battle. These are the same: holy hope erases doubt and discouragement in them. They all keep the title of future millionaire in their bundle of clothing… If the grenadier felt his faith wavering, he had only to look at the marshal covered in gold, who had been a soldier just like him. When emigrants doubt, they need only remember so many rich men who made their first voyage just as badly as they did. On this very ship, they can see examples to revive their energy… The miracles of hope! Many of those men had worked They returned to America again, then fled in discouragement. They preferred misery in their homeland to the vagrant life of a laborer in the New World, and upon returning to their country they kissed the soil with transports of enthusiasm, vowing to die there . “America for the Americans. They will not deceive us again…” But before long , the same stories that had excited them before their first voyage returned to bite deeply into their simple imaginations. The odious America was transformed and illuminated, recovering the sweet colors of their pristine vision. Perhaps they had fled too soon; perhaps they unjustly attributed to the country blame that was theirs alone. The prosperity of those who had stayed behind irritated them like a mistake. “They quickly forget what they suffered,” Fernando continued, “to remember only the few hours of happiness. Insignificant and almost forgotten events reappear in their memory as fortunate opportunities foolishly disregarded.” “I could have been rich,” they say in his town, “but I was in too much of a hurry to return.” And they end up believing it with their eyes closed, and the desire to return to the land of hope becomes more and more imperative, until finally they embark with equal or greater hopes than the first time… And off they go, mingling with the neophytes of emigration; and they, the disillusioned and cursing of a little while ago, are now the same as the veterans who revive recruits at bivouac parties with hyperbolic stories. “I believe,” said Maltrana, “that if the curious Limping Devil, who lifted the roofs of buildings, could show us what the lids of those skulls conceal, we would read the same thing on all of them: “Buenos Aires… Buenos Aires.” “That’s right… What a power of illusion this name has!… Everyone, upon repeating it, sees the city of hope, the land of well-being, modern Zion .” Ojeda, with his lyrical enthusiasm, reconstructed the thoughts of the cosmopolitan crowd heading south, stretching out their hands after the fluttering wings of the headless goddess. This name circulated like music throughout the ancient world, awakening dormant souls. Nationless races and peoples weary of having one felt an instant rejuvenation at the thought of that wonderland, where astonishing transmutations took place. The lazy felt active; the apathetic stirred with optimistic enthusiasm; those oppressed by the narrowness of their native environment broke through their cyst of routine with sudden ardor. Many went there called and advised by other compatriots who had preceded them… But what about those who set out on their own, lacking friends, without knowing the language, knowing only how to repeat with sickly tenacity: “Buenos Aires… Buenos Aires…”? Who had taught them the name? What charm is there in these syllables, which made the distant crowds advance, trusting in the good or bad gesture of fate? Ojeda admired the strong pull with which this spell of hope had torn away human groups rooted by history in different places around the planet. “Buenos Aires!” murmured the wind on winter nights as it entered the chimney of the country home, where the Spanish or Italian family cursed the embargo of their fields and the shortage of bread; “Buenos Aires!” bellowed the gale laden with snowflakes as it filtered through the wood of the Russian hut; “Buenos Aires!” wrote the sun with arabesques of light on the limestone walls of the eastern alley, for the fearful Arab in servitude; “Buenos Aires!” the golden wings of hope rustled as they flew from streetlight to streetlight along the deserted boulevards of a sleeping metropolis, as the ruined young gentleman and the homeless bachelor thought of killing themselves the next morning. And all, regardless of race or class, strong and humble, ignorant and intelligent, at the echo of this name saw rising in the landscape of their imagination, bathed in the glow of hope, a woman of majestic bearing, white and blue like Murillo’s virgins, with the purple cap, symbol of freedom, over her loose hair; a matron who smiled, opening her strong arms, letting loving words fall from her lips: “Come to me, all of you who hunger for bread and thirst for peace; come to me, all of you who arrived late to an old and crowded world. My home is large and was not built by selfishness; my house is open to all the races of the earth, to all men of good will. ” Maltrana interrupted his friend’s lyrical evocation with ironic enthusiasm: “Very well said, poet! Very beautiful! May the blue and white matron not lead us into false illusions… may she seem as beautiful up close as she does from afar… So be it. Amen.” Chapter 6. “What day is it today? Friday? Saturday? I’ve lost count of how long I’ve been on the ship. The days are double… not double, triple. From the time we woke up until lunch, one day; From lunch to dinner, another; and from dinner to bedtime, the longest day for some, as they stretch it out until the sun rises… And always the same faces! We see the same people a hundred times a day. It seems we’ve known each other since we were born… Tell me, Manzanares: what day is it? It was Maltrana who asked the question, in the early hours of the morning, walking along the promenade deck with the Spanish merchant. The starboard street was flooded with light; the port side retained the dampness of recent hose loading, with the cool twilight of an underground gallery. The shadow of the ship ran across the calm, united waters, like a Chinese silhouette. On its back were outlined the profiles of boats and davits and the quadrangular mass of the funnel. The calm ocean stretched out to infinity, without a ripple, with the emerald green of tropical seas, dense and sleepy. There was no foam in it other than the two bubbling sheets raised by the prow as it plowed its surface. Occasionally, a swarm of flying fish emerged from the troubled waters. They flapped their wings like enormous dragonflies; their troops fanned out in various directions, and thus flew a great distance along the ocean floor, tracing debris and subtle furrows over it, until the fatigue of flight forced them to submerge again. Along the partitions of the promenade deck, the passengers’ armchairs were lined up in a whimsical arrangement, displaying the names of their owners written on cards at the top of the backrests. This inscription seemed to give them a personality, a soul. They remained grouped or alone, just as their owners had left them the day before. Some seemed to silently follow their masters’ interrupted conversations ; others stood apart, timidly or proudly. Maltrana thought of the late hours of the night, hours of mystery and silence, when all these pot-bellied wooden or cane hulks, leaning back proudly and displaying their baptismal certificates on their heads, stood alone under the cold light of the electric bulbs, facing the darkness of the sea. They rested from creaking and expanding under the weight of their masters; they emancipated themselves for half the night from their weighty servitude; the hour of freedom had arrived for them. But like men who, believing themselves saved by a revolution, do nothing but parody their former oppressors, the armchairs, in their repose, repeated the actions and gestures of their owners. A tall one, made of sturdy wood, with a Scottish blanket forgotten on its lap, rubbed against another, slender and elegant cane, which had a luxurious cushion on the seat. They seemed to be swaying, silently continuing the whispered conversations they had had during the day. The loose seats perhaps persisted in the meditations on figures and business that had spiritually permeated them during the daylight hours , or looked with pity at their companions gathered in accordance with the cursing gatherings or the attractions of love. “Vanity of vanities…” Maltrana noticed some wider and deeper ones, which They seemed to have their insides torn apart, unsteady on their feet, with a certain air of being gutted. They belonged to the lady of Goycochea and other noble matrons of pachydermic majesty. “Poor things!” He thought he saw among them farmhands lying with open oars, panting after hard labor; porters in shirtsleeves cursingly wiping the dampness from their foreheads after carrying a piano. “Today is Friday,” Manzanares replied; “the day before yesterday we left Tenerife… To me, too, the number of days we’ve been here seems double or triple. And how many more we still have to get there!… This afternoon, according to what the captain says, we’ll see the Cape Verde Islands in the distance… On Monday we’ll cross the line. The voyage couldn’t look better: a beauty… Look at that sea.” They stopped for a moment to follow the flapping of the wings of the flying fish with delighted eyes . “A sea of romance,” said Maltrana. “It’s a pleasure to live. What color! What light! It’s like theater lighting; the golden glow of a ‘final apotheosis.’ And what air!” He breathed, half-closing his eyes, with anxious delight. “We’re a little bored, but you have to admit that this life is beautiful. I feel like singing; all the sweet little songs from the Gulf of Naples come back to me.” And to Manzanares’s great scandal, he began to belt out a romance at the top of his lungs. Some sailors who were painting the pipes for the deck irrigation system white turned their heads, laughing with childlike simplicity. “But man, shut up!” protested the merchant. “And you’re going to Buenos Aires to make your fortune?” The first thing is to be a serious man, to inspire confidence. No one believes the signature of a singer. Don’t be crazy! All people of writing are the same!” “Manzanares, I’m happy to be alive.” I feel younger… You seem to be getting younger too. Yesterday I caught you talking to one of those French women. You were leaning on the railing, looking out at the sea, but you were talking to her at the same time in a low voice, as if you weren’t doing anything. “Well, I’m married,” Manzanares protested. “Don’t make unwelcome assumptions: I don’t think about those things anymore.” But Maltrana insisted. He liked the French woman, and he didn’t mind Conchita either, that fellow countryman who was going to Buenos Aires alone. “A man my age!” Manzanares exclaimed. “And with a bad stomach !… That Conchita is a decent girl; just look at her: a young lady. Don’t be crazy, Maltrana. All of you creative types are lost and think everyone else is the same. ” “And Paris?” And your nighttime trips to Montmartre?… Remember how you entertained Goycochea and Montaner the other evening by telling them about your good fortunes… I’ll bet anything that if you let me into your cabin I’ll find a packet of compromising photographs and love letters . “Don’t be crazy; don’t make rash judgments. Leave quiet people alone . ” But Manzanares said this with a tone of mild protest, a certain satisfaction shining in his eyes at the same time. “Ah, you hypocritical scamp!” Isidro continued. “When we’re in Buenos Aires, I’ll go one day to your establishment on Alsina Street to tell Mrs. Manzanares who her husband is… I will, unless you bribe me with a couple of bottles of champagne.” A greenish wave spread across the merchant’s face. His eyes shone hostilely, Isidro not knowing for sure if this fury was due to his insolent threat or the proposed invitation. “Good morning.” It was his fault , he was talking to madmen. And he turned his back on him, walking away. Maltrana sank into an armchair. He felt tired: this “dear friend” was only generous when it came to walking. He stood there for a long time, facing the ocean, which shimmered in the glare of the sun, enjoying the shade of the deck, sitting up and putting a hand to his cap every time a new passerby appeared. They were all men, and they walked quickly, circling the central castle, with the concern to combat the saturation of a sedentary life. At this hour, the ladies were still below, in the cabins and bathrooms. Maltrana had sometimes surprised the intimacies of the morning’s get-together as he walked through the corridors of the lower decks, bumping into women wrapped in kimonos and old dressing gowns who hurried to take refuge in their cabins, hiding their faces as if afraid of being recognized. They were completely different from those who appeared an hour later on the promenade. Sometimes, Isidro felt a certain hesitation before identifying them. They all seemed considerably smaller and their movements were heavy when they walked without the heels. Their light, tucked, and bouncy feet, like birds in their daytime confinement of morocco or satin, were now flat and deformed inside the clacking slippers. Their flesh trembled as they moved, still retaining the softness and loose carelessness of their sleeping hours. Their shrunken, hairless heads displayed strands matted by recent dampness. Their faces had a greenish or bloody tinge; their noses were reddened at the tops. After such encounters, Isidro avoided walking through the corridors at this early hour, fearing the anger of the ladies. When they saw him later on the promenade, they would avoid greeting him or respond curtly, as if they were blaming him for a lack of consideration… But the memory of these surprises made him smile with a certain pride. He had seen; he could judge; he was in on the secret. And he found life on board interesting, with this promiscuous contact imposed by a communal existence developed in a limited space. Maltrana left his chair when he recognized two ladies coming toward him: the first to appear on the promenade. “Conchita and Doña Zobeida…” And he greeted them, cap in hand, smiling obsequiously, for Doña Zobeida, despite her modest appearance, inspired in him a great deal of sympathy, not without a touch of pity. In his opinion, this elderly lady was more of a child than all the little blonde girls running along the promenade with a doll in their arms. The butler, inattentive to her shrunken appearance and the shabbiness of her black dress, had placed her in a two-person cabin, giving her Concha, the girl from Madrid, “this fine young lady,” as she called her, even in the most intimate moments. She was returning to her homeland after spending a few months in Holland with her grandchildren. Her daughter’s husband was the Argentine consul and had lived abroad for years. For the first time, the good lady had left her beloved city of Salta on a daring pilgrimage beyond the borders of the Republic, beyond the sea, to a land from which she returned with a disoriented spirit, not daring to express her opinions. “And that was Europe!” She, in her astonishment, didn’t dare speak ill of it; everything inspired her respect; she only complained of her spiritual deprivations. “Those lands, sir, are not for us; the people have other beliefs. We must find a place to hear mass. There’s no priest who understands our language to confess to. ” And the joy of returning to her land of high plateaus and tropical vegetation lessened the sadness of leaving her only daughter and grandchildren behind. They had begged her to stay with them. Oh no! Whoever took her out of Salta would be killed. Speaking with Isidro for the first time, she had praised her city. “When Buenos Aires was nothing more than Buenos Aires, a miserable village, we were the kingdom of Tucumán. The porteños, now so proud, date back to yesterday; they are, for the most part, children of gringo emigrants. We are nobles. You, being Spanish, will undoubtedly know our surname: Vargas del Solar. We have many relatives in Spain who are counts and dukes; an uncle of mine who dealt with these matters corresponded with them. I had gathered old family papers ; but with the revolutions and the decline in status, they are forgotten.” These things. There they still call us “the marquises.” When you come to Salta, you will see a stone coat of arms on the door of our house. Other houses have them too… But you, who are a man of much knowledge, according to this good young lady, pointing to Concha, will have read about Salta; its fairs, where people came to buy mules from Chile, Bolivia, and Peru… No one mentioned the porteños back then: we took everything with us. My late doctor, who had many books, spoke of all these past things when people praised him for the growth of Buenos Aires. “My late doctor” was her husband, whom she designated par excellence with this title. Everything in the world that can be said with truth and just observation had been said by the grave provincial lawyer, who, after thirty years of widowhood, now appeared to her ever more magnificent, like the personification of calm wisdom and equable common sense. Maltrana was drawn to Doña Zobeida’s simplicity of words and thoughts and the stately air that accompanied her modesty. He noticed her somewhat coppery complexion; the brilliance of her bulging eyes, with their moist corneas and sweet humility in the pupils, eyes similar to those of the guanacos of the Andean highlands; and the intense black of her strong, coarse hair, which the years could not whiten. Despite the remote indigenous influence that emerged in this Vargas del Solar, Isidro found in her entire person a rancid Spanish distinction, the air of a lady accustomed to respect from birth, and who, confident in her worth, dares to be familiar in her dealings and simple in her tastes. “This Doña Zobeida, half Indian,” Maltrana thought, “is a lady from Burgos who, after supervising her maid’s purchases at the market, goes into a bookstore to ask for a well-stocked prayer book ; a great lady from Cuenca or Teruel who in the afternoon hosts her gathering of canons and old lawyers, and they share hot chocolate, talking about the corruption of the world. These memories evoked in her mind the old Spain, which had left indelible marks wherever it had rested, spreading the characteristics of the national personality throughout the planet, in the most diverse and remote regions. The credulity of the good lady expanded into naive astonishment at the lies and exaggerations Maltrana allowed himself to shock her innocent soul. “Don’t say anything!” exclaimed Doña Zobeida. “Look!… What things!” And when she wasn’t present, Isidro burst into praise of her candor. For him, she was the best person on board. That woman with grandchildren harbored the soul of her eight years, incapable of growth or evolution; And this soul remained motionless and dormant in the envelope of her credulous innocence, like human embryos worthy of study that are preserved submerged in a jar. Separated, by her shyness, from the elegant compatriots who came on the ship, she had bonded with a familiar affection with her cabin mate, “this good young lady,” “this poor girl,” who was leaving for an unknown country with no more support than vague recommendations. Isidro, who knew Conchita from Madrid, was somewhat alarmed to see her in constant contact with the innocent lady. She had lived maritally for several months with a friend of hers, “a colleague from the press”; then he had found her as a chorus girl in a theater by the hour and at various evening or morning parties on the mezzanines of Fornos and Las Ventas. “Be careful, girl, with Doña Zobeida,” he had said when he found himself alone with Concha. That good lady is a soul of God… Let’s see if you put your foot in it and scare her with one of your tricks. But the Madrid native also felt a respectful affection for the good lady. “I love her very much: she’s so good!… Some nights, before going to sleep, I accompany her to say the rosary in the cabin. Look, kid, I love her as if she were my mother… And I’ve never even met my mother. ” This morning, Doña Zobeida greeted Isidro with a shy smile and glances. supplicants. She didn’t dare articulate a thought that had driven her toward him, and she was anticipatingly imploring forgiveness with her eyes. “Tell us about last night, Misiá Zobeida,” said Concha , interrupting the good lady in her praises of the sea and the beauty of the morning, topics with whose development she entertained her shyness. “Isidro is a good friend… most helpful. I’ve known him since I was taken to school.” Concha lied with aplomb, attributing to her friends with Maltrana this remote and pure origin, which gave the good lady a sudden sense of confidence. Her young companion called her Misiá, knowing that this honorific title, of Creole origin, she liked more, for its patriarchal and rancid flavor, than the Doña, of peninsular origin. “I didn’t dare,” stammered the lady. “I don’t like to bother anyone with my things. But this good young lady has told me who you are; that you were a great friend of her father’s and that you know a lot… and people who know a lot are always attentive to those who know nothing. That was my late doctor. And after this introduction, he began his speech at the end, mentioning the conversation the night before with “the good young lady,” from bunk to bunk, after having prayed the rosary. Since that Mr. Maltrana was so good, he could help her in her lawsuit, the great undertaking of her life and that of all the Vargas del Solar, the goal of her dreams in her hours of contemplation, the only request she included in her prayers for the happiness of her daughter and grandchildren. “Look, sir: it’s about four hundred leagues; about four hundred square leagues that are ours and they never quite hand them over to us.” Isidro opened his eyes wide with an expression of astonishment and scandal. Could that Doña Zobeida be a maniac?… “Four hundred leagues!” “But that’s a state. It’s almost a nation.” The lady calmly insisted on the figure. Four hundred leagues… or maybe it was more. They hadn’t been measured, but they extended from the Andes to near Salta. Everyone there knew about the Vargas del Solar lawsuit: even the papers from Buenos Aires had mentioned it on several occasions. If Don Isidro ever went to the north of the Republic, he only had to ask: the last muleteer of those who brought mule trains to Chile through the Andes would agree with him. The droves walked for weeks on end through deserted landscapes, where Pachamama and Tatacoquena, the two indigenous deities from before the Spanish conquest, still appeared, surrounded by the rough storms of the Andes . Similar in every way to the simple human imaginations that created them, these gods are also muleteers, leading behind them silent packs of llamas laden with rich bales of coca, the ambrosia of the Indian palate. And the travelers of the Cordillera, navigating this ocean of red earth, metallic boulders, and dormant borate lakes, discerned with their righteous spirit the true ownership of the long road. “All this belongs to the marquises who live in Salta.” And the marquises were the Vargas del Solar. “It’s ours, and very much ours,” continued Misiá Zobeida. “Over there in our house we keep the papers. The lawsuit was started by my late uncle, the one who corresponded with our relatives in Spain, counts and dukes, as I already told you; and then, my late doctor, who knew a lot, obtained a favorable judgment. The field is ours here.” Maltrana smiled upon hearing four hundred leagues simply called a field; The government of Salta has acknowledged that it belongs to us, but the years go by and they don’t give it to us. Look, sir, the matter couldn’t be more serious: a donation from the king… from the King of Spain; a gift he gave to one of our grandfathers, Ensign Vargas del Solar. Doña Zobeida interrupted herself, looking timidly at Maltrana, as if she feared offending him with her explanations. “You, who know so much, will have understood that this ensign was a great personage, and that they called him that not because he was in the military, but because Whenever a royal couple was born or married, he was the one who brought out the monarch’s banner as a royal standard-bearer and gave the first cheer. My late uncle explained all this so clearly that it was a pleasure to listen to him. He also read us the king’s papers, yellowish sheets with holes, as if they had been eaten by mice, and written in an ink that must have been black but is now red like old iron… The field wasn’t given to us as a gift: it was a donation from some money the standard-bearer sent to Spain once when the king was in trouble. And as a well-born and Christian man, the king reciprocated this favor by giving him the field and the marquisate. They must have been friends, don’t you think? The standard-bearer was a great personage; and his wife, the Peruvian, not to mention! Even back in my homeland, when they see a dressed-up gringa or a Chinese woman putting on airs of lordship, people say, in mockery, “As if the marchioness were Misiá Rosa.” The good lady lost her usual shyness when she remembered this grandmother, even more famous and worthy of memory than the illustrious second lieutenant, friend of the king and queen. She contemplated her just as her “late uncle” had described her many times, on the dais of her mansion in Salta, with rich silk stockings, of which she changed three pairs a day, gazing with a pride of race at her small, tightly shod feet. She wore the hollow, flowered panniers sent to her from the best stores in Lima, with pearls on her breast, pearls in her ears, pearls scattered throughout her dress. Beyond the dais, seated on the floor with their legs crossed, were a few black women in dazzlingly white skirts . One watched the brazier where the water was boiling; another offered the silver mate cup carved with a gold mouthpiece; another kept the stately, richly inlaid guitar on her knees. Horsemen trotted up and down the street, with the vague hope of seeing the Peruvian woman’s glowing eyes when the curtain of some gate was slightly raised. At mass, noblemen from far away would pretend to be distracted at the church door to gaze at the country’s greatest celebrity, who arrived wrapped in her black silk mantle, from beneath which peeked her embroidered white or pink skirt. The second lieutenant walked at her side, with all the dignity of his rank. His plumed hat solemnly answered all the hats raised as he passed. Behind them marched two black men with parasols and a rich carpet, on which the Marchioness, Misiá Rosa, sat cross-legged to hear mass. The noble Vargas mansion, with its bulging ironwork and stone coat of arms on the doorway, only admitted visits from a few of the country’s notables. During the fair season, it was enlivened by the presence of old-fashioned hidalgos from the Viceroyalty of Peru or the Kingdom of Chile to buy draft cattle; landowners from the lowlands from the banks of the Plata River to sell their mule trains; and the occasional black merchant from Buenos Aires who was driving a convoy of African slaves to the mines of Potosí. When a new governor passed through on his way to his island, a bishop on a pastoral tour, or the lords of the Royal Chancery, the lieutenant’s house was their inn, and the travelers were in no great hurry to leave, as if enchanted by the beauty and nobility of Misiá Rosa, whose fame had reached them many days’ journey away. The common people spoke highly of the noble building and its riches. Once a year, the doors would be closed for a full day, and the Vargas’ old servants, slaves and freedmen, all trusted individuals, would spread out hides in the main courtyard, emptying enormous sacks of coins onto them. They were ounces, eight-dollar doubloons, Portuguese cruzados, piles of gold that they brought out annually from their underground vault to air and sunbathe. And the ensign and his wife impassively watched over this traditional operation, as if their servants were moving sacks of wheat for the household’s consumption. Doña Zobeida grew excited as she recounted past splendors, and Conchita She nodded in approval, as if she were attesting to it. Accustomed to hearing these great things every night in her cabin, she thought she had seen them with her own eyes. “And now, sir,” the old woman continued, “the Vargas del Solar are poor because of the never-ending lawsuit. Revolutions and wars have ruined us… They say that in order for them to give us what’s ours, the land must be surveyed according to the titles, and to carry out that survey, it will take a year, or maybe more, and many men, who will have to live like they do at the Pole; and this will cost a lot of money, and we will have to pay for it… There is a lot of useless land in the countryside: crags, mountains; but there are mines and there are also good pastures. For my part, I wouldn’t do anything: I need little to support myself. But there are my grandchildren, my poor little ones, condemned to live in that land of gringos; My daughter is here, and I want to see her rich in Buenos Aires with the dignity she deserves… Besides, I’m thinking of my late doctor, who spent his life struggling to get this lawsuit over. Surely he’ll be happy in the afterlife if I tell him when we meet after my death that the land now belongs to the family and that I’ve gotten it. He used to say that ladies only understand household matters! Imagine, sir, even if the league sells for only two thousand pesos apiece, what that represents. Maltrana questioned her with his look and his gestures. And what did he have to do in this matter?… “What I want, sir, is for you to speak to Dr. Zurita, since he’s your friend and I always see you together. I’m ashamed to approach him without knowing him. I think he’s been bossy in Buenos Aires. Besides, he’s a doctor, and you already know what that represents.” A doctor has a lot of power, especially if he’s a Buenos Aires doctor, because now they cook and eat everything, leaving nothing for the others, as my late father used to say… If you’d be so kind as to hear me, I’ll explain my dispute to him, and surely a word will be enough for those in charge to settle everything “on the spot,” as we say there. He’s clearly a good gentleman, Christian and serious, like my doctor. Many people from Buenos Aires have sought me out to handle the matter: businessmen, people who frightened me, and I’ve always said no. My late father had a horror of “black birds.” Doña Zobeida was silent for a moment, as if hesitating, but then she added timidly: “Right here on the boat, there’s a man who, I don’t know how, found out about my dispute, and according to what they tell me, he wants to talk to me… He’s the father of that little girl they call Nélida, the one who’s always fussing with the boys.” I don’t like to talk about anyone; each one must sort himself out with God. But, frankly, sir: that girl who looks like a comic, and smokes, and doesn’t respect her mother! And that father who doesn’t scold her and laughs at her pranks!… Let each live as he pleases, but I don’t want to deal with gringos of that kind. I prefer my own; and since I know that this gentleman wants to talk to me about the business, I’m even more eager to ask Dr. Zurita for his advice. “You’ll see, Doña Zobeida. I’ll take care of the arrangements.” The old lady smiled with childlike joy, becoming even more talkative and communicative. “The business would have been completed a long time ago if my late uncle were alive. All he would have had to do was send a letter to our relatives in Spain. But what happens is that the king there isn’t aware of it.” You, sir, who know so much and who back in your country are undoubtedly a doctor, or that other gentleman with you, so handsome, so distinguished and serious, and who will also be a doctor, when you see the king tell him what is happening to us Vargas del Solar, the heirs of the ensign. You will surely see the king. Doctors always have great involvement with those who govern: in my country, all the President’s friends are doctors… My dispute would be settled “on the table,” so to speak, if only the king would send a note to the government of Buenos Aires, or better yet, to the governor of Salta, saying: “What is “This, gentlemen? What’s given is given, and between gentlemen it’s not right to break one’s word. Give the descendants of Ensign Vargas what my grandparents were good enough to give him, and let there be no more talk of the matter.” And I am certain that the good king would write it thus if someone were to speak to him and show him our papers. “He will be spoken to,” Maltrana said with a tone of resolve, without the slightest hint of laughter. “The good king will find out everything, and he will write the letter as soon as I see him.” And as if fearing the contagion of laughter from Conchita’s eyes, who was pursing her lips to maintain her seriousness, Isidro said goodbye to Doña Zobeida, repeating the promise to introduce her to the doctor after lunch. As he went toward the bow, he saw Ojeda and Mrs. Power leaning on the railing, gazing out to sea, their elbows and flanks touching. The breeze twisted some of the American woman’s curls, escaping from a small cloth-of-gold hat, like fiery spirals . “The day has begun well for these people!” Isidro murmured. “And the Yankee looks like a child with that graceful Venetian page’s cap. What a fine woman! Good morning, madam.” He greeted her without pausing, with a bow that he deemed gracious, “the bow with a white wig and red heels,” as he called it, and for a moment he saw ironic eyes and a vermilion mouth responding to his greeting. “Anyone who was immodest,” Maltrana continued murmuring, “would have such pretensions toward this lady. She can’t see me without laughing… That’s how , according to general opinion, great passions begin; And friend Ojeda, if he weren’t blind like all lovers, should look at me carefully… But let’s leave aside all pomp and vanity and pay attention to our friends. Here comes one… Good morning, monsieur. He crossed paths with the “funereal and mysterious” man, his cabin neighbor, dressed in mourning as always and with his face carefully shaved. He barely bent his dignified stiffness with a slight bow. Then he enveloped Maltrana in a fleeting glance from his hard, blue pupils and continued on, answering in a dry voice: “Bonjour, monsieur.” Isidro laughed, while the other walked away as if offended by the greeting. “Friend Sherlock Holmes is angry. He still remembers the joke of the other night.” Evil heart!… As if we were all forced to live sadly and dressed in mourning, like him!… What is the princess he keeps locked in the cabin doing at this moment?… And I still haven’t discovered this mystery! What a shame! He stopped thinking about the black man and his unknown captive as he returned to the starboard side. Two couples remained motionless, in intimate conversation, among the passengers walking along this side of the ship, following their morning routine. In the background, toward the bow, Ojeda and Mrs. Power continued leaning on the rail. At the opposite end, near Isidro, Manzanares was standing next to a rush armchair with embroidered cushions, on which a blonde woman appeared almost reclining, one arm hanging loose and a volume in her hand. The merchant ‘s eyes fixed avidly on the nape of her neck, perfumed by the morning ablutions, and all the immediate whiteness was revealed through the half-open darkness of her blouse. From there, his gaze leaped to the curves of her legs, wrapped in openwork silk, emerging from the silky foliage of her skirts. Maltrana approached him as if he had forgotten the scene from just before. “I wanted to catch you there, you scamp, you old coot from Alsina Street… Surely you’re declaring your love for this young lady, in the style of a billboard. ” Visibly irritated by the mocking intervention, Manzanares nevertheless hastened to answer, fearing that Isidro would persist with his jokes. “No, sir; we were talking about serious matters, things from there. The young lady wanted to know my opinion on the upcoming harvest. Ah, the harvest!” Maltrana smiled as he remembered that the upcoming harvest In the Argentine Republic, it was the main topic of conversation for a large portion of those on board, and a pretext for continual consultation by that blonde French woman, who was listed in the ship’s register as a traveling salesman in fashion and hats, a profession that made many people sneer maliciously. Mademoiselle Marcela had also asked him the same question the first time he had approached her chair, attracted by the novelty of her Spanish speech, laced with French words and Italianisms from the popular vocabulary of Buenos Aires. This was her fifth voyage to the banks of the Plata, and she displayed the skill of a transatlantic navigator in her kindness to the ship’s personnel who could best serve her, in the discreet reserve with which she kept herself separate from passengers of a higher social class—especially the ladies, a sure way to avoid scorn and bad language—and in her skill in choosing her place on deck, placing the same rattan chair, pillows, and blankets that had accompanied her on previous voyages. “I go to Buenos Aires almost every year,” she had told the curious Maltrana to cut short his insidious questions. “It’s my business; I travel for a large milliner .” Maltrana, malicious and incredulous, thought that the beautiful commercial traveler should not bring with her any samples other than her own somewhat worn hats. To economize on their use, she protected the hairpieces on her blond head with a variety of colored gauze purchased from the piles of Parisian department stores. Upon learning that Isidro was going to Argentina with her, she had asked him about the upcoming harvest, believing him to be a landowner from that country. Afterwards, with frequent conversations, a certain intimacy had developed between them. Money! How hard it was to earn and how necessary it was for life! And the “beautiful milliner,” as Isidro mockingly called her, would narrow her eyes as she spoke of the sacrifices the business entailed; of how sad it was to leave her little apartment on Avenida de Ternes, where everything was in order and ready for life’s necessities, cared for by a woman who knows how to value small objects and put them in their proper place. She spoke with childlike tenderness of Chiffon, a fat, glossy cat, and of two canaries she had entrusted to the concierge. At other times, she would wistfully recall the “good friend” who would wander the boulevard awaiting her return, a truly chic young man, though poor, with whom she had been in a relationship for some years. And friends! And theaters! And you had to abandon everything for… business! “Life is sad, decidedly sad.” When Isidro, who couldn’t approach a desirable woman without initiating an attempt at possession, believed it his duty to show himself loving toward Marcela, she received his words with a certain severity… A man going to the New World in search of his fortune would think about amorous trifles that could take away the time necessary for business! Life is serious, and you have to take advantage of your youth to secure a future. Then, when you have the support of your savings, you can allow yourself some madness… Didn’t she suffer equally because of business, having to make her trips to America whenever her friends there wrote to her that the harvest was good and money would be circulating in abundance?… In every port, she filled postcards with phrases of intense love learned from comedies. She couldn’t read a few pages of that yellow volume worth three francs and fifty in succession, for it would slip from her slung arm or be forgotten on the armchair. She thought of her “good friend,” the chic, penniless man she was leaving for a while. She had had her portrait taken many times by a steward on board who took advantage of the snapshot, and these sheets of paper would leave for Paris at the ship’s first port of call , depicting her standing and gazing at the sea with a melancholy air, or lying in the armchair with her face resting on one hand and eyes “of “daydream,” crocheting, reading… but always thinking of him. “I have my beguine,” she continued in her polyglot language. ” But you have to be serious, don’t you? And think of money for old age. If only I were to listen to all those who claim to be in love! Nonsense, che, believe me… Besides, you’re poor, and I don’t understand a poor man; he has no meaning for me; I don’t know what that can be. I know many who don’t have a sous and are nice; but I treat them as comrades only. Gaston, my friend, went bankrupt, and although he’s now on the mashed potatoes, he’ll have money again when his aunts die… Don’t look so amorous like a cabotin; it won’t move me . I’m too old to believe that.” “Me and the pigolita!”… And to demonstrate her love-monger incredulity, deaf to all the gestures, words, and oaths of the patrons, she repeated with delight the Creole phrase, the obligatory end of all her speeches: ” Me and the piolita!” Maltrana wasn’t the only one who had approached, wanting to disturb with diabolical proposals her tranquility as a reflective and prudent Argonaut, that monastic quietude of placid digestions and long naps, which for her was the greatest charm of ocean voyages. Her light blue eyes, her ashen blond hair, her white, juicy flesh with light yellow tones, similar to the fresh pulp of a melon, seemed to gain new charms as the days passed. With each voyage, the passersby filed more slowly past her chair, casting glances sideways. The number of serious gentlemen standing near her, contemplating the sea with a thoughtful air, increased, while propositions accompanied by figures fell from their feignedly motionless lips. Marcela no longer spoke to Isidro about the great Parisian house that had entrusted her with their representation. She seemed to have forgotten about hats, but she continued to apply meticulous commercial prudence to her true industry. The men!… She united them in her thoughts, seeing them with the same contraction of lugubrious spasm and the same snoring of agony, eternal gestures with which all intimacy inevitably ended for her. She believed in good faith, with the skepticism of a weary professional, that they had all come into the world for this sole purpose and were incapable of experiencing other desires. “It’s the same on all voyages, mon cher. As we approach the Equator, the men go crazy and we have to shake them off like flies.” And I, not for anything in the world!… Even if they offer me a thousand! Even if they offer me two thousand! Here everything is known, and even if it weren’t known, it’s the same. Later, when we arrive in Buenos Aires, they make a big deal out of the kindnesses one may have shown them on the ship, and they tell about it, and it’s useless for them to bring good toilettes from Paris and for a woman to present herself well. Importance is lost, one loses value, as they say there, and friends who are waiting with interest suddenly turn their backs… The novelty! Just being one’s own, so one can put on a show and one’s friends will envy you! You don’t know what this stuff costs in America, mon cher. It’s worth as much as a chic dress and much more than beauty… No; here, on the ship, nothing. I repeat: even if they gave me two thousand, Even if they gave me three thousand… Maltrana admired the ease with which this young woman repeated, amid sneers of disdain, figures in the thousands. She who, weeks before, in her small apartment on the Avenue de Ternes, would undoubtedly keep track of her daily expenses with the care of an orderly woman, albeit one of ill repute, who wishes to save for her old age. It was the influence of the environment, the march toward the land of hope, that daily upset the timid and narrow-minded notions of the old world in everyone’s minds . On the ship, there was constant talk of hundreds of thousands of pesos, of fields of leagues and leagues, of land whose value could increase a hundredfold in a single day. The franc and the centimes laboriously saved remained Aft of the stern, they disappeared into the horizon like something shameful that should be forgotten. They were the dreams and misery of a previous humanity that fortunately would never exist again. “You have to be prudent,” Marcela repeated. “Think of business and don’t waste time on love. Those of us who are born poor shouldn’t indulge in such nonsense. You’ll be ruined when you’re old and rich. Then you’ll have the pleasure of ruining yourself for some girl who could be your granddaughter… And if you really need love now, don’t waste your time on us: look among the “good” people coming on board. None of us would dare to reveal ourselves like that tall young lady with the bobbed hair. At the end of the voyage, it will turn out that we are the most judicious on board.” This girl’s restraint was remarkable; she managed her sex life with the same tact of a merchant who knows how to offer or withdraw goods in time to maintain their value. “The harvest is magnificent,” Isidro said that morning, leaning on Manzanares’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, mademoiselle. Everyone on the ship says the same thing. The banks won’t restrict credit; everyone who asks for money will have it; and business will flourish, and life will be good, ‘in the best of all possible worlds’… But even if an unexpected accident were to ruin this harvest that so interests you, you shouldn’t worry. Here is Monsieur Manzanares, a generous man who, it seems, is in love with you and will be happy if he can make you happy. ” “Sir,” Marcela said, smiling, “you know that I don’t accept anything on the ship. ” “Well, it will be on land. And he’s certainly eager to get to Buenos Aires as soon as possible, to lay all the lace and doily decorations in his establishment at your feet. ” Manzanares, with a greenish face and a ferocious smile, stammered his protest. “But who’s putting you in? What do you know?” And using the pretext of the arrival of other French women who were sitting next to Marcela and greeted her with a malicious “Bonjour!” upon seeing her so crowded, the merchant attempted to withdraw. “Wait, friend,” said Isidro, “I’m leaving too. These young ladies will have to discuss their affairs among themselves.” He pointed to two of Marcela’s companions who were arranging their armchairs to stretch out in them, undoubtedly tired from the climb from their cabins to the deck. The oldest was tall, stout, with hair dyed a fiery red and somewhat flabby flesh. Her green eyes had an imperious gleam; her movements were resolute and manly. She exercised undisputed authority in that part of the ship where her companions gathered, and which the grave ladies on board quietly called “the coconut corner.” Her friends listened to her like an oracle when they sought the support of her experience. They all knew of her travels across much of the globe, her daring voyages into the heart of America as a singing artist. Her life was a true serial novel, with encounters with wild beasts and bandits. And despite her energetic past, she would remain for hours in her armchair, overwhelmed by an unfounded fatigue. Going down to her cabin was an undertaking that made her reflect for a long time, and she ended up asking to be replaced by one of her friends. Her companion was a young woman with clear, virginal eyes, sometimes shy and timid, and at other times with the audacity of a rebellious schoolgirl. On the ship, she always wore her head uncovered, free of veils and hats, letting her thick, dark blond hair float freely, gently waving. She was proud that “everything was hers.” She was pleased with her youth, which was unadorned by false hair, and with her healthy skin, which had never seen the blush of rouge. Maltrana greeted them both like an old friend. “Good morning, Mademoiselle Ernestina. I am, as always, the most fervent admirer of your beautiful hair… My respectful homage, Madame Berta. I salute the majestic heroism of the old woman.” guard. And without paying attention to the cheerful but somewhat harsh word with which the exuberant madam responded to his greeting, Isidro hurried to flee after Manzanares, who had broken away from the group. The morning concert was beginning on the café terrace. Waiters circulated with large trays laden with sandwiches and cups of broth. The music seemed to draw human clusters from the doors, hatches, and stairwells. Isidro compared the ship to an old piece of furniture: all it took was the vibrations of the brass instruments to move it, for people to immediately emerge from every pore and orifice like strings of parasites. Several of the most prestigious ladies passed by him without turning their heads, ignoring him at seeing him in such bad company. “These dignified matrons,” he thought, “are going to take a dislike to me if they see me here for too long. Let’s flee; we must maintain good relations.” He stopped Manzanares at the café door. “Your effort is useless,” he said. “You’re wasting your time. I know very well what they told you: ‘We’ll see on land; here, not for two thousand, not for three thousand…'” “Leave me alone; don’t bother me,” roared the merchant. “Don’t bother me anymore.” And, separating himself with a rude jerk, he went into the café in search of his friends. Maltrana stopped at the door. He didn’t dare enter the gloom of this dark and smoky room during the day, and only at night did it bring out the glory of its gilding, its polychrome coat of arms, and its stained-glass windows under garlands of electric lights. The tables next to the windows were already occupied at that hour by the everlasting poker players. Isidro looked at them with admiring disdain . They began their daily task, which was to conclude after midnight, with no breaks other than those between meals. “What people!” he thought. ” They make the journey without knowing where they are, without having cast a glance at the sea. In the dining room, they discuss the incidents of the game between bites . They took up the cards as they left Boulogne or Lisbon, and when we reach the River Plate, we’ll have to shout to them: “We’ve arrived; we’re already in Buenos Aires.” And it’s possible they’ll still reply: “Just a moment; wait to dock until we’ve finished the last game…” And have some drinks! And bring some cigars! And the most admirable of ladies, who live side by side with them, touching their knees with the comrade across from them, swallowing smoke and looking at the cards with the eyes of a hungry witch!…” He fled from there, returning to the promenade, where he met Fernando, who was walking alone. Isidro saw an inner joy reflected in his eyes. “Business is going well, it seems. This morning’s conference was successful… Let’s walk a bit… tell me all about it.” But Ojeda, to divert the conversation, avoiding the requested confidence, slowed his pace and nudged his friend with his elbow. “Look and admire, Isidro. There you have one of the great priests of the yellow cult, preparing to officiate.” He pointed with his eyes at the banker, majestically reclined in his chair, with rich fur around his feet despite the heat. His long, dark red beard descended to the tome in his hands, the snaking of hair extending between the columns of typewritten figures. On a nearby chair, other files were piled unevenly, and he occasionally reached over them to collate them. Beside him, his wife, dressed in white with a profusion of expensive lace, was flipping her inseparable string of pearls between her fingers with a bored expression. As the two friends passed by her, her vague eyes seemed to focus on Fernando with a brief but vehement and curious glance. The banker was giving orders to his secretary to look for a new file in the various rooms that made up his luxurious apartment. “Have you noticed, Isidro, the titles of those tomes?” said Ojeda as he moved away a few steps. “Railroad projects, construction works, Sanitation for cities, land drainage, running water, streetcars… That gentleman carries an entire civilization with him. And it’s all for Brazil: most of his business dealings are in São Paulo, judging by the signs. “What I’ve seen,” Maltrana replied, “is the look on the lady with the necklace. She seems bored by so many pieces of paper, and I think she’d rather be next to you, chatting like the Yankee. Ah, women! Their desire to imitate! Their instinctive rivalry! That lady didn’t notice you in the early days; you didn’t exist for her. But since you’ve been walking around with Mrs. Power, leaning on the rail, she and many others, each day more excited by the monotony of sailing, are beginning to find you a little interesting… It’s not much, I admit: a bit plump and soft… and with that birdlike profile… and that nose that never ends.” She must be from the East: Jewish, Turkish, what do I know ! But a lady with such pearls always deserves attention. You should have made me friends with them. They don’t associate with anyone on the ship. The two of them keep to themselves, entrenched in their importance. But Ojeda smiled, shrugging his shoulders, and said maliciously, to irritate his friend: “If I were Brazilian, I would tremble just seeing the ramparts of files that good gentleman brings. In a few years, if they let him, he will have devoured Saint Paul and all the other saints he finds at hand, the coffee plantations, and every last black person. These European conquerors have insatiable stomachs. ” “Fernando, don’t be barbaric,” said Maltrana, becoming serious. “Don’t be a reactionary, don’t be a poet. That man will eat whatever he wants, and he will do very well if they let him, for such are the laws of life; but he will render civilization a great service.” Men like him are the ones who have made the America that attracts us and the ones who will make it even greater . Imagine when he has made all the great works he has on paper into reality… What does it matter if he abuses the reward! Whoever he is and wherever the millions he puts into the line of battle come from, he is a representative of the holy capital, a priest, as you say, of my religion, and I venerate him… It’s a great pity that he presents himself as such a great gentleman and only answers me with a cold stare from his horn-rimmed glasses and a rude grunt every time I try to talk to him about the good weather and the pleasure of the voyage! They had just turned the curve of the prow, and the entire starboard street opened up before their eyes. Maltrana stopped, seeing the armchairs detached from the wall and scattered so as to obstruct the passage. They were occupied by women, only women, and some passersby backed away, unwilling to continue their walk through these groups of women who had taken over the deck as their own, unconcerned about hindering traffic. “Look here, Ojeda. The ‘penguin bank’ is already gathering.” And at the puzzled expression of his companion, he offered an explanation. This nickname “penguins” was not his own invention. May God save him from such audacity!… The “penguins” were the most notable ladies on board, Argentine matrons who, unable to occupy the entire ocean liner, or even a yacht of their own, had gathered in this part of the ship as if frightened and offended by contact with the others. It was a young Argentinian man, returning to his homeland after several years of living in Paris, who invented this nickname one day when, speaking with Maltrana, he was lamenting the character of his compatriots, calling them unsociable and unsociable. “Look at our women, and learn your Galicianism,” he had said. ” They have taken refuge at one end of the ship, isolating themselves from the rest of the people. They keep their elbows pressed together so that no one can enter their group. They remind us of the penguins of the South Pole, those silly birds that can only live wing to wing, forming lines on the edges of rocks. And from then on, young people, in their gatherings at the smoking room, would call them “Penguin Corner” was the part of the ship where their mothers, sisters, and respectable family friends spent their days isolated from the rest of the passengers. This “penguin corner” was gradually regarded with a certain respect, until, a few days later, it became an enviable place. Passersby refrained from circling the deck and retraced their steps so as not to disturb the ladies’ conversations. Only the occasional careless or selfish gringo passed between the armchairs on his thick shoes, without bothering to understand the meaning of the furious glances his bold presence aroused. Tacitly, by virtue of a dark instinct shared by all passengers, a great class division had been established on the deck. The starboard side belonged to the socially worthless rabble, nameless travelers, and female passengers with suspicious lives. On this side, starting from the smoking room, was “the coconut corner”; then, “the comic section,” that is, the numerous armchairs of the male and female singers of the operetta troupe; “the Galician section,” where the Spaniards hung out ; and the much larger “gringada” group, composed of German commission agents who planned to penetrate with their samples into the heart of America; Swiss watchmakers, seemingly good-natured but quick to become irritated with a cold anger that took a long time to dissipate; small-time British businessmen; Scandinavian farmers established in the far South; German blondes looking for their husbands; and the American cattle ranchers, who were already half drunk by nightfall. The red-bearded banker and his voluminous files, the wife and her pearl necklace, and the secretary, always wearing a high, shiny shirt collar, remained on this starboard side among the unimportant people, to demonstrate with their ostentatious indifference that they were far above all the social divisions established on the ship. “Look at the respect the ‘penguins’ inspire,” said Maltrana. ” The chorus girls stroll arm in arm across almost the entire deck, laughing, pushing each other, looking at the men; but when they round the bow and reach us, they find our ladies doing hook work with a queen’s majesty, reading _Fémina_, or conversing about the merits and connections of their respective families, and they immediately retreat, keeping their mouths shut. Not one of them has the courage to slip before the imposing Areopagus.” The other night, through an interpreter, I proposed to one of those blondes that we pass together in front of the “penguins,” hoping to make her proud with this sacrifice and that she would reward me afterward. But the poor thing almost paled with fear: “Nein… nein,” as if I had proposed throwing us headlong into the sea. Of the modest society on the starboard side, the only ones passing by were Doña Zobeida and Conchita. The good lady from Salta greeted the “porteñas” with her lordly and kindly air, in the old-fashioned style, and continued on without indulging in further intimacies. Neither those grand ladies desired her friendship, nor did she need their support. The older ones responded to this greeting with a certain sympathy, as if they sensed in her something inherited and common that was being lost in their own persons. The younger ones looked at “the good woman” with surprise, welcoming her smiles as if they came from an old family maid. Conchita was less kind, and passed with obvious hostility between the groups blocking this stretch of deck belonging to everyone. The ladies dressed by the great Parisian couturiers had looks of mocking pity for her Madrid-style, homemade gowns . But she straightened her small, Goyaesque maja stature, joined her elbows at her waist, and walked forward, swaying her hips, looking with her piercing little eyes at the favored ones of fortune. Her gait and gesture seemed to say: “What’s it to me? What’s it to me?…” Near this majestic group, and seeking their contact, were other women. Ladies, whom Maltrana called “aspiring penguins.” They were the wife and daughters of Goycochea the Spaniard, the wife of the Italian millionaire, whose pearl necklace rivaled in value and continuous displays that of the banker’s wife, his daughters, the English governess, and the entire Boca family who brought Monsignor at their own expense. “Look, Fernando, with what an air of smiling humility these ladies welcome any word from the “penguins.” They are perhaps richer than the others, they can afford greater luxuries, but they are no more than ” middle-class people,” and the others are “good people,” as they say. Their husbands, Galician or gringo, have made their fortunes as did the fathers or grandparents of the others, also from Europe. There is no more difference between them than a generation or two of American life. Their origins are almost the same. But what a social difference that represents!… Ojeda nodded, recalling his time in Buenos Aires as Secretary of Legation. “Laugh, Isidro, at the social castes of Europe. There, almost all of us are one; education and intelligence level people. But in these democratic countries, the rich of yesterday need to isolate themselves so that others believe in their importance. Furthermore, the constant influx of adventurers forces them to defend themselves with a close touch of the elbows. The “good people” are those who had a great-grandfather who was a shopkeeper in Buenos Aires shortly before Independence, who sold red handkerchiefs to the Indians, packets of mate to the whites, and bought black slaves to resell them in the interior. All the best families were proud of owning an open shop, a great wealth for those times of poverty. Later, the grandfather disguised himself as a gaucho, without being one, to please the dictator Rosas, and drank his mate with a horse’s skull as a chair.” Another grandfather copied the French Romantics in his dress, his hairstyle, and his emphasis, fighting against the tyrant on the walls of Montevideo and firing odes and pamphlets at him in his moments of repose. He also had to keep an eye open to make sure that despot wouldn’t get his hands on him and interrupt his literary enthusiasm by having his throat slit with a blunt knife… Later, his father was the first to truly have money, and he began to establish the household and family in their current position. He believed in Mitre and fought for him… But meat was no longer abandoned in the Pampas as a priceless thing, and instead of making odes, he dedicated himself to fencing leagues and leagues of land with wire, making them his own, and putting his own brand on ownerless cattle… “And these ‘aspirants,'” Maltrana interrupted, “when the memory of their gringo or Galician husbands has faded like that of the poor shopkeepers of a century ago and their children or grandchildren marry those of the others, will in turn be “well-offs,” untitled grand duchesses of the transatlantic aristocracy. ” “True. And that’s why they beg for contact with those higher up with a tenacity that can withstand humiliation. They’ve just arrived from the lowest depths with great hardship; they already have the money: now they lack the social luster… And they push upward with the audacity of former emigrants who know neither shame nor ridicule.” As I told you before, you can laugh at the social castes of Europe. Between a Paris comic strip and a Grand Duchess featured in the Gotha, there is less distance than between a young, recent millionaire, daughter of emigrants, and a young lady whose father perhaps mortgaged his land and whose grandparents also came to America as emigrants… but eighty years ago. Maltrana went on to explain the diverse character of the other groups sitting on the port side. In the background, near the smoking room, the German merchants dozed in their armchairs with an old copy of Simplicissimus over their faces. Certain English couples patiently delighted in the adventures of well-behaved , well-dressed, and well-earning characters, recounted in four-volume novels in which nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. And between These people and the “penguin” faction, with their fellow admirers, were joined by another group, which Isidro called the “grand coalition of hostile powers,” composed of ladies of diverse nationalities, attracted by a common antipathy. Maltrana referred to them with beautiful nicknames, like Homeric characters. The Chilean woman, “the swan’s neck,” was like the central nucleus of this cell of transatlantic sociability, and around her gathered several Uruguayans, “those with beautiful arms,” and some Brazilians, “those with antelope eyes.” In the morning, upon going up on deck, members of both groups greeted each other with a ceremonious smile. “Good morning, madam; how did you wake up, madam?” And then each went to occupy their own territory, pushing their chairs so that the border gap, the unbridgeable separation between one nation and another, was clearly marked . The “hostile powers ” stood lined up along the wall with military correctness, taking care not to obstruct the walkway, so that everyone could appreciate the difference between one people and another. From time to time, the “penguins,” chatty and moving in their bursts of exuberance, would throw a friendly smile from the enemy side, but the smile was lost in space or was answered with slight nods of the head. The “powers” pretended to ignore this proximity, taking care to position themselves in such a way that they only presented the tip of a shoulder to the other side, and when the “penguin” side became most agitated, laughing at a piece of news or admiring a rare object, they would stubbornly gaze at the sky or the sea with unshakeable indifference. The “would-be penguins,” positioned between the two groups, caught the smiles of some and the words of others, taking advantage of them to strike up a conversation. They were content with the ship’s intimate life, which requires no introductions for people to get to know each other. Despite the lack of cordiality between the two groups, a momentary rapport was established between them almost every day. This is what good diplomatic practice demands; this is how nations armed to the teeth live, ready to tear each other apart, yet sending ambassadors and affectionate messages. The Chilean woman would leave her seat, unfolding her superb stature to advance across the deck “with the majesty of the Queen of Sheba,” according to Isidro, followed by a retinue of confederate women. The opposing side welcomed the diplomatic visit with a great shuffling of chairs, offering the best seats, and the conversation would develop languidly about memories of elegance and great purchases. Whenever some extolled the merits of a couturier or jeweler from the Rue de la Paix or the Place Vendôme, the others murmured in a soft voice and with aggressive modesty: “We can’t afford that; in our country we are very poor. That’s you and no one else.” And at the same time, they looked with malicious complacency at their dresses and jewels, of equal value to those of their rivals. The “penguins,” in turn, sent a deputation of matrons to the hostile territory, and their presence seemed to excite the industriousness of those they visited, who attacked their crocheting and embroidery work with renewed vigor, following the conversation without raising their heads from their work. Sometimes, neither side decided to seek out the other, and the encounters took place on neutral ground, in the group of “aspirants,” where the Italian family of La Boca and their bishop were seated. Beloved Monsignor! The ladies of the intervening country regarded him as a glory of their own. Thanks to him, the ladies of both sides came to visit them, attracted by the purple glow of his silk sash and the splendor of his gold cross. And Monsignor, smiling good-naturedly, strove to appear gallant and tried to entertain the feminine crowd with jokes learned in the seminary and memories of his classical studies. Virgil was his greatest adoration: he remembered him more often than the Fathers of the Church; he had said and guessed. He attributed modern anecdotes to the poet, as if this gave them new value. And every time he opened his mouth to speak in their language, the ladies already knew what the prelude was going to be: “Says the poet Virgil…” And what the poet said was a story the bishop had read months before in some Catholic newspaper. Another relationship of cordiality was established daily between the various groups. In the afternoon, before tea time, when the passengers were dozing in their seats and burning rays of sunlight entered the gloom of the promenade through the gaps in the canvas, dancing rhythmically from one head to another with the movement of the ship, as if they were pendulums of light, the girls went down to their cabins to come back up with large boxes full of sweets. Just like the processions of virgins that parade in front of cathedral tympanums, carrying a casket of relics as an offering in both hands, the American virgins with their tight skirts, high heels, and graceful gait went from group to group, handing out sweets: “A chocolate, madam? A chocolate, sir?” ” It’s incalculable, my friend Ojeda, the amount of confectionery these girls have packed into the steamer. Each friend, upon seeing them off in Paris, felt it her duty to bring the corresponding casket. Not two days go by without each of them uncovering a new package of chocolates. Empire boxes with Recamier or Josephine lying on a sofa; silk-lined caskets with Wateau shepherds, real suitcases of fleur-de-lis velvet… And the poor things, so kind!” With a taste for displaying the gifts from their acquaintances, they make their rounds every afternoon on the distinguished side of the deck, and people spend the journey chewing caramels and chocolates with cream. In the course of their offerings, they reached the port end, near the smoking room, where severe social differences began to blur, and the people who considered themselves distinguished fraternized with those on the opposite side. The virgins carrying caskets met their brothers, cousins, and future suitors, who spent the day in the café or its surroundings. This young woman, with her head uncovered, her hair parted in two thick, glossy, impermeable black locks that no hurricane could alter or move, and her small foot encased in patent leather boots with high insteps and showy shafts, whenever she left the smoking room, she would turn her eyes with some fear toward the “penguin corner.” There were their mothers and relatives and respected family friends; but they preferred escape to being caught by an affectionate call and suffering through half an hour of conversation in such noble company. “Tiring old women! Bold ladies!” And they would wait for their cousins or future brides to pass by before joining them and gently luring them toward the stern or the starboard side, where they would laugh and jump like free schoolchildren. Other times they would remain together in silence, gazing at the sea, with the ironic gaze of the French women stretched out in their armchairs behind them or the smiles of the German chorus girls to whom they would speak late at night, murmuring figures. “I admire those boys,” said Maltrana. “What a vision of reality! What a concept of life and its needs! They all reluctantly return to their homeland: they carry Paris in their hearts. The other night, Dr. Zurita’s eldest son consulted me about his future. As soon as he arrives in Buenos Aires, he plans to demand that “his old man” send him to Europe… He wants to study in Paris, he doesn’t know where… but anyway, he wants to study, without going near the Latin Quarter, which he finds not very chic and with ordinary women. And he asked me with adorable simplicity if a young man can live on four thousand francs a month, which is what he intends to ask the old man… “Four thousand pounds,” I thought. But at the same time I felt like embracing him, because of the high opinion he has of the needs of youth. To justify the young ladies’ advance toward the places occupied by His friends continued their task of distributing among the sleepy gentlemen who were pretending to read near the smoking room. “Sir, a chocolate? ” And the gringo, roused from his reading by the youthful voice, would raise his eyes from his German or English volume and put his hand in the chest, murmuring: “Thank you, thank you very much.” Then he would once again immerse himself in his poppy book. “Sir, a chocolate?” And the Brazilian with his yellow complexion and pointy chin, lean and angular, as if the equatorial sun had absorbed all his fat, would leap from his armchair with gallant haste, as if his life depended on it: ” Thank you very much… oh! Thank you very much.” And only when she was far away did the young lady dare to return the cap to her head and her head to the back of the chair. When the various groups of ladies occupying the port side met, engaging in general conversation, they invariably burst into complaints about the inclemency of the ocean and the attacks it inflicted on their persons. Their necks changed color, despite their care to avoid the sun’s rays. The salty air darkened them, giving them a brownish hue; the fair skin of the blondes yellowed with the hue of old ivory. The humid breeze swept the powder from their faces, preserving it only in the wrinkles and hollows of the skin, forming a white smudge. Their hairstyles were ruffled in the opening of a doorway, at a crossroads of corridors, as they passed from one side to the other, revealing the artifices and touches of the additions, forcing them to preserve these hair secrets under a gauze turban. If some respectable gentlemen approached the groups of ladies to converse with them, even the oldest, who seemed oblivious to worldly vanities, repelled them with youthful snarls. “Oh, don’t come any closer! We’re horrible. This damned sea is a disgrace. We all have something green about our faces.” And the gentlemen felt obliged to extol the great advantages of the voyage, during which the body is saturated with beneficial salts. What was lost in distinction was gained in healthy rusticity. At night, all were equally beautiful in the close atmosphere of the dining room and salons. A solidarity of gender suddenly erased the envy and antipathy that separated the female groups. Ladies from different factions gathered to walk the deck with a watchful eye. They were worried by the prolonged absence of their husbands. And when they saw them through the windows of the smoking-room playing poker, their eyes fixed on the cards, their foreheads wrinkled and worried, they smiled with satisfaction, as if they had just been caught practicing a virtue. Their anxieties reappeared when they found them on deck, even when they were deep in business conversation. The blondes from the operetta, the traveling cocoa-heads, a host of fearsome dangers were nearby; and without a word to reveal her anxiety, each one would approach her husband, hang on to his arm, join in the conversation, parade him around the deck, and only decide to release him at the entrance to the smoking-room, with the promise that she would return to poker or have a drink. Some women who had not yet left their prime and had been married for a short time strolled almost all day arm in arm with their husbands, with the air of a besotted treble, leaning their heads on his shoulder, as if the deck were Faust’s Garden. Out of dignity, they were happy to play the “old lady” for a while, distinguishing themselves from the spinsters, and remained among the respectable matrons; but suddenly they felt agitated by an irresistible tingling. They didn’t see their little husband. Who knew what was happening on the other side of the ship or on the deck of the boats! With so many bad women coming on this voyage! There was no ship free of temptations, only for decent people! And they ran, not knowing where, as if the alarm signal had suddenly sounded. An extraordinary amount of activity had young women of various nationalities coming and going that morning on the deck, in chatty groups. Each one approached her friends and acquaintances with a piece of paper and pencil in her hand. They were collecting for the equinoctial festivities, and before registering the donation, they argued and protested, wanting to increase the amount. “Look, Fernando,” said Maltrana, “how the French abbot, the bearded lecturer, moves among the ladies, whose admiration he wishes to retain. For him, there are no divisions, and he jumps from one group to another. The “penguins” consider him theirs because the great ladies of the Paris colony have recommended him to them. He dazzles the “aspirants” by talking about the princesses and duchesses he has met in his life as a worldly preacher.” He tries to flatter the “hostile powers” by speaking highly of their countries and implying that everyone in Europe knows where they stand in their appreciation of some peoples and others, distinguishing between real value and bluff. Look at how he distributes to the ladies the books he has written and newspapers with his portrait. Ah, comedian!… He carries in his luggage entire collections of all the illustrated magazines that have covered his sermons in Canada, the United States, Australia, and I don’t know how many other places. He circulates them and then carefully collects them, just like a tenor… That’s right, a tenor: a tenor in a cassock. And he spoke with ironic astonishment of the multiple and mediocre abilities of the traveling and verbose abbot: lecturer, painter, sculptor, poet, and musician. Maltrana knew this from one of the newspapers he himself distributed . “A rather devout lady lent it to me, who is determined that I admire the abbot.” And since I have no trouble pleasing, I showed my astonishment. “But madam, that man is Leonardo: the great Leonardo de Vinci.” And my words have had a mad success, for when Dr. Zurita and other sarcastic Argentinians mock the abbot and say he’s a sly fellow who’s gone to Buenos Aires in search of silver, the ladies of his family are indignant and bring me up as a decisive argument: “It’s Leonardo, the one who painted _The Supper_: Leonardo de Vinci. Maltranita says so, for he’s a young man who writes and has met many eminent figures…” Ojeda laughed at the seriousness with which his friend recounted these incidents of life on board. “Now, the good ladies,” Isidro continued, “want the abbot to give a piano concert one night, just for them… They’ve already given up hearing him give a lecture that was in the works. “Rostand’s _Cyrano_ and Christian Idealism…” What do you think of the subject? Are you laughing?… There’s a reason the good matrons praise him, saying he’s a most modern modern priest. But the abbot doesn’t want to hear about lectures on board; he refuses to unpack his merchandise for free before it arrives at the market. He’s reserved for a theater in Buenos Aires. Maltrana looked around for the other lecturer, the Italian professor, who was keeping away from the ladies, near the smoking room, among the sleepy readers, with a column of volumes and magazines beside his armchair. “The ‘penguins’ greet him because he has a familiar name, and they instinctively respect celebrity. They’ve had him sign countless postcards with philosophical and gallant ‘thoughts’ for them and for all their collector friends; they’ve taken autographed portraits of him , and now, the exploitation over, they don’t remember him. He’s a wise man with bad ideas. The abbot monopolizes them all.” Maltrana remained thoughtful, and then said to Fernando: “I think that you and I could dedicate ourselves to giving lectures. Apparently, it is very popular in America and it brings in money. What interesting countries! Paying to hear speeches!… So many people speak for free in our country, and even so, most of the time they don’t find anyone to listen to them!” Ojeda recalled his life in Buenos Aires years before and the lectures he had attended. Young people feel the same eagerness as the diligent and curious scholars, who, after hearing the masters’ lessons, desire to know the inner workings of their lives. The books and works of art sent by the old world weren’t enough for them; they wanted to see the physical personalities of their authors up close. “And every year, my friend Isidro, illustrious men arrive in Buenos Aires under the pretext of giving lectures, but in reality to satisfy the curiosity of the Argentines and for the pride of the numerous European colonies, which, by exhibiting and celebrating their famous compatriot, seem to say: ‘We’re not all ignorant people who plow the land or sell behind a counter. It’s good for these Creoles to know that in our country there are doctors better than their own…’ And the people, upon learning that the author of a book they happened to read a long time ago , or the political figure whose name they find every morning in the newspaper, has arrived, say to themselves: ‘Let’s see what breed that bird is.’ They spend a few pesos to lock themselves in a theater from five to seven, and lulled by the speaker’s voice, they compare his face with the published portraits, they notice the cut of his frock coat, convincing themselves once again that in Argentina people dress better than in Europe, and they even count the number of times he drinks water. Furthermore, they indulge in caricatures of him and attribute anecdotes to him in which he appears astonished to learn that in America no one wears feathers anymore. Because there, people insist that Europeans imagine them as feathered Indians, so they can later laugh, with childlike delight , at the great ignorance of those from the Old World. Ojeda stopped speaking, smiling as if inwardly pleased by his memories, and then continued: “The ladies who fill the boxes out of curiosity disappear after the third lecture, and they’re right, because they’re bored to death.” They only like lecturers who recite poetry… But there remain the country’s intellectuals, the “doctors,” who attend with manifest hostility , and upon entering, they say to one another: “Let’s see what that gentleman has to say.” Then, upon leaving, they protest in chorus. “He said nothing new; we learned nothing, absolutely nothing…” As if discovering something new were an everyday occurrence! As if a man who discovered something new in his country were going to say to his compatriots: “Be patient, wait a little while. I’m going to take the ocean liner to tell the gentlemen of America about my discovery, and I’ll be right back…”! As if, with the means of communication of our time and the widespread distribution of books, it were possible to go anywhere with a recent idea without thirty or forty people immediately jumping out saying: “I already knew that… “! “So,” Maltrana interrupted, “on these voyages of lecturers, the arrival is always more glorious than the return. ” “Certainly. When our ship anchors in Buenos Aires, you will see flags, hear music and cheers. Then, curiosity satisfied, indifference sets in, and the heroes of a day reembark with no other accompaniment than half a dozen friends who remain there as consuls of their renown and in charge of their business. The only ones who don’t forget are the “doctors,” who, to convince themselves of their own superiority, repeat: “You haven’t said anything new. We knew everything…” And this happens because no one in life courageously presents the truth; because the lecturer should tell his audience on the first day: “All of you, who live struggling for money, must imagine why I made this long voyage, coming to a land that doesn’t have the Parthenon, the Pyramids, or the Alhambra. It wouldn’t be right to put my hat down in the middle of a sidewalk and say, ‘I’m So-and-so, who’s come to see you. Throw something in so I can take back a good memory of this rich country. That’s why I prefer to perform in a theater and justify the public’s generosity with two hours of boredom and vulgarity…’ Basically, this is nothing more than a series of lectures. A pretext for the country to be generous with the celebrity who visits him. “I see clearly,” said Maltrana. “A kind of Nobel Prize that Argentina allows itself the luxury of giving to someone known for something, as long as they take the trouble to go and ask for it in person… With the difference that this Nobel Prize is by popular vote. ” “Exactly. And don’t think the country loses anything with it. For its worldwide glory, never has money been so well spent as the five pesos it costs to hear a lecture. The lecturer, upon arriving in his country, forgets with distance the scratches of the distant “doctors” and only sees the check he keeps in his wallet. A sum of little importance there; but translated into European money, it represents fifty thousand or one hundred thousand francs: the product of half a dozen books, the salary of eight years of teaching earned in a couple of months.” Ojeda imagined the consequences of the trip. The wife of the illustrious man renewed the family furniture and wardrobe; The two spouses acquired a small country house so their children could be raised better; everyone in the household erupted in praise of Argentina, and friends and even the most distant acquaintances fixed their attention on this wonderful country, where you only have to stoop to find money. The illustrious teacher’s colleagues bit their lips with envy, and when, in the hazards of life, they found someone from Argentina, even a fool, they flattered and harassed them, implying that they too would go there… at the slightest invitation. The lecturer considers it his duty to write a book that demonstrates his gratitude, a book conceived through pleasant memories, and which is pompous and glorifying like an officially commissioned ode. And when some ill-humored person roars against the distant Republic, implying that things there are very different from how optimism imagines them, the great man indignantly leaps to the defense of a country whose name his wife and children always mention with veneration. “I thought,” Isidro interrupted, “that these lecturers were amiable mockers, who, after exploiting American credulity, were laughing at it… ” “Perhaps some have thought so; but in the end, they are the ones exploited , for on their own impulse, upon returning to their lands, they produce propaganda that, if it were the work of the government, would cost millions. Who knows how much of a part they play in the recent, worldwide fame of the country we are going to! It may well be that someone gave us the first initial idea of this trip with a reading we no longer remember… ” Isidro, who, while listening to his friend, was following the course of the strollers with his eyes, touched him on the elbow, interrupting his words. “Look at the peerless Nélida.” She had just stepped onto the deck, and her adoring followers were already emerging from the smoking room… “Hail to the most beautiful passenger on the entire ship!” Nélida’s fresh lips parted, responding with her feline smile to Isidro’s Versailles-like genuflection. Then she passed before “the penguin bench ,” straightening her towering stature, defying the anger of the imposing ladies with her candid gaze. Most pretended not to see her, so as not to respond to her greeting. Some replied, “Good morning, child,” with sad voices and pitying eyes, as if she were a sick woman whose end they believed was imminent. “That Nélida is stupendous in her audacity,” said Maltrana. “She knows that all the ladies speak scandalously of her, and she greets them as in those early days, when they believed her to be a sensible girl. The sneers and snorts roll over her person without bothering her.” Isidro spoke of the matrons’ indignation, who considered it a torment to travel with their daughters and suffer Nélida’s company. ” They forbid the girls from greeting her, when in the first days of sailing she was the most feted by all of them… But the girls pretend to obey, and seek her out in secret, far from their mothers. The charm of brushing against the forbidden! The magical attraction of sin!… In the evenings, While the ladies doze, they go up with Nélida to the top deck so she can teach them how to dance the tango… but the tango as it is danced in the night cafes of Berlin. They think of the excuse that when they go ashore they will no longer see her, and that here on the ship everything is fine. Nélida continued on until she reached the port side, where her mother was sitting, with her half-imbecile son on one side and the venerable head of the family on the other, who was swaying his patriarchal head, half-closed eyes, as if mentally cherishing a new business. “The poor thing,” Isidro continued, “feels the family’s love in the mornings and goes in search of her father. She kisses him, plays with him like a cat, and at the same time she has the pleasure of following out of the corner of her eye the impatience of her admirers, who keep their distance, eager to join her.” Naive and refined creature!… But look, Fernando: you, who think me so little, and you’re not wrong, look how impatiently my admirers await me. And he surreptitiously pointed to the group of ladies, some of the older ones turning their eyes toward Maltrana, as if inviting him to approach. “I have my audience, and like every notable man, I also have my enemies and detractors. I can’t approach the noble matrons and exchange a greeting with them without one of them saying to me: ‘Tell us something. You who know everything, Maltranita, tell us what’s happening on the ship.’ And they keep me standing before them, so that the social distances aren’t completely erased , until suddenly I make them laugh or tell them something that interests them deeply, and then one of them, with sudden solicitude, says to me: ‘But sit down, sit here and don’t be silly.’ And he draws up his legs so I can sit at the end of the long chair, like a page at the lady’s feet… Moruzaga’s widow, who has millions and millions, likes to talk to me privately so I can learn about her husband’s charms and virtues. Poor lady! A true lover! She only lives when she can talk about “her deceased.” And if the conversation changes the subject, he loses all interest for her and seems to fall asleep with his eyes open. A sudden thought made Maltrana abandon his light tone. “But have you noticed, Ojeda, the character of these brothers of ours? The first few days, when I heard them, I would say: ‘We’re the same: the same except for some differences in accent and syntax…’ And no, sir; we’re not the same. How can I explain myself? We all play the same instrument, but we have different ears for appreciating the sounds.” Perhaps I say something that happens to strike me as funny, something that in Spain would pass for a “stroke” of wit, and the good ladies remain indifferent, as if they didn’t understand me. Then, in the course of conversation, I throw out a childish foolishness, a school joke, which in Madrid would earn me a jeer, and my audience laughs at this joke and repeats it as a brilliant display of wit. Ojeda, recalling his travels in America, agreed with his friend’s words . There was not only divergence in the appreciation of the sounds of the common instrument of the language: they also differed in the agility and strength of its use. “In many of those countries,” said Fernando, “people speak with painful slowness, as if the search for words were accompanied by the pains of childbirth. The women, especially, only have the verbal energy to last five minutes, and then they fall silent, staring at one another. They only come to their senses when they have to “peel” someone; But this is a verbal phenomenon not only in America, but in every country on the planet. “Yes; they speak little,” said Maltrana. “They like to listen, but their hearing capacity is perhaps as limited as their verbal capacity. In the long run, they tire of listening, even if the conversation interests them. They seem to resent having remained silent for so long, and they retaliate by calling the very person whose voice they have requested a “clunker.” What is not understood, what is not liked, is known to be a “clunker.” Isidro began to move away from his friend. “I’ll leave you, Fernando; my audience is calling me. In the early days, I was more successful. I went from one group to another: from the “penguins” to the “hostile powers”; but you can’t please everyone at once. Now, with the “powers,” it’s just a greeting; cold and courteous diplomatic relations. The last time I approached the group, the Chilean “swan neck” said to me with a knife-like smile: “What are you doing here, patero? Leave us alone and go mess up your Argentines.” And although being called a flatterer is a bit harsh, I abide by the advice, since I’m going to Argentina.” He tried to tug Ojeda’s arm to draw him toward the group. “Come with me. The ladies will be very pleased to hear you. You ‘ve been introduced to all of them, and they find you very nice.” Don’t you want to?… You’re undoubtedly offended by what I told you, that the girls found you “very handsome, but somewhat old-fashioned”… Don’t pay any attention to it. It’s a consequence of the simple mentality of these people who still live close to the primitive trunk, that is, to Nature without artifice or refinement. For them, a good-looking girl of thirty- five is an old woman, and a man worthy of being loved must be twenty at most. They only admire existence in bud, as in the days of tribal life… And this when in Europe each passing year pushes back the limit of amorous age to the confines of old age. Balzac would make people laugh today with his novel *The Thirty-Year-Old Woman*. Ladies of forty are now the most formidable conquerors. In the theater, gallant men in their fifties vie for their lovers with young men and end up carrying them off… Old man, and you’re only thirty-six ! Pay no attention to the opinions of these newly refined people, who, when it comes to refinement, only copy what is external and obvious… Absolutely, you don’t want to come?… See you later. Fernando remained alone for a few minutes, leaning on the railing, following with his eyes the cascading of the water churned over the ship’s sides. Flowers of foam swirled over the green back of the ocean, topped by a spiral that disappeared into the depths. Then he began a stroll across the deck, and before the group of ladies, he raised a hand to his cap in a silent greeting, without turning his gaze. As he passed, he brushed past Isidro, who was standing up speaking, and heard a woman’s voice interrupting him with interest: “Don’t say anything!… That’s very curious. Sit down, Maltranita, and tell.” Ojeda continued on the port side, greeting the ” hostile powers” and a group of Argentines and Brazilians who were discussing the estancias along the River Plate, the coffee plantations, and the value of the fields, mixing in quantities of leagues and millions of pesos. Mr. Oneglia, the Italian millionaire, who was resting, enormous and flaccid, in a special armchair, far from his family, eager to rub shoulders with the ” well-to-do,” opened one eye upon hearing Fernando’s footsteps and protected it with a grunting greeting, returning to his night of calculations. Beside
him, as if their shared tastes required this contact, sat the three Spanish merchants. Further away, the Italian lecturer raised his head and rested a book on his knees to greet Ojeda. Near the smoking room, Nélida’s mother seemed to caress him with her glowing eyes, and the father gratified her with a protective smile. The girl, already tired of family outings, had detached herself from them and was laughing at the door of the smoking room, escorted by her brother and all the admirers, who seemed to undress her with their eyes. Fernando arrived at the terrace of the café, attracted by Mendelssohn’s _Song of Spring_, which was playing. He had barely leaned on the railing to listen when he saw a body approaching him, blocking the sunlight, and heard a forceful voice harshly cutting through the words. “Good morning, Mr. Ojeda… You will forgive the liberty I take, but I am a friend of Don Isidro, and perhaps he has told you about my person… Please excuse me for approaching just like that, but among compatriots! There are so few of us on the ship!… That’s why I said to myself: “Even if it’s not proper, I’m going to greet that gentleman.” It was the Spanish priest that Maltrana had shown him several times from a distance: a small, dark, wiry man, lively in his movements, in whom Fernando found a certain agile and graceful air of a banderillero. His thinness made more visible the exuberance of a pointed abdomen that seemed to belong to another body. A somewhat blackish chain, with watch keys and medals, stretched from the buttons of his cassock to a breast pocket. Two fingers, reddened by tobacco, held a cigarette. His head, with its coarse, intensely black hair streaked with premature gray, was partly hidden under a round silk cap, the same as those worn by shopkeepers. “José Fernández, priest, to serve God and you,” said the priest, introducing himself. He showed the strong teeth of a countryman with a humble smile that betrayed his desire to be intimate with this compatriot, the most eminent figure on the ship, in his opinion. The music had stopped playing, and the priest took advantage of this silence to express himself with the exuberance of a verbose man lacking friendship, seeking an opportunity to spread his eloquence. His Spanish frankness led him to treat Fernando with confidence after a few words, as if he were an old comrade, accompanying each advance of his intimacy with humble apologies: “Forgive me; but here it’s not like on land. We spend our lives together; we are in the solitude of the sea, trusting in the will of the Lord… So you’re also going to Buenos Aires, Don Fernando?… Well, well!” “There we all go, and may the Almighty grant that business may turn out well for you, according to your wishes.” The good priest spoke without interruption, and Ojeda extracted fragments of his story from these periods of confidential conversation. He had his mother in a small town in Old Castile; he also had a sister who was unhappily married, with a multitude of children, and everyone trusted him, who was the glory of the family, “the priest,” the exceptional being. The last descendant of a line of miserable farm laborers, he had managed to emancipate himself from the servitude of his homeland thanks to a certain quick wit demonstrated at the local school and the protection of an elderly lady who had paid for his priesthood. “A short career, Don Fernando. I’m not a theologian; I’m not a doctor of anything. A priest who preaches mass and cooks nothing more; but how much I’ve worked in this life!” And what I still have to suffer!… My brother-in-law is unhappy, a good man, good for nothing, and I have to support him, both the poor old woman and my sister, and all the nephews and nieces, who think themselves superior to the rest of the town because they have an uncle who is a priest. I have been a vicar, working from dawn to night for six reales a day: a peseta and a half, Don Fernando. I have been a substitute parish priest in shabby places, and after sending my mother what I earned, less than what a Civil Guard earns, I had to support myself with gifts from poor parishioners . And still the town barber and other gossips gossiped about the pampered life we in the Church lead… When I lived in Madrid, near the district representative, applying for a better position, I went from sacristy to sacristy asking for masses like someone begging for alms. I have suffered a lot of hunger; I am not ashamed to say it: a lot of hunger to support my family; And that’s why I’m going there, to see if I can change my luck.” Don José was silent for a moment, as if hesitating, afraid to express his ideas, and finally continued in a low voice: “They say Spain is a Catholic country, the most Catholic on earth. That may be so, but there aren’t two pesetas in it for the clergy of my class, for those of us who really work. There’s money for the Church, but others… others take it.” In the vagueness of his gaze, in the timidity of his voice, there was a certain protest against those who lived in the high places. Fernando wanted to know how he had come up with the idea of the trip. “I have seminary classmates there. A young man who studied with me lives in Buenos Aires, and he has written to me wonderful things about that land, inviting me to go with him. Before, it was much better: there was a lack of people of our class; now, priests from all countries arrive on every ship. But it doesn’t matter: in the capital, one can live well in the shadow of a parish, and then there’s the countryside, where a town is founded every week and a priest is needed… I also have classmates in Chile and other Pacific nations. There, I believe things are still looking up for us. They write to me that there is a lady who gives one hundred pesos in alms for a Mass. And in Spain, no one earns more than three pesetas!” Ojeda was pleased with Don José’s frankness when comparing the earnings of the priesthood in the two hemispheres. He had done well to embark: surely fortune awaited him there. “It’s not so easy, Don Fernando; there are many people.” They tell me that Italian priests work for what they’re given, and they’ve lowered their prices. It’s like many of them help themselves with a trade, and when they return home from church, they’re old people’s tailors or mend shoes… In those lands, according to my information, the men seem somewhat indifferent to us. The same as in ours. We must seek the support of the women, and for this, Don Isidro has promised to introduce me to those rich ladies who talk with him and sit in the bow. They seem very enthusiastic about the Italian bishop: “Monsignor, here; Monsignor, there,” but I’m Spanish, and who knows! I’d like to find a rich lady to protect me. Fernando smiled, somewhat astonished by the naturalness with which Don José made this statement. What calm cynicism! And he wanted to accompany his laughter by touching him on the chest with a finger, but stopped when he saw his expression of surprise. “You’re mistaken, Mr. Ojeda.” I am an unworthy sinner in many ways… except in that one. I have my flaws, like all men, but what you think… never! I never think about such trivial things. I am very much a man! He arrogantly beat his chest as he made this manly declaration, and Ojeda admired the incoherence of the poor priest, who proudly repeated his masculine quality as proof of virtue. “I am very much a man, Don Fernando, and that is why I am indifferent to that silly sin you are thinking about, which only causes scandal and headaches… I’m not saying there are other sins… ” A smile of childish malice wrinkled his brown cheeks, where the blue stain of his thick beard was prominent. His clenched, dazzling teeth were revealed, revealing a great crushing force. Contemplating their avid brilliance, Ojeda believed in the purity of that man. Voluptuousness had contracted all its tentacles within him, only to sordidly retract into his palate and stomach. Maltrana had spoken to him a few times about Don José’s insatiable appetite, about the promptness with which he rushed to the dining room as soon as the trumpet sounded, about the profusion with which his hands piled sandwiches and biscuits onto the trays at tea time, about the enthusiasm with which he praised the abundant nutrition aboard the Goethe. His capacity for nourishment was comparable, according to Isidro, only to that of a shipwrecked sailor who has survived or that of a resident of a besieged city who has surrendered after several years. Forty generations of starving day laborers were eating with his mouth. At that very moment, Ojeda looked toward the port promenade and saw Isidro, who had just abandoned his conversation with the ladies and was coming toward him. But he stopped in front of Nélida’s family. The priest, without moving from his seat, was talking with Martorell, the bank poet, and Maltrana, after listening to them for a few seconds, joined in . “To make my way, I need a lady to protect me,” Don José continued. ” But that’s not easy; in our world there are fashions, as in all worlds, and vanities and categories. I am a poor priest who He only knows how to perform like a good worker. “You should imitate,” said Ojeda, “that French abbot who so enthuses the ladies. ” “Shut up, sir!” protested the priest. “I’m no good as a puppeteer. We Spaniards don’t know how to put on comedies: we have more seriousness… I’m very much a man!” And he summed up his indignation with a fierce blow to his chest, affirming several times that he was very much a man. “Perhaps on land it will be easier for me to make my way. I’m not a fashionable priest , but I am a Spanish priest, and that must count for something among people who are of our blood, speak our language, and profess Catholicism because Spain was the first to discover their lands. There’s the good lady Doña Zobeida, that angel of goodness; for her, there is no other priest on board but me: the bishop and the abbot, as if they were shoemakers. I wish their lawsuit would be resolved and their fortunes would change!” Certainly I wouldn’t forget… Besides, in that land, they say, excess money and an abundance of business spoil the priests. Some are dedicated to breeding horses or oxen, others lend money to parishioners on the crops. But I only work at my own expense, to do my part, and I’m content with little. My happiness would be a parishioner in those fields where meat is wasted, they say, and bread the same. My mother can’t come because she’s afraid of the sea; but I’ll bring my sister, who’s a fine cook, and it will be bad if she doesn’t find a job for my brother-in-law and give my nephews a career… Lord, so be it! He remained indecisive and silent, as if new and unexpected ideas were stirring his brain . “May the Almighty save me from being deceived,” he said; “but I think, Don Fernando, that we are something in America.” Perhaps we don’t know as much or are less daring than that chatterbox with the beard, but we are more serious, more simple. Our Catholicism is for America more… how shall I explain myself?… more… “More classical,” Ojeda interrupted, to get the priest out of his predicament. “That’s it,” Don José said after a hesitation, as if he were weighing the word and not fully understanding it. “More classical, more in keeping with the country, and that ‘s why good, simple people who don’t mind fashions should receive us better than those foreign priests who look like theater people.” The two remained silent, and Ojeda again had the same vision as the day before… “Buenos Aires!” This world name had also flickered for a moment, like the flicker of a mystical lamp, in the gloom of the sacristy, evoking the illusion of a bountiful table, a table of plenty, and around it a robust and healthy family, secure in the future, surrounding the rich priest… And off they all went, following the fluttering of hope, toward a world of fertile solitudes devoid of men, carrying as their entry price strength, initiative, and appetites: some their arms, others their intelligence, others the avid capital eager to copulate with the earth and reproduce ad infinitum… and even that poor priest brought his mass, his Spanish Catholicism , more serious, more… classical. Maltrana’s arrival interrupted these meditations. “What does Don Pepe say?” And he accompanied the familiar greeting with a gentle pat on the cleric’s abdomen. The latter bowed, smiling. “What a cheerful and friendly Don Isidro! It was impossible to get angry with him…” Seeing the two friends together, the priest seemed to shrink in his humility. “You’ll have to talk,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost noon. Time for lunch! I need a bit of a walk to work up an appetite.” And he walked away, followed by the laughter of Maltrana, who ironically lamented the priest’s lack of appetite. Ojeda wanted to know what his friend had discussed with Martorell and Nélida ‘s father . “We were talking about business,” Isidro said with sudden gravity and a mysterious expression, “about a big deal we have on our hands. Who knows if before a year is out I’ll be rich, very rich, richer than you, who want to go to the desert to plow the land! Friendships serve as A lot, and I have good ones. Ojeda’s questioning and astonished look invited him to continue his confidences. He hesitated for a moment, as if fearing his friend’s mockery, and finally said resolutely: “We’re going to found a bank as soon as we get to Buenos Aires… Don’t laugh , Fernando; I expected it. It’s serious. Martorell contributes the idea and his experience as a technician. Mr. Kasper, Nélida’s father, will provide the capital needed to get started; not much, according to the Catalan, who knows a lot about this. I… I don’t know what I’m putting into the business, but I’ll certainly contribute something, since I’m entering it, and my partners seem happy to have me in their company.” Ojeda laughed so hard that his back hit the railing, bending him over. “Bastard, banker!” “Maltrana, founder of a bank, when he barely had a few pesetas to disembark!” “Don’t mock me,” he said, somewhat annoyed. “It’s not such a big deal. Are we going or not to a land of riches and wonders?” If you could listen to that Catalan lad, the simplicity with which he explains things would convince you that the bank is a serious matter. And what’s so extraordinary about me becoming a great banker in a country where everyone, upon arrival, changes professions and each one discovers faculties and aptitudes they didn’t suspect in Europe? Here on the ship, all you hear is talk of millions and stupendous business deals. We all carry our gigantic plan to astonish the New World and enslave fortune. Even those who returned from America in despair are returning with renewed vigor. Why shouldn’t Maltrana have his business?… Believe me, those who founded banks there were no more valuable than me, nor did they have the talent of Martorell, who is an eagle in these matters. After the initial burst of hilarity had passed, Ojeda marveled at the conviction with which his friend spoke of the future business. He undoubtedly felt the mysterious influence he had observed on previous voyages. A broadening of hope, to the most absurd confines of the unreal, dominated the travelers. The isolation in the middle of the ocean diminished or nullified all the obstacles one encounters when living on dry land. The immensity of the sea seemed to dilate brains and eyes. Everyone thought big and saw their own ideas with magnifying lenses. And since the hope of some did not hinder the hope of others, everyone pushed madly forward, taking things for granted in this gallop of optimism. The fellow passengers, who during the first days of sailing had glared at each other on the promenade deck, now sought each other out, unable to live apart, and talked for hours about the future joint ventures they had conceived, tirelessly handling them to better assess their merits, examining them, like a precious stone, facet by facet. A breath of heroism that despised obstacles made their minds vibrate. Old Europe, meticulous, cowardly, and backward, was left behind; the propellers sent the foaming waters spurting at it like a spit of contemptuous farewell. From the bow came the wind of the New World, the breath of a land of brave men without scruples or remorse, where absurdity triumphs, provided it is accompanied by tenacity and audacity. If a business required land, the land would be acquired. The future winners didn’t know how or by what means, but it would be acquired, and… enough. This was a minor detail. If large amounts of capital were needed, they would still be found. There was no need to worry about this. The important thing was the business, the great, stupendously new business they had come up with—a novelty that consisted of transplanting something old and traditional from Europe—and they calculated the sure profits: so much per month, so much per year, so many millions in five years, believing themselves, through sheer delusion, almost at the end of this rapid race of fortune. Some, with inexhaustible generosity, felt the desire to do so. They shared their stupendous fortune with all their associates, and each morning they admitted a new partner, graciously offering a share to a new assistant, to the point of not knowing for sure what would remain for them, the brilliant inventors. Others, more rugged of soul, began to view each other with suspicion and wariness, fearing mutual betrayal in the business that was yet to come. Wealth shrinks and hardens hearts. And the most extraordinary thing was that they all abhorred imagination as a dishonorable and ridiculous faculty. “No illusions: you have to see things as they are, and if you exaggerate, assume the worst. Let’s say you only earn half; let’s say it’s only half of half… ” And after these downward calculations, which revealed their hatred of all fantasy, they always emerged as millionaires. The most enthusiastic and those with unshakeable faith were those who had been to America and returned for a second or third time. The neophytes, who had listened with amazement to his prophecies of wealth, suddenly seemed to hesitate. It was European timidity resurfacing. “I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like,” said the old companion. “No need to be afraid; this time, with my experience, I’m sure of success…” And Maltrana, mocking and skeptical, who was going to America without really knowing why, had suddenly felt swept away, like the others, by this hurricane of optimism. “Yes, sir; a bank,” he repeated, looking at Ojeda with a somewhat aggressive expression. “We’re going to found a bank, and I don’t understand why a serious business should make you laugh so much. Things are magnificently conceived. That Catalan boy, although despicable as a poet, is a great organizer; and Mr. Kasper may be a crook, if you will, but in business, cunning is a merit. The plan is flawless .” And he explained it with the dryness of a great man offended by the ignorance of his audience. Founding a bank was commonplace in those countries. One was born every week, according to what Martorell had told him. There wasn’t a main street in Buenos Aires that didn’t have a few. The most important thing was to find a good house and furnish it with “serious,” “distinguished” English furniture and polished mahogany counters. In addition, a huge gilded sign was needed, sets of flags for patriotic celebrations, and bright lighting on the facade at night. Capital to start with: two or three million pesos. “You’ll think you’ve crushed me by asking: ‘Where’s the capital?…’ All those millions, and more if you wish, are listed in the Bylaws, and especially in the windows and the sign, in letters two feet wide. But in reality, you start with thirty or forty thousand pesos… And you’ll also ask me: ‘Where are they?…'” Mr. Kasper, who greatly appreciates Martorell and believes in the business, promises to bring them. Furthermore, we count on the good gentlemen who will join the Board of Directors… There are always half a dozen shopkeepers eager to appear at the head of a bank. It’s very nice to be able to say to friends: “This afternoon I have a Board meeting.” It’s important to write to relatives in Europe, to the simpletons of the land, on bank paper with a letterhead that commands respect, in which the millions of capital and the operations of the establishment are recorded. The Catalan, who “knows the human heart” and is a great exploiter of vanities, has had his eye on a few compatriots since his previous trip. They will contribute funds, take shares to be on the Board of Directors, and once the bank is up and running… it’s time to live! We’ll lend money at 30 percent, which is easy there, according to Martorell, we’ll lend with a mortgage, so we can keep the mortgaged assets; countless beautiful misdeeds, which my partner explains with his beautiful, poetic hyena smile. Maltrana remained silent, as if examining himself internally. “Land of wonders!” he continued. “I, a banker, I who have made the moneylenders of Madrid suffer so much!… Land of transformisms, where Bricklayers become farmers, fugitive priests become family men, and ruined young gentlemen become trusted cashiers in commercial houses!… “Do you already have a title for the bank?” asked Ojeda. “That’s the obstacle, the only stumbling block our business has encountered so far . The title is important. Success almost depends on finding something that sounds good, that catches the ear, inspires confidence, and has an international character, as international as possible. The partners can’t agree on the title; the only indisputable thing is that, whatever its size, it must add “and from the Río de la Plata.” Because there, according to Martorell, all banks, even those with Russian, Chinese, or Norwegian titles, have “and from the Río de la Plata” at the end of their titles. Without this, there’s no possible respectability.” Isidro fell silent again, but his face animated during this pause with its usual expression of malice. “I have my degree, a most universal degree. It encompasses the diverse nationalities of the people who will come to us and at the same time flatters the regionalist sentiment. I’ve even taken into account the birthplaces of my two companions. ‘Bank of Westphalia, Tarragona, and the Río de la Plata.’ But the partners don’t accept it.” Fernando stared at his friend. “Famous Maltrana!” With him, gravity was always short-lived. One never knew for sure where his emotions ceased, giving way to cold mockery. High above the ship, the midday signal vibrated, a roar that shook the corridors and partitions of the ocean liner and was absorbed without echo by the dull infinity of the ocean. “Twelve: we’re going to lunch.” Near the bow, they saw some passengers pointing at the horizon , arguing in short sentences. They squinted to give greater power to their vision; They passed the binoculars from hand to hand , exploring the edge of the ocean, over whose backs billowed faint vapors. “Cape Verde is now visible…” Others hesitated. They were n’t the islands: they were simple clouds. And everyone, as if awakening from the lethargic calm of the sea, displayed a starving desire to see land, to distinguish those islands where the ship would not stop. Down below in the dining room, many were eating lunch with a certain haste, like people who have to go to the theater and hurry through their meals for fear of being late. “Land: land is now visible,” they said from table to table with childlike joy. More impatient, some rose from their seats with napkins in hand and craned their necks, wanting to distinguish through the dining room windows those islands they were about to pass by and which everyone spoke of as a promised land. After lunch, people drank their coffee in a hurry, and the lounges were deserted, the chirping of fans and the trills of canaries echoing in the void. Everyone crowded toward the bow, on the sides of the deck, eager to see the islands. The dark, blurred humps of mountains emerging from the sea began to appear on the horizon. Tired after a while of this monotonous contemplation , many turned back. Was that all it was? A good hour would pass before they were in front of them. Besides, the ship was passing very far away… They returned to the smoking room to continue their poker games, or formed their usual groups on deck, lying in armchairs and talking, until the nodding of drowsiness made them staggeringly get up and head for their cabin to continue their siesta. Ojeda and his companion, leaning on the railing, looked with interest at the silhouettes of the islands standing out like pointed clouds against the serene blue of the horizon. “This is as far as Columbus went,” said Fernando. ” The Admiral, who had always sailed towards the West, turned his bow to the South on his third voyage, seeking to discover new lands on the south side. But beyond these islands he became afraid, and changed course to follow the route of always. He was frightened by the heat of the Equator; he believed that if he continued south, his ships would eventually burn. Perhaps the legends surrounding the then poor geography of the equator influenced his visionary credulity. He later recalled the incidents of his third discovery. The sun’s rays were so intense that the Admiral, as he recorded in his letters, feared they would set ships and people on fire. Frequent squalls fell on the squadron, but these sticky, warm showers only made the heat tolerable for a few hours. Columbus welcomed them as providential relief, believing that without them everyone would have perished. He was ill; he was troubled by the disappearance from the horizon of the stars that guided navigators in the seas of the northern hemisphere, as well as the appearance of other unknown stars that rose higher in the sky with each voyage. The contemporary opinions about the equinoctial line and what lay beyond it revived in their memory, doctrines learned during their wanderings through convents and ports, conversing with scientists and navigators. For many, the earthly Paradise lay in the southern hemisphere. The Equator, with its irresistible heat, was “the gladius or versatile fiery knife” that God had placed between humanity and Paradise so that none of Adam’s children could return to it. The poets of antiquity and the Fathers of the Church marvelously remembered this when fantasizing about this completely unknown part of the world. Beyond the Equator lay the land called “the Table of the Sun” for the mildness of its climate and the generous abundance of its products. In it lived happy beings who, not having to worry about the necessities of life—for Nature, lavish, offered them everything in excess— devoted themselves to the study of natural causes, and especially astrology. Arim, the “city of philosophers,” was the center of the “Table of the Sun.” Paradise , being the noblest, was necessarily located in this part of the earth . The stars powerfully influenced our existence. Everything developed on the earth, not according to its own goodness, but by “the noble and happy influences of the stars above it,” the universal cause of life. “A noble heaven corresponded to a most noble earth,” and since the constellations of this unknown hemisphere were, according to the science of the time, “the largest, most resplendent, most noble, and most perfect, and consequently of greater virtue, happiness, and efficacy than those of the North,” it follows that under its splendor there necessarily lay the best of lands, that is, Paradise. The head is the noblest part of “all things natural and artificial, the most adorned and best made, from which the influence on the other members of the body proceeds.” And where was the head of the earth?… In the unknown South, in the South, like the tree, which, although its head is hidden below, could not spread its branches, with its fruits and birds, if this head ceased to send it its nourishment and strength. And fire, the source of life, was born in the South, was engendered there, and a barrier of this fire stretched circularly across the Equator prevented passage from one hemisphere to the other. The discoverer, alarmed by the unbearable heat that met him , saw in it an indisputable confirmation of the opinions of the learned men of his time, and turned his bow to the West, not daring to advance further into the dreaded South. A great surprise awaited him. The world was not round, as Ptolemy and others had believed. It might be spherical in the northern hemisphere, where those scholars had only conducted their studies; but this other hemisphere, through whose boundaries he was navigating, had the “shape of a pear, which is round except where it has the nipple, which is higher, or that of a ball with a woman’s teat on top,” and the tip of such a nipple was “the part of the world closest to the sky.” The ships, as they continued westward, although they seemed to be sailing on a flat and level ocean, climbed and climbed, following the ascending ridge of this protuberance of the planet. The Admiral recognized this rise in the freshness of the air, increasingly noticeable as they advanced westward, even though the ships followed the same gradient, and above all in the peculiarities offered by the lands and people. As the discoverer approached the fiery line of the Equator, the sun burned brighter, the lands were more scorched, and the inhabitants were blacker. In Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, the people reached the most extreme darkness, and the lands seemed scorched. And yet, as he set sail west, following the same latitude, the air cooled, and the Admiral found the island of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela, “of very mild temperance,” according to his writings, “with very green and beautiful lands and trees, like the orchards of Valencia in April, and the people of very fine stature and almost white, more astute and more resourceful than the blacks, and not cowardly.” All this was because the lands and people were higher up, closer to the good air, on the slopes of that gigantic nipple that altered the roundness of the southern hemisphere. And the hypothesis of Paradise, the head of the earth, located in the noble South, became a certainty for the Admiral. At the apex of the nipple was the ancient place of delight; And the Orinoco, which sweetened the sea, astonishing sailors with its immense sheet, was one of the four rivers that descended from Paradise. Fernando and his friend, who were talking about these fantasies of the Admiral while walking on deck, stopped before the windows of the great hall. The soft voice of the piano, played softly, attracted Isidro’s curiosity. “Look here, Fernando. The German woman, the wife of the conductor, is taking advantage of the fact that there are no one in the hall. Her child is near her… What’s she playing? Wagner? No; I know that; it’s Schubert: _The King of the Poplars_. Look how she moves her mouth. She’s singing, but we can’t hear her well… No; don’t come closer: we’ll scare her away like the other day… Well; I wish you well: good luck.” He said this last thing when he saw that Ojeda, suddenly, as if obeying a previous decision, separated from him. He disappeared through the port door leading to the saloons. Maltrana saw him pass between the tables in the winter garden, occupied by a few dozing passengers. Then he entered the saloon and went to sit near the piano, next to the little, big-headed boy, who was contemplating the engravings in a large volume with the thoughtful air of an elderly person, lulled by his mother’s music. Upon noticing the presence of a man listening with his eyes fixed on her, she made a gesture of surprise and annoyance, flinched, as if about to abandon the piano, but with sudden resolve remained in her seat. A slight blush colored her pale, greenish complexion. “What an Ojeda!” Isidro murmured, looking through the windows. “We’ll see what all this music will lead to.” He felt too weak to continue walking around the deck. The heat had dispersed the crowd. Everyone enjoyed the freshness of the siesta, lightly clothed, inside their cabins or in the clashing hurricanes of the smoking-room ventilators. The ship lurched lazily, with long intervals of calm, over the vast undulations of a dense, sparkling sea, reddened like molten metal. Not the slightest breath stirred the canvas of the deck, stretched from the railings to the ceiling like a rigid, dark, and burning partition. Maltrana sank into one of the several armchairs marked “Doctor Zurita and Family,” and there he lay in a pleasant slumber, not knowing for sure whether he was asleep or awake. He heard the piano playing far, far away, like a little Lilliputian tune. “Now it’s Wagner,” he thought; “I know that: Parsifal, The Enchantment of Good Friday… Now it’s Schubert: the Trout Quintet. What a thing!” “Gracious!… Now… now…” And he couldn’t recognize anything else, because he stopped hearing the music. He sank, sank into a black hole, accompanied by the faint melody, which grew thinner like an increasingly taut thread, until it broke and was devoured by silence. Suddenly he came back to life when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Dr. Zurita standing before him, a cigar in his mouth, smiling at him. “Rise, friend, and take a leaf cigar. You didn’t come today for the tribute.” He offered him his inexhaustible case full of Havana cigars. It was three o’clock. The doctor had taken his usual short nap, and, finding himself alone, he wanted to chat with Isidro. The latter stood up to light his cigar, and his gaze searched through the living room windows. The piano had fallen silent, but the German woman remained on the stool, turning the pages of the sheet music and listening to Fernando, who, leaning on the lid of the instrument, spoke to her closely. The friendship was forged thanks to music, a pleasant mediator who needs no introduction. The doctor wanted to go for a walk, and Maltrana continued puffing on his wildly fragrant cigar. The proximity of the equinoctial line seemed to cheer Zurita up. They were close to his hemisphere; they would enter it in two days. “It’s, as they say, going home, my friend. I’m very American, and I’m dying to see my sky. How many nights in Europe did I deprive myself of looking at it because I couldn’t find the Southern Cross there!… And tomorrow perhaps we’ll see it. My youngsters don’t understand these things about the old man. He was impatient to get back to his land, see his friends, learn about the progress of his business, walk the streets of Buenos Aires.” The capitals of Europe were worthy of his admiration, but Buenos Aires!… “We’ll soon get there, God willing,” he continued cheerfully. “There you’ll see, my sympathetic Galicianism, what you’re worth and what’s inside you. Let’s see if one day you become a multimillionaire and I can proudly say that you made your first trip with me… But you have to work, you know, _che_?… Don’t believe that you can find money there just by bending down to pick it up. There’s a lot of lying. People go there with their heads full of exaggerations. Besides, money isn’t made in a month or a year: you have to count on time, which is as valuable as work; you have to dedicate most of your life to an enterprise, whatever it may be.” They had walked all the way around the promenade, and the doctor stopped near the parlor windows. The piano was playing again. Isidro saw his friend standing next to the artist, his eyes fixed on the back of her head, waiting for a signal from her to turn the pages of the score. “Look, Maltranita. The important thing in our land is to buy something, to possess something, to be a property owner, and then the country, which always moves forward, takes care of enriching you, as long as you have patience and serenity. Why do you think we are a people apart from the rest and people from all over the world come to merge with us?” The doctor asked this question with an expression of good-natured malice in his eyes and mouth. Maltrana hastened to repeat all the commonplaces he had heard about Argentina. The fertility of the virgin soil, the lack of laborers, the ease of credit for work… “I have reflected a lot, my friend, on the things of my homeland, and I believe its power of attraction lies in the fact that there is no arithmetic there .” Do you understand?… Or rather, that your arithmetic is different from that used by other nations. In Europe and beyond , two plus two always equals four. Isn’t that so?… Well, in Argentina it has never been that way. He remained silent, as if enjoying Maltrana’s stupefaction, and then continued with a doctoral smile: “In colonial times, when old Spain had us like children in school, and even much later, during the time of our revolts, two plus two never equaled four. There was no one to add, no one to put the two numbers, one above the other. We dressed in household textiles; we slaughtered animals for only their hides and tallow, leaving the meat to the caranchos; we farmed the land for household needs only… Then came the good times of exports and immigration, and two and two were no longer four either. Everything appreciated like crazy, and two and two were eight, two and two were twelve , and maybe you’d get out of bed, and with no more trouble than having been sleeping, you’d wake up and find that two and two made twenty-two… What a country, my friend! Maltrana listened to him, raising his eyebrows in genuine astonishment, as if this doctor’s paradox revealed the great secret of the country he was going to. Understood; the important thing was to have two addends, however simple they were: two and two. The country would then take care of the addition according to its marvelous arithmetic. “But that arithmetic sometimes has its failures,” the doctor continued, his smile deepening. “That of the old world, timid and routine, is unshakeable. Two and two always equal four, no more, no less. There, in our land, every ten years everything trembles, without anyone being able to discover the reason for the cataclysm. Years of drought and bad harvests… Sometimes, not even that. Wars that rage on the other side of the planet, in countries we don’t know and don’t care a bit about; credit restrictions, lack of money; banks that are being “run on,” as they say there, and whose doors are filled with people withdrawing their deposits; owners who want to sell and can’t find anyone to whom; foreign capitalists who don’t want to mortgage… and then, two and two equal one… two and two equal nothing… and whoever can’t bear to wait for arithmetic to recover its former originality is doomed for the whole harvest.” Maltrana continued the doctor’s paradox with an objection. The day would come when two and two would eternally equal four in that country: when its fields would be divided into small fractions, the deserts would be occupied by a dense population, and the waters would rise to the lands now cracked with thirst beside rivers as enormous as the arms of the sea. “So it will be,” said the doctor. “Two and two will equal four in Argentina someday… Undoubtedly, centuries from now. But then,” he added sadly, “no one will go there; because to encounter the same arithmetic as their native country, with the novelty that two and two only make four, no one would feel the desire to leave their home. ” Chapter 7. “Yes; you say well. The demonic power of music, which influences our fate, as the stars once did… The Maestro speaks of it when recalling his years of initiation in his Memoirs… It sharpens our sensitivity, so that we suffer the wounds of existence more intensely.” Mina Eichelberger, the conductor’s wife, murmured these words, her chin resting on her chest and her gaze fixed on Fernando, standing beside her. They were talking on the boat deck, under the shifting shadow of a canvas awning that allowed a sliver of sunlight to advance or repel it, following the long, gentle, barely perceptible roll of the ship. It was in the afternoon, after lunch, when many passengers disappeared, drowsy and overwhelmed by the heat, seeking to continue their siesta in their cabins under the breeze of the fans. Others, fearing to be enclosed within the steel partitions, lay on the deck chairs, under the bluish shade of the canvas, waiting for the light, intermittent breaths of the breeze on their sweaty necks , around which their shirt collars wrinkled like a wet rag. Painful snores and panting breaths sounded, their animal death rattle cutting through the august silence of the afternoon. The sea seemed to withdraw, equally asleep, with no other sound than the rubbing of its foam against the ship’s sides. A creaking of footsteps on the wood made some eyes half-open, only to close again. The pesky stroller had barely left. The cries of the children on the upper deck, playing, insensitive to the sun and heat, resonated with an extraordinary echo, reminiscent of the clamor of children in the white square of a southern town at siesta time. After lunch, all the ship’s inhabitants felt a tendency to sleep, overwhelmed by the gloomy atmosphere, numbed by a heavy preparation, stunned and happy at the same time by the voluptuous contractions of the digestive tract in the midst of assimilating. It was the moment—according to Maltrana—of great purity. Those who at other times of the day hovered near the skirts, with inviting glances and insinuating words, remained stretched out on the decks. Those who, at dusk, seemed to be revived by the breeze and stretched impulsively, like awakened carnivorous beasts, now sunk into the smoking-room armchairs, unconscious like a coiled boa constrictor, vaguely following the spirals of cigar smoke. Friendly couples, whose intimacies the gossipmongers delightedly discussed , remained on the deck seats, not seeing each other, not knowing each other, turning their backs on each other, lacking the strength to exchange a word, longing for tranquility and oblivion. The animal comfort of digestion and the burning atmosphere relegated love to a secondary position for a few hours, as something annoying and intolerable. Previous passions fell silent. No one dared to suggest a request for fear of seeing it accepted, having to descend into the stifling gloom of the cabin, stirred by the flapping of the ventilator. And it was at this hour that Ojeda began his fourth conversation with Mina Eichelberger. They had exchanged words for the first time the previous afternoon, when the ship had sighted the Cape Verde Islands. They had known each other less than twenty-four hours, and Fernando spoke with absolute confidence, free from the reluctance that shyness inspires, as if years of acquaintance had worn away all the angularities of prudence and fear between them. Life on the ocean in a floating cage a few hundred meters deep, where it was impossible to move without tripping, made friendships flourish. When the ship was off the islands and the passengers contemplated the mountains, behind which the sun was setting, bloodying the horizon, the two were already speaking with rapid confidence, and their hands felt a sympathetic shudder as they met among the sheets of sheet music. They found themselves alone in the lounge, oblivious of the people who had gathered around the sides of the ship. Mina sang in a low voice, suddenly blushing at the thought of Fernando standing behind her, his gaze falling on the back of her neck and her shoulders. Perhaps
she was embarrassed, with a sudden coquettishness, to see herself poorly dressed and without any cosmetic adornment. When her hands remained inert on the piano and she stopped singing, they would talk about music, the famous masters, the great magician, the necromancer—names Ojeda gave to Wagner—insisting on these topics that had served as a pretext for their initiation into the world of music. The first words had been in English, then in French, and finally, as if seeking greater outlet for her expression, she spoke in Italian, a slow, hesitant Italian, a reminder of a time close in the chronology of her existence, but remote, very remote, in her memories. It was the era of her glory, during which she had sung outside of Germanic lands the works of the most famous of the German masters. Little Karl, a child of manly gravity, seeing his mother in conversation with this stranger, had forgotten the picture book, marching towards her and placing himself between her knees. He opened his eyes, amazed at the incomprehensible language that passed between them, and from time to time, with the vain tenacity of little children who cannot bear to be forgotten, he spoke to his mother in German, formulating a request, or rubbed himself against her knees to make his expression visible. presence. Mina’s hands played with her straight, whitish-blond hair, but distractedly, with the carelessness of a worried mother, without her eyes descending upon him. She looked at Fernando with manly frankness , as if he were a comrade, smiling at his every word without knowing why. Her pupils fixed themselves resolutely on his pupils, as if she wanted to probe them with her fluid vision. But suddenly she regretted this trust, felt fear and shame, and turned her head to listen to him, her eyes lost in the staves of the music book. Meanwhile, he spoke, more attentive to her silent, internal thoughts than to what she said with her mouth. He boldly examined her, his eyes detailing her entire person, without ultimately reaching an exact judgment. Was she ugly? Was she beautiful, with the lifeless beauty of a withered flower? Ojeda remembered certain antique pieces of furniture, with their faded gilt and opaque mother-of-pearl, which, when opened, spread the subtle scent of a forgotten soul. He also thought of the old, dusty living rooms, which held within the cracks of their walls shreds of rich tapestries revealing the sumptuousness of their past; of the weak voices, plaintive with illness, that suddenly trailed with a velvety touch or rose with the vibration of a pearl on glass, denouncing a glorious past. He saw her slender neck, with harmonious and graceful lines when she was at rest, but which at the slightest contraction revealed the taut skein of tendons. He focused on the sharp ridge of her clavicles beneath the matte skin, a greenish whiteness that absorbed the light without reflecting it. The slightest smile opened two sad, dark hollows in her cheeks, which perhaps had once been graceful dimples. An internal consumption had devoured the softness that softens the feminine body with harmonious padding; but this consumption was irregular, fragmentary, concentrating on some parts of the organism and neglecting others, leaving unscathed, with incomprehensible respect, the most prominent: the breasts, still fresh and victorious on the emaciated torso, resembling a double marble coat of arms on a ruined facade; the hips of Germanic robustness, firm and immovable, as if they were more the bone of the frame than the flesh of the covering. The skin, taut in some places, had slackened in others, leaving painful voids between it and the bony scaffolding. But her gaze was undoubtedly the same as in the days of her glory. The corners of her mouth, the outer corners of her eyes, rose simultaneously with the smile, an inner smile, sweet and enigmatic like those painted by Leonardo. Physical decay had paused piously before the beautiful expression of her lips, curved upward like a crescent moon. Her eyelids, somewhat withered, filtered a transfiguring light, similar to that of the sun on the ruins, gilding the mold on the blackened stones and giving garden-like joy to the parasitic plants of the rubble. A faint scent of perfumed and diseased flesh reached Ojeda, but so faint, so vague, that he wasn’t sure if it was his sense of smell or his imagination that perceived it. And once again he thought of the sleepy atmosphere of the old secret furniture, redolent of love letters, dust, dried bouquets, forgotten ribbons, and moths. That night he had spoken to her again at length. Near the smoking room, Mina introduced him to her husband, taking advantage of his quick exit, who was going to his cabin in search of tobacco, leaving his companions and the tall columns of felt roundels that denoted the consumed bocks. The musician was courteous and respectful. It was an honor for him to shake the hand of such a great poet. He had not read a single verse by Fernando, but in the inquiries and curiosities of the first days of navigation, when everyone wants to know who their neighbor is, Maltrana had He had spoken of his companion’s poetic talent, and this was enough for them to designate him par excellence with the title of “the poet.” Some Germans , disposed to recognize and accept all social differences and hierarchies, out of an irresistible tendency toward admiration, called him “the great poet” … “a colossal poet,” with merits all the greater because they lived lost in the mystery of an unknown language. Upon examining Maestro Eichelberger, Ojeda experienced the same sensation as he did when he looked at his wife. He saw something that had been, and, not being, preserved in its ruins the dead splendors of the past. His gestures, his words, everything about him was that of a man superior to the environment in which he currently lived. He searched for his words, stroked his mustache, an old-fashioned German mustache with drooping ends; he swept back, with an air of inspiration, his long blond hair, in which gray hairs were beginning to appear. But his sallow eyes, with their slightly swollen corneas, the unhealthy reddish blotches on his face, and a certain shyness at finding himself in the presence of someone whose superiority made him recall the past as remorse, revealed the tenacious vices of his failed life. Suddenly, so as not to betray himself in the straits of a long conversation, he hurried to say goodbye to the poet. Fernando also believed that the musician was avoiding showing himself to his wife in this courteous manner so contrary to reality, doubtless fearing the silent irony of his thoughts. They remained alone until nearly midnight in a corner of the deck, with little Karl between them, who was beginning to become familiar with Ojeda. When he tired of resting his head on his mother’s knees , he went in search of his new friend, welcoming like a tame kitten the caress of her hands on his limp hair. Sleep finally overcame him, and Mina took him to her cabin, saying goodbye to Fernando with visible annoyance. But a few minutes later she came back up, as if pulled by something greater than her maternal concerns, and she gave Ojeda a look of gratitude when she saw him motionless in the same seat, as if silently prolonging the previous conversation. They spoke again, but completely alone, in growing intimacy, paying no attention to the orchestra, which played its nightly concert of waltzes, oblivious to the curious glances of some passersby who seemed to take note of the sudden approach of two people whom no one had seen together until then. A dry, persistent cough made Fernando look back. It was Mrs. Power with the couple of her compatriots who were passing in front of him, pretending not to see him. The next morning they had met again. Mina came up on deck in the early hours, much earlier than on other days, leading Karl by the hand. The little boy, as soon as he saw Fernando, ran toward him, letting his blond locks float over the blue collar of his sailor shirt. This close connection made the two approach each other smiling, hands extended, continuing the conversation of the previous night. And once lunch was over, Karl had climbed one of the stairs leading to the top deck, attracted by the shouts of the children playing. His mother followed him, first looking around to see if Ojeda was nearby. And he followed her up the steps, as if attracted by her pale smile. “We haven’t even known each other for twenty-four hours,” Fernando thought. “The miracles of shared confinement! On land, it would have taken me months to reach this intimacy.” The two had isolated themselves amidst the commotion that stirred the passengers on the occasion of the upcoming celebrations of the crossing of the Equator. Fernando followed the German woman in the life of modest seclusion that she had led until then, timid and proud at the same time. The night before, Isidro had approached him when he was talking to Mina. He had to remind him that he was one of the presidents of the organizing committee for the festivities, and the gentlemen of the commission were requesting his presence before the end of the party. program. But Ojeda sulkily rejected the unwelcome summons. Maltrana could represent him: he delegated to him all the majesty of his important office. The following morning, the gentlemen of the commission sought him out. They requested his participation in the literary and musical evening, a party in which all passengers with any artistic ability would display it, for the aesthetic enjoyment of their fellow passengers. The piano played incessantly in the great hall under the numb fingers of the young ladies preparing their “act.” Other pianos, no less babbling and prone to error, answered from the ends of the deck, in the children’s room and in the luxurious cabins. Flute-like and timid voices sang sentimental ballads, Neapolitan songs, and interrupted themselves to say: “Artists coming aboard! What nerve!” Some young women, under the severe criticism of a panel of parents and aunts, recited verses in French, covering their large, burning Creole eyes or their crimson mouths, on which the silk of a light downy down was beginning to form, with a fan, contorting their hips like the buds of future procreators with the reverence of a Versailles lady . Ojeda stubbornly repelled these invitations to the “great poet” to recite some of his works. He didn’t like such parties: he couldn’t say two verses in a row well; besides, a large portion of the audience didn’t understand his language. They could address themselves to the Italian lecturer or the bearded abbot, who were making the trip to entertain the audience. He had embarked with other purposes… Out of courtesy, the inviters also addressed Mina, recalling that they had seen her sitting at the piano. She could “fill a number.” But she blushed, refusing, claiming that she wasn’t an artist, but simply the wife of the orchestra conductor, and her participation might upset the operetta “stars” who were on board. And the inviters didn’t think it necessary to insist further, regarding a poorly dressed woman who withdrew from everyone with sullen modesty. Her dealings with Fernando infused a new energy into her life. After each interview, the isolation in which she had lived until then seemed to crack, like a shell bristling with spikes. And in this resurgence, Ojeda contemplated her with increasing interest each day. She revealed her past in fragments, with hesitations of modesty, as if afraid of tiring her friend’s curiosity. She blushed at the recollection of certain misfortunes she had longed to forget, thus maintaining the peace of a monotonous life, without hope or memories. Her brilliant entry into life, long before meeting Maestro Eichelberger, when she was applauded in the theaters of Germany and, having learned Italian, performed Wagner’s works on the stages of Europe and America!… Nineteen years old; her voice wasn’t prodigious: just right and precise, nothing more; just enough to sing her part without choking. But the great magician’s enthusiasts appreciated her because she knew how to get “into the skin of the characters.” Wagner the poet, creator of epic heroes, interpreter of human conflicts, inspired as much adoration in her as Wagner the musician. For a long time, through a phenomenon of artistic adaptation, she had believed herself to be Brunhilde. Her true personality was that of the daughter of Wotan. She lived only at night, by the light of the stage drums, accompanied in her steps and laments by the mysterious music that emerged from the orchestral abyss. Her chest enclosed in the nipples of her scaled breastplate, her metallic helmet surmounted by two white wings, her vibrating lance in one hand, her purple mantle following her vigorous stride like a strong virgin with a fluttering flag : all this had been reality. Life in hotels, travel by sea and land, and miserable professional rivalries were an uncertain and colorless dream, a limbo of which she retained only pale memories. The demonic power of music had possessed her completely, transporting her to the realms of a higher life. The crude reality, a deceptive curtain that hides supreme beauty from our eyes so that we resign ourselves to the gloom of a practical existence and live like beasts staring at the ground, tore for her every night as soon as she trod the stage. She felt her soul bathed in divine sadness when the father god, wrathful and kind at the same time, punished her for her disobedience, leaving her to drowsy on the rock that was to surround the fire with a red wall of billowing battlements. She sang with the joy of a bird greeting the day and love when Siegfried, the great child without fear or prudence, woke her and, by stripping her of her armor, snatched her virginity. Farewell, cold greatness of the gods! She wanted to be a woman, with all the pains and the poor joys of humans. She still shuddered as she recalled the end of the great epic, before the funeral pyre surmounted by the hero’s corpse, when, waving the avenging torch that turns the kingdom of the gods to ashes, she expressed her sorrow and her wisdom. Her sadness was that of a superior woman who has loved a frivolous, courageous, and inconstant being, and in the supreme hour mourns for him and excuses his faults. The great truth, the summary of all life’s experiences, the truth we grope for and often reject when we find it; the truth we only recognize at the last moment, when it is impossible to begin again and errors are beyond remedy, came from her tearful mouth: “I renounce my divine science and give it to the world. Let men know that happiness is not riches, nor gold, nor the power of the gods. Nor is it the pomp of supreme rank, nor the lying bonds of social conventions, nor the rigorous rules of a hypocritical law. In joy as in sadness, there is only one source of happiness for man: love ! And the passion Mina brought to her voice was communicated to those who listened. On her travels from theater to theater, accompanied by her mother—the widow of a Bavarian soldier killed in the French campaign— the young woman had been asked to marry several times. A millionaire from North America wanted to marry this German woman, who was talked about in the newspapers and whose portraits were honored to be displayed alongside the presidents of the great Republic and the most famous boxers. Up-and-coming singers offered her a marriage partnership to save together, and she amassed a great fortune. But she lived to be twenty-five without heeding these propositions that threatened her glory, until she met love in the person of Maestro Eichelberger. Perhaps it wasn’t love: perhaps it was pity. Women feel the feeling of motherhood developing in their breasts long before they become mothers and apply it to any man who inspires a sympathetic interest, confusing love with pity. She had deliberately deceived herself, interested in the musician’s defects. “It was in Dresden that we met,” Mina said. “He, despite his youth, had a certain reputation as a composer. Everyone believed he was destined for something greater than conducting an orchestra. Some of his romances were beginning to be popular in Germany; one of his symphony had been applauded at the Berlin concerts. He worked little, his life was stormy, and I thought that he lacked, like all superior men in the early stages of their lives, a loving spirit to guide him, the love of an intelligent companion to keep him on the right path.” He remembered the youth of the great magician, of his first wife, Mina Planer, industrious and bourgeois, who pursued a career as a singer as a profession, but who knew how to facilitate her husband’s creative output by defending him from creditors, organizing a modest home that without her the great musician would never have had. “I thought I found in the similarity of our names an identity of destinies. I could be the Mina of this new Wagner who was beginning to emerge from the darkness. And so began what was never love, but a great sacrifice for glory… Oh! How art poisons us.” when we make him the counselor of our poor existence! With intellectual sympathy, they sought out, among the other artists, common musical journeymen. Mina had frequently received him against the will of her mother, a woman of rigid principles who could not compromise with the maestro’s disorders. They spoke together of Him, of the demiurge, of the necromancer; they became enraptured at the piano, their nerves shaken by the demonic power of his music. One day, Eichelberger arrived drunk at these meetings, completely drunk. This resemblance more!… Wagner too, at the age of twenty, when he was a simple conductor in Magdeburg and had no other works than _The Fairies_ and the _Christopher Columbus_ symphony, had arrived drunk one night at Mina Planer’s room. And the consequence of Wagner’s intoxication was his marriage to a woman who didn’t believe much in his talent, but knew how to take care of his kitchen and overcome his financial difficulties with the practical sense of a former factory worker accustomed to poverty. Luck marked the path for the other Mina. This one, more intelligent, would know how to “redeem” the young master, who only needed the support of love to reveal himself as a genius. And after Eichelberger, drunk, spent the night in his room, the marriage was finalized , and his mother had to resign herself. Mina was saddened when she remembered this event: the great mistake of her life, the fatal change of direction. She put a hand to her forehead, as if she wanted to tear out a tenacious memory and throw it into the ocean… The cruel deceptions of art! The intermittent nature of talent, which in some appears like a seductive flower with its days numbered, and in others has the grandiose immobility of a mountain!… You must have seen artists with beautiful voices dragging out a miserable existence , yet singing in cafes like beggars. People are outraged by this injustice of fate. They must be helped, they must be taken to the opera. And when they go, the most devastating failure accompanies their attempt. They know how to sing a romance well, but they can’t handle an entire opera. At the end of the first act, they go hoarse; by the second, they’ve lost their voices; before the end, they have to flee… And the same fragile talents are found in all the arts: budding talents that never open, that lack the vigor to open, and they wither and die. Ojeda nodded. He was thinking of the “genius” sketch painters who never manage to finish a painting; in which they conceive optimistic illusions with poetic fragments or short stories and can never write a book. Mina said it well: it wasn’t enough to sing the sweet little ballad, brief as a sigh; one had to sing the entire opera, without hoarseness or fainting. Art demanded patience, and above all, strength, a lot of strength. Willpower was an inspiration. “My husband,” she continued with discouragement, “never went beyond the works of his youth. With these, he gave “everything he had of an artist.” And I who believed him a genius!… I had seen him thrashing about like a sandwich, struggling to lift the enormous slab that had fallen upon him, interposed between the eyes of his spirit and the light he longed for. And Mina didn’t even have the consolation of ignorance; she couldn’t delude herself like other women who blindly believe in their husbands’ talent until the last moment and attribute their misfortune to the injustices of fate. She realized Eichelberger’s artistic weakness, followed his decline with a painful gaze, and recognized the reason for the growing indifference surrounding his name. Out of desperation or a desire for consolation, he gave himself over with ever greater tenacity to his favorite vice. He drank recklessly, forgetting the respect he had shown her in the first months of their marriage. Intoxication accompanied him even in the most difficult roles of his profession. He often occupied the director’s podium while intoxicated. Theaters were beginning to refuse his offers. His name did not inspire confidence; on the contrary, it was greeted with laughter. Outrageous. The artists complained of his mood swings, his alcoholic rages, which disrupted rehearsals with the din of battle. His discredit began to affect his wife’s artistic reputation. By dint of commenting on the incidents of their married life, the public found her less interesting. Ojeda thought he could guess in Mina’s sad face a myriad of unspeakable miseries. He imagined the return from the theater of these two beings who could no longer understand each other: she resigned, with mute gestures of despair; he brutalized by the bitterness of failure. Perhaps their arguments had ended with blows; perhaps upon entering the house, hesitant and smelling of alcohol, this false Wagner, with brutal heaviness , had placed his fist in the face of Mina, the dream creature who was trying to “regenerate” him. She spoke laconically when recalling this part of her life, as if she wanted to escape the painful memories as quickly as possible. “My mother died… and I had Karl, to make matters worse. I became ill, I think forever: ill from being a mother; ill from having been a wife … Ah, that man!… And yet, he’s not a villain: he’s an unconscious big boy; a child who has become cruel , convinced of his failure; an egotist who takes refuge in drink and only occasionally realizes the harm he’s done me… I lost my voice, I withered while still young, and I had the courage to flee the theater before I could delight my fellow women with total ruin. He… you see him: at the head of an operetta company, beating out Viennese waltzes with his baton. A man who has conducted Tristan and The Mastersingers !… He was only able to find someone to hire him for one trip to America. The impresario scolds him as if he were a chorus boy, and intends to keep an eye on him on land so that he doesn’t drink before the performances. The public had completely forgotten Mina. Her name was nothing more than a vague memory for enthusiasts who cherished Wagnerian performers. Stage glories die early… I recently came across my name in a magazine. It spoke of me as a young woman of great hope who was lost prematurely. Many believed me dead; the columnist lamented my sad end… And it didn’t occur to me to say a word to dispel the error. La Schamale, my stage name, is quite dead; dead to the public that applauded her so much, dead to herself, who doesn’t want to remember anything… Now all that’s left is for Frau Eichelberger, the ugly, ailing wife of an operetta director, to die too, but for real, so that she can once and for all forget the great mistakes of her life. And that afternoon, beside Fernando, on the ship’s top deck, looking out at the ocean, she repeated in despair: “The demonic power of music, which influences our fate as the stars once did… I owe my misfortune to it, and yet I love it.” The luminous, blue sea was cut by a wide band of sunbeams , a triangular path of fire that rested its vertex on the horizon and its uncertain, trembling base on the side of the ship. The peaks of the small ripples throbbed, bristling with brilliance like fragments of a mirror. Their eyes contracted, fatigued by the excessive glare of the sky and the ocean, which seemed to scorch the retina. Mina and Fernando, to avoid the annoying refraction, averted their eyes from the horizon, looking below them as they spoke. A third of the ship stretched out at their feet, the entire bow section, the iron snout that was plowing with tireless tenacity the oceanic fields, green and luminous by day, dark and bulging at night with a phosphorescent ridge in each fold like the back of a mermaid. Looking down, they experienced the sensation of a traveler contemplating a town from the platform of a tower. The various decks of the ocean liner descended like steps, to rise again at the opposite end, where they formed the castle of bow. At a regular depth, they could see the beginning of the mess deck: a damp floorboard on which rested the arms of two cranes with their cogwheel joints, and from which emerged several white-painted fan trombones with scarlet throats. Further ahead, the large square of the waist was hidden under a canvas awning, and from this tent emerged the foremast, a large, hollow, yellow steel mast, similar to a minaret, around which the unloading arms were aligned, gigantic candles tied in bundles around the top. And from this top to the gunwales, the steel rigging, the crew ladders, all the iron vines that shipbuilding grows around the masts to ensure their stability and facilitate access, were stretched at an angle. Finally, the forecastle, a triangular space with a small flagpole at its apex for the Company’s flag when the ship entered port. And in this triangle, occupied by the steam-powered winches that raised or lowered the anchors, the ventilators also opened their respiratory tentacles, their serpentine mouths eager for oxygen. The invisible palpitations of the sea in the serene afternoon caused the triangle of the bow to rise and fall, like a playful, leaping goat , parting the water with its blade. This movement seemed limited to that part of the ship, since its vibrations were muffled as they spread over the sides and were barely perceptible in the rest of the gigantic structure. The foam, after rising next to the bow, forming two jets of pulverized milk, slid down the sides in large circles resembling rings of starlight. The turbulent waters ran from bow to stern, two green rivers, agitated, tumultuous, open in the blue immobility of the ocean. Flying fish leaped in swarms, opening up in great fans of silver and pink, flying far, far away, in a showy sputtering, plowing the surface with the scraping of their tails, until, exhausted, they sank back into the depths. When the bow fell asleep for a few minutes, the ship seemed motionless, rooted to the spot. The speed of its movement made it seem, with an optical illusion, that it was the ocean rushing toward it in gigantic folds that pushed against one another. The eyes encompassed an immense, monotonous blue amphitheater that erased the notion of volumes and distances. Then they blinked with a sense of strangeness as they retreated into this iron shell lost in infinity, with its swarm of ants on its back. Behind Mina and her companion, the wooden discs sounded as they skittered across the deck, pushed by the players’ paddles. Every time one of them came to stand on a number in the square drawn on the floor, the group of children would burst into clapping and shouting, making the sleeping passengers squirm in their seats. Karl, thoughtfully, a finger to his mouth, watched the play of these children older than him from close range. Suddenly, as if feeling the need to be protected, he would flee and cling to his mother’s skirts, who, intent on the conversation, ignored his insistent calls. Tired of going unnoticed, he was drawn again by the shouts of the boys, slowly returning to them. Mina spoke sadly of the old world they were leaving behind. “Ah, Berlin!” This name revived the saddest memories of her life, years of desperate poverty, cruel humiliation, shameful decline. She was heading for new lands with the hope of something better. Ojeda, hearing this, smiled imperceptibly. Hope, too, guided the unfortunate Valkyrie’s journey. The New World was the only remedy for the great mistake that had turned her life upside down. Mina embarked on this adventure for her son, for the future of little Karl, the only link that bound her to existence. What could she possibly wish for? Beyond her hopes as a mother, there was no hope for her. Everything was over: no beauty, no glory, not even health held her future. “I am old at the age when other women begin the summer of their lives. The years have fallen upon me all at once: I carry the weight of my own years and those of others who are happy… We unfortunates carry our age and the ages of those who, being happy, prolong their youth. Sometimes I think I am a thousand years old… And sick! Forever dragging the consequences of having been a mother!” She paused as she said this with a prudent blush, not daring to confess the internal tribulations that agitated her organism. Her eyes went toward Karl with the loving and sad expression of an artist contemplating her work, the fruit of hardships, a painful shred of her own existence. He had come from her womb, but he was also her husband’s son. Ferdinand thought he could guess the mother’s thoughts in the fixity with which she gazed at Karl’s voluminous head. The boy looked too grave for his young age, with an air of premature old age. “How I fear for his fate!” said Mina. “I spend hours looking at him in silence. What will he be? What will come of him?… Sometimes I think he might be a great man, a genius, who knows! We mothers all believe we are predestined to give wonders to the world. He says things beyond his years. And that grave expression, as if thoughts were boiling in his head that he can’t quite put into words!… Other times I am frightened. He is very weak; illness attacks him in all sorts of ways. He has attacks when he is thwarted… He is his son: the son of a degenerate father.” Tears welled up on her eyelids, but this despondency was succeeded by a spirited resolve. Who could guess what moral rehabilitation awaited her in a new life on the other side of the ocean? Perhaps even Eichelberger himself would be regenerated by work. And if this transplant from one hemisphere to another had no effect on the musician, it would surely influence her son, who was at an age to be deeply affected by the change of environment. She planned to stay on the new continent: she dreaded life in Europe. When her commitments to the impresario were over, they would settle in Buenos Aires or another city. She and her husband would give singing lessons. Karl could embark on one of the many practical careers that enrich the citizens of young countries. Anything but returning to her homeland, a land of tears that made her remember cold nights by the dying fire, her son in her arms, waiting until the wee hours for the maestro’s hesitant steps and his drunken babbling; the shameful foreclosures; the rudeness of creditors; the sad reflections before a table that was sometimes covered with abundant food during the unexpected ups and downs of bohemian life and stained with the foam of champagne, but where almost always bread and potatoes were the only things of value. And driven by hope, which places happiness beyond the reality of the moment, in the uncertainty of the unknown, Mina saw health, peace, and oblivion in that mysterious land toward which the ship was carrying her, a marvelous land whose language she didn’t even know. The little boy, clinging to his mother’s hand, pulled her along with a plaintive lilt. Tea time had come; the boys, abandoning their game, were downstairs in the dining room. Mina said goodbye to her friend, and the corners of her eyes and mouth turned upward with a pale smile that seemed to light up her face: “a moon smile,” according to Ojeda. “We’ve talked for a long time. We’re always together. What will the ladies you know say about us? What will that beautiful, elegant American woman say when she sees me stealing her conversation? But with me, jealousy is impossible. I’m ugly, I’m poor; on the entire ship, you can’t find a woman worse dressed than I.” And despite the sadness with which he said these words, something of his former coquetry as an artist celebrated and admired by the crowd was shown. through her smile, rejuvenating her with a fleeting flash. “What a great woman she must have been!” thought Fernando. “And what a misfortune she was!” As she walked away, holding her son’s hand, he followed her with compassionate eyes. Upon descending to the promenade deck, Fernando found Dr. Zurita talking with Maltrana, the two of them leaning on the railing, facing the sea. The solitude of the Atlantic brought back memories of the Argonauts of Spain, who had been the first to violate the secret of the blue deserts. “Come here, doctor,” said Zurita to Ojeda, extending his university diploma . “We were talking about your country, about the first navigators who ventured across these seas. What courageous men! Barbaric!… I feel proud when I speak of them. After all, we are all of the same blood. My grandfather was Galician. That is to say, not Galician; But you already know that in my country we still have the ugly custom of calling all Spaniards “Galicians.” I was from near Burgos, and I traveled from Paris to Madrid in two cars with my entire family just to see the town where we come from. And I said to mine: “Look, children, and learn; your grandparents came from here .” I was a little moved to see the poverty where we come from. But my cheerful, brainless youth laughed and found everything very ugly and miserable… It seems incredible that from those tinder-colored towns , where you can barely find water to wash with, centuries ago came the fearless men who set out for these parts. The conversation became general, and finally Ojeda was the only one who spoke, recalling with enthusiastic words the exploits of the ocean-going Argonauts. After Columbus’s first voyage, Spanish ports had been like open dovecotes, from whose mouths the fragile and daring caravels escaped with outstretched wings. The mirages of gold and the spirit of adventure developed by seven centuries of war with the Saracens drove the daring. Small fleets authorized by the monarchs set out to discover, but clandestine expeditions were more common, many of which remained a mystery. These secret expeditions, financed by merchants from Seville and Cadiz, were led by companions of the Admiral who were familiar with the route to the Indies or by improvised sailors. Even the tailors—according to a contemporary author—felt the ambition to become explorers. Hardy noblemen who had never seen the sea launched themselves into the unknown ocean with astonishing confidence. They took command of the caravel or the ship, with no help or advice other than that of a few coastal navigators, with the same tranquility as the paladins so often admired in books of chivalry who would board the first mysterious vessel they found on a deserted coast. Notaries of Andalusia abandoned their protocols to become explorers; merchants threatened with ruin fled the market to buy a ship with the remainder of their fortune and launch themselves into the unknown. How many catastrophes were ignored in this struggle with geographical mystery, with no guides other than faith and holy ignorance! How many ships descended into the depths of the ocean when they returned with news of new lands to be rediscovered years later! The coveted wealth would appear for a moment and then flee fearfully before the prows of the sailors. The indigenous people of the coasts spoke of enormous riches and powerful monarchs, always pointing inland, beyond the mountains that seemed to touch the sky, and the trembling swamps, to immense seas of aquatic weeds. But from the ransoms from these copper-colored people, lavish in portentous tales and paltry in reality, the navigators only brought back a few misshapen, badly perforated pearls or showy guanines, gold jewels carved in delicate leaves. Upon returning to the Spanish port with magical news and a meager cargo, the creditors attacked the discoverer and seized the vessel, claiming to be Deceived. Many had planned their voyages by returning provisions, weapons, and ships to usurers at 80 percent interest. Discoverers of towns later famous for their riches found themselves threatened upon their return with going from the caravel to prison. Kings had to intervene with pious decrees to appease the moneylenders, proposing arrangements. Obscure sailors, fleeing the Admiral’s course, resolutely set their bows south, unafraid of the terrifying news circulating about the fire of the Equator. A Pinzón reached the coasts of Brazil long before this land was accidentally discovered by a Portuguese expedition sailing toward the Asian Indies. In this flurry of white wings that the first news of the discovery launched into the oceanic solitudes, the bold march ever forward, by sea and by land, through storms, mountains, straits, and lagoons, was the general motto. Arrive or die! No one returned to the port of departure without having seen something extraordinary and brought back marvelous samples. And those who did not return were at the bottom of the Atlantic, locked in the coffin of their caravel, which was slowly petrifying, becoming covered in mollusks, while the seaweed of the depths waved like green pennants from their broken masts. Others were nothing more than skeletons on a deserted beach, stripped bare by birds of prey, stripped to the marrow by the endless swarms of the torrid jungle, where everything moves and boils with devouring life, bleached and dried by the fire of the sun until it becomes fragile lime. And among these adventurers of the first hour of discovery, the hour of the navigators, the Argonauts, the caravel heroes, poor and sad, who derived not the slightest benefit from their ventures and paved the way for the iron-fisted conquistadors on horseback who arrived shortly after, two stood out as men among men: Alonso de Ojeda and Diego Méndez. Ferdinand enthusiastically repeated his own surname when speaking of that strong man, whom he considered his glorious ancestor. “Ojeda is in the New World the same as Achilles in the _Iliad_ or the Cid in the _Romancero_. What a fine example of a man!” The chroniclers of the time painted him as small of stature, graceful of face, with surprising agility and strength. A great friend of quarrels, he always emerged from them “making blood of his opponents, without ever making blood of himself.” As a page to the court, when the King and Queen were in Seville, he would place one foot on the base of the tower of the main church—the famous Giralda—and, by throwing an orange up high, make it reach the bells. On another occasion, following Queen Isabella on a visit to the top floor of the same tower, he saw a beam advancing horizontally in the air for about twenty feet. With a single leap, he jumped onto it, ran to the end with agility and confidence, “as if walking through a room,” turned around, and returned the same way, laughing in fright at the good queen and the screams of her ladies. He was protected by Bishop Fonseca, who was charged by the monarchs with preparing expeditions and supplying the new lands: something like being Minister of the Navy and the Colonies all at once. The Admiral, who knew of this young man’s exploits and his merits as a swordsman, took him on the second voyage to fight inland, since he was only a man of the sea. Other captains were on the expedition, veterans of the wars with the Saracen; but the restless Ojeda, a young man of twenty, stood out above them all. Columbus, who wished to capture the chief Caonabo, organizer of the indigenous resistance, in Santo Domingo , saw all the malice and mischief he had advised Mosén Pedro Margarit and his lieutenants to carry out, in accordance with the bad faith of the time . He only achieved his goal when he entrusted Ojeda with the capture. The page from Cuenca, the quarrelsome man from Seville, advanced inland with a few men, until he reached the chief’s camp. There he seduced the savage with good intentions. In other words, he would trick him, taking him from among his people, and by surprise, he would put handcuffs on his hands. Then he would mount the gigantic Indian on the saddle of his horse, like a gallant stealing his lady, and gallop for leagues and leagues to the Spanish camp. So marvelously audacious was this kidnapping that Caonabo himself, in his nobility as a primitive warrior, despised the Admiral for having ordered such a vile act without daring to carry it out personally, and he only wanted to converse and eat with Ojeda, admiring his audacity in snatching him from among his subjects. In battles with the Indians, he would charge first, without looking to see if his people were following him. Beside his horse, covered in bells, leaped the faithful companion in all his undertakings, a shepherd dog named Leoncico, a fierce fighter who, during food distributions, enjoyed an arquebusier’s ration for his exploits. Ojeda soon moved on his own into the vastness of the New World while Columbus made his final voyages. Returning to Spain, he began a series of discoveries, financially supported by the merchants of Seville, who believed in his courage. One of the Pinzones, Juan de la Cosa, the most expert of pilots, Amerigo Vespucci, and other renowned navigators, commanded his ships. Sailors liked to sail with this captain, the most courageous and audacious of the early period of the conquest. He sailed along the coasts of Venezuela in search of pearls and eventually settled in what later became Central America, which the conquistadors then called “Castilla del Oro.” An Indian woman accompanied him as a lover, guide, and interpreter. The young adventurers almost always found among the copper-colored concubines offered by the hazards of their lives someone who captured their hearts and lived sharing their dangers. The Christian nobleman, upon uniting with her, had deemed it necessary to purify her with baptism—the best gift, according to the ideas of the time—giving her the name Isabel, in memory of the good queen. Ojeda’s life in the governorship of Urabá, with no other resources than those he could muster, far from his compatriots settled in Santo Domingo, and forgotten by Spain, was a constant battle. His city of San Sebastián, a miserable settlement of straw and mud with a wooden fort, was the first permanent city founded by the conquistadors on the mainland. Tribes of skilled archers besieged it at all hours, firing arrows soaked in incurable poisons. They were the dreaded “grass arrows,” which swelled the wounded’s bodies with a blackish and deadly swelling. The country’s provisions—cassava bread, forest fruits, rodent meat—had to be conquered daily at the point of the sword. Fighting and disease decimated the inhabitants. Juan de la Cosa, the wise pilot and author of the first map of the Indies, had died tied to a post by the natives, bristling with ” grass arrows,” which turned his body within hours into a mass of black putrefaction. In the town’s squalid huts, the badly wounded conquistadors moaned, starving, and trembling with fever. Ojeda, leading a few men, went out daily to fight for food. One encounter occurred in which he emerged bearing on his shield, according to the chroniclers, the marks of more than three hundred arrow shots. At other times, the weight of the enemies swarming around him was so great that he doubled over and continued fighting on his knees, covering himself with his shield. The small size of his agile and slippery body served him well, as did the strength of his arms, and he emerged from every fight unscathed, “without drawing blood.” The natives believed him to possess marvelous amulets. Ojeda also considered himself protected by heaven thanks to a small antique painting of the Virgin, a gift from Fonseca, which he wore hanging from his sword belt. Four Indian archers positioned themselves to treacherously wound the white captain who was emerging unscathed from the fighting, and one day as Ojeda advanced through the jungle, surprised by the absence of enemies, he received an arrow in his throat. A thigh. For the first time, his body was oozing blood. The wound, which was a grass wound, quickly blackened from the poison. Then the man’s courage was displayed with barbaric grandeur. He had the breastplate and backplate of a breastplate heated over a fire, and when the two steel plates were red-hot, he ordered them applied to the wounded man himself with tongs. The surgeon refused this horrible treatment, but Ojeda threatened to hang him to force him to obey. The flesh creaked under the barbaric cautery, spreading the stench of human sacrifice. To prevent him from fainting, Ojeda had him wrapped in sheets soaked in vinegar. An entire pipe was consumed by this remedy; and the leader, thanks to the gruesome torment, endured without complaint, was saved. The small town, lacking food, was close to perishing. At this point, some Spanish pirates unexpectedly appeared, commanded by a certain Bernardino Talavera, a daring criminal. They were aboard a ship they had stolen from a Genoese merchant and were offering to sell provisions to the besieged. Ojeda, recovering from his wound, embarked with them to request aid from the governor of Santo Domingo. But before abandoning his wretched people, he wanted to assign them a captain, and he settled on a young man from Extremadura who had recently arrived in the Indies, in the exodus of swordsmen that followed that of the navigators: an exodus that Fernando called “the second wave of conquistadors.” This soldier, who had been trained in Indian warfare alongside Ojeda, was named Francisco Pizarro. The eventful voyage with the pirates was Don Alonso’s last and most painful adventure. Authoritarian and harsh, he sought to take command as soon as he found himself on the deck of the ship, imposing his discipline on Talavera and his bandits. But they rebelled against him and threw him into the hold in chains. Despite this, the prisoner did not cease his brave attitude, asserting that he would hang them all as soon as they reached land. Such was his prestige that they dared not do anything against him. They often asked him for advice, given the experience he had acquired in navigation, and they took him out of confinement to steer the ship. They finally abandoned it on the coast of Cuba and then traveled for months and months around the still- unexplored island, eager to get closer to Santo Domingo, but without knowing for sure where they were going, sinking into swamps, fighting the natives or compromising with them, tormented by hunger, which killed many. During this desperate march, the captive Ojeda found himself elevated by his guards to the rank of chief every time they had to fight an indigenous group, deal with a benevolent chieftain, or navigate the desert of trembling mudflats that swallowed men. He alone was as valuable as the others. Then, once the danger had passed, Don Alonso would once again become a prisoner of these heartless men, who hated him for being their superior, and so they marched together, condemned to tolerate each other’s misfortune. “Never,” says one chronicler, “were people seen to go through such hardships only to end up on the gallows.” When, after great tribulations by sea and land, they reached countries subject to Castilian authorities, Talavera and his men were hanged, and Don Alonso found himself embroiled in trials that embittered his final days. The governorship of Urabá, which the king had given him, no longer existed. Most of his soldiers had left their bones there; others had perished at sea; only Pizarro and a few predestined like him managed to return to Santo Domingo. The former page of Doña Isabella dragged out the miserable existence of the conquistadors in the colonial city without success. He was a grumpy veteran and quick to quarrel among the bohemian youth of the swashbuckling order who arrived from the Peninsula dreaming of conquering treasures and kingdoms. New expeditions were organized. Pizarro took the pay of various captains. Another man paraded his grace through the streets of Santo Domingo. An Extremaduran, amorous, a swordsman, and somewhat learned, whose surname was Cortés. The captain of the first Admiral, Vicente Pinzón’s partner, Juan de la Cosa’s companion, Amerigo Vespucci’s boss, he found himself increasingly forgotten. He was unknown to those young men who arrived from Spain, passing by him without acknowledging his gray hair or his merits. From the island metropolis they took flight, swooping like birds of prey over different parts of the mysterious Indies with greater success than Don Alonso, unfortunate like all his predecessors. The only ones who remembered him were his creditors, for their lawsuits and trials, and his many enemies, whom he had offended with his arrogance and quarrels. More than one night, the poor conquistador, upon returning to his hovel, had to draw his sword against people who were waiting to kill him. “Thus ended, obscurely,” said Ojeda, “the first and most unfortunate of the heroes of the conquest. His death remains a mystery. Some say he became a monk in his later years and asked, upon dying, to be buried at the convent’s door, so that everyone would trample his tomb, thus punishing his pride and other sins. Others deny that he was a monk and say that poverty forced him to take refuge in the monastery of Santo Domingo, like a parasite, living off the community’s soup … Hunger was the hero’s only fear. He had been predicted that he would die of starvation, and on his expeditions, he always took care to carry food in his pockets. The prophecy didn’t come true while running through jungles and deserts or sailing on ships with scarce supplies. But it was almost a reality when the old conquistador had to seek refuge in a monastery in that colonial city where no one paid him any attention. “And the other one?” Dr. Zurita interrupted with lively curiosity. “That Méndez you mentioned earlier. ” “Diego Méndez,” Ojeda continued, “was a hero of a different kind; a ‘superman of the sea,’ as our friend Maltrana would say. His prodigious adventure astonishes even today. He was a young man from Seville who accompanied Columbus on his final voyages, when, old, sick, and unable to find the prodigious treasures he had promised, he felt the growing indifference surrounding him. Méndez was the faithful disciple who always accompanies great men in their agony. The Admiral’s last letters praise him and commend him to the gratitude of his descendants, who had never done anything for him. When, on his last voyage, the most unfortunate of all, the discoverer found himself in a difficult situation, his tearful old man’s eyes sought Méndez. “Son! Son!” he would say. And the “son” found in his courage or in his quick Andalusian wit a resource to get out of trouble. When the Admiral explored the coasts of Central America, which he took for those of Asia, he stayed on his ships, and it was Diego Méndez who went ashore to gather news and gather supplies. Completely alone, he went among the tribes of Veragua, who were gathering to suddenly attack the ships, immobilized in a bay closed by the sand. Méndez was received by the most fearsome of the chieftains in a hut decorated with three hundred enemy heads, and he astonished them by cutting off his hair and beards with scissors in their presence, a magical operation for the indigenous people. His cures of sores and other illnesses earned him the respect of a witch doctor, and thanks to this, he was able to live among the Indians, warning Columbus of his plans. He founded the first town on the continent, some years before that of Ojeda; But this town on the banks of the Belén or Yebra River, which he governed with the title of Factor, had to defend itself day and night from the attacks of the Indians. With twenty men armed with swords and shields and two small cannons of the kind they called “de fruslera” (metal obtained by gnawing on pieces of brass), they faced the natives for a long time, who, according to Méndez in his will, “shot arrows and poled from “far away as one slashes a bull, and the arrows and shooters were as numerous as hail; and some of them broke loose to come at us with their machadsnas or macanas—clubs or clubs—but none of them returned, because they were left there with their arms and legs cut off and those killed by the sword…” Finally, this hostility was so unbearable that the Admiral re-embarked Méndez with his men and set sail without having set foot on dry land. Then came the most painful and difficult of Columbus’s adventures. The “joke,” the dreaded calamity of tropical seas, consumed the ships’ wood. The mobs, exhausted by the continuous handling of pumps and cauldrons, felt powerless before the ocean, which invaded the hollows of the cracked shells with a slow rising tide. They sailed in this way for thirty-five days, believing they were heading for Castile when they were farther from it than when they had left Veragua. One ship had to be abandoned , “riven and worm-eaten, unable to stand on the water,” and the other two, having reached the beaches of Jamaica with great difficulty, were hauled ashore and turned into houses or forts of corroded planks. From the sterncastle, with its turned balconies, to the prow, topped by a sculpted figurehead, thatched roofs similar to those of Indian huts were extended . Upon landing, Diego Méndez, the fleet’s bookkeeper, had distributed the last ration of biscuit and wine. Nothing remained in the gutted holds. A starving and desperate population of 270 Christians were moving around the dry hulls. The natives were hiding, and hunger, attracted by the solitude, was approaching at full speed. They could not expect any help. Santo Domingo was many leagues away, and they didn’t even have a boat left to attempt this daring voyage. The Admiral, ill, weakened by old age, afflicted by the presence of his little Fernando, didn’t know what to do. “Son! Son!” he exclaimed, imploring Méndez’s advice. And the young man, without fear or laziness, drawing his sword, ventured inland with only three men, going from tribe to tribe to purchase provisions, which he paid for with blue beads, combs, knives, bells, and fishhooks. His companions returned to the ships with the food, and he continued along the island’s coasts, completely alone, until he was able to buy a canoe from a chief, giving him in return a brass basin that he kept in his sleeve, his coat, and one of the two shirts he owned. In this hollow log, manned by six Indian rowers and steered by him, he returned along the coast, after many days of absence, to the place where the ships were stranded. The Admiral received him with kisses and great joy. Only the two of them realized the perilous situation. The Indians, who hunted and fished due to their dealings with Méndez, brought provisions to the camp, but their presence was becoming less and less regular, and everything led to fears that they would disappear and then return with enemies. Columbus feared that one night they would set fire to the dry and cracked hulls. There was no other hope than to notify Santo Domingo so that a ship could come for them. But how could they get there? “Sir, I’ll go,” said Méndez. In the canoe he had purchased, he would face the dangers of a violent forty-league gulf between two islands where so many ships of explorers had been lost, also having to contend with the fury of the currents. The Admiral kissed him on the cheeks. “I knew well that only you would dare to undertake this undertaking. Our Lord God will bring you out of it with victory, as in the others.” Méndez put his canoe on the stern, fitted it with a false keel, coated it with tar and tallow, nailed some planks to the bow and stern to keep out the sea, as it would have done if it were shallow, mounted a mast with its sail, and packed the necessary provisions for himself, another Christian, and six Indians, since the canoe could only carry eight people. He said goodbye to His Lordship and began to follow the coast of Jamaica to the easternmost point, that is, the closest to Santo Domingo, sailing for thirty- five leagues. Along the way, he was taken prisoner by some Indian robbers, and he miraculously escaped. Then, when he was encamped at the tip of the island, waiting for the ocean to calm before he could undertake his bold voyage, other Indians fell upon him, determined to kill him. But while they were playing ball with their lives, he was able to escape and returned to camp after an absence of fifteen days, when Columbus believed him dead or in Santo Domingo. Persisting in his purpose, he asked for an escort to accompany him to the end of the island so he could safely await a chance for calm weather, and the Admiral gave him seventy men under the command of his brother, the Adelantado Don Bartolomé. In this way, he returned to the eastern tip of Jamaica and remained there for four days until, seeing that the sea was calming, he said goodbye to everyone, commending himself to Our Lady of Antigua. He sailed on the high seas for five days and four nights, without letting go of the oar that served as his rudder, unable to move in that boat, which could capsize at the slightest disorderly movement . Thus they reached the island of Hispaniola, approaching Cape Tiburón after he and his companions had not eaten or drunk for two days, their provisions having been lost in the rough seas. He then sailed 130 leagues along the coast of Hispaniola in the fragile boat until he found Commander Ovando, the governor, and presented him with the Admiral’s requests for help. Afterwards, he had to wait several months in Santo Domingo for ships to return from Spain, as no vessel had approached in over a year. Finally, three ships arrived from the Peninsula; Méndez bought one and, loading it with bread and wine, pork, sheep, and fruit from the island, sent it to Jamaica, where Columbus had been abandoned for seven months, encouraged in his misfortune by celestial visions. A lunar eclipse, announced by him with the air of a sorcerer, had served to convince the natives to attend to the upkeep of their men. “Méndez returned to Spain,” said Ojeda, “and accompanied the Admiral in his last and sad years. Columbus recommended him to his family, and the family did nothing for him. Columbus’s son, second viceroy of the Indies, had offered him the position of chief constable of Santo Domingo, but he gave it to a relative. The valiant gentleman lived many, many years; he even rose to power under Don Luis, Columbus’s grandson, and his mother, the viceroy governor… At the time of his death, while drafting his heroic will in Valladolid, he declared with bitter pride that, although he could have been the richest man on the island if the Admiral’s descendants had kept their promises, he was the poorest on it, since he didn’t even have a house to live in without paying rent. The glory of his somewhat forgotten exploits preoccupied him in his final moments as he prepared his burial. He wanted to be buried under a large stone, the finest his heirs could find, and on it inscribed: “Here lies the honored knight Diego Méndez, who greatly served the Royal Crown of Spain in the discovery and conquest of the Indies…” And with the gravity of a great lord arranging the quarters and other heraldic decorations of his tomb, he described the coat of arms that should head the inscription: “Item: In the middle of the said stone, a canoe shall be made, which is a hollowed-out timber on which the Indians navigate, because on another such stone I sailed three hundred leagues, and above it, some letters shall be placed that say: _Canoe_.” An extravagant arrangement, a mixture of noble pride and bitter irony, closed the Argonaut’s will. Before dying, Columbus had established an estate with the great properties he owned in the Indies. Poor Méndez, without a house “where he could live without rent,” did not want to be less than his former boss and established an estate with all his property. These properties were a marble mortar, which was in the possession of a son of Columbus and seven books, which constituted his entire fortune. “The will cites the books,” Ojeda added. “A verse treatise on the revenge of Agamemnon’s death, another treatise on the Disputes of Peace, the moral philosophy of Aristotle, and the works of Erasmus, the author in vogue at that time… This proves that the conquistadors were not heroic brutes, incapable of writing their names, as was later believed, equating them all with the harsh and illiterate Pizarro. ” “What men!… what men!” Dr. Zurita murmured with admiration. Maltrana, seduced by the enthusiasm of his companions, also spoke of the conquistadors. After the seven-century struggle with the Moors, the venture in the Indies had been the most popular, the most Spanish. The wars in Italy, Flanders, and France, all the undertakings of Europe, were royal affairs, hereditary disputes in which the nation took part out of obedience, without any initiative, often accompanied by other peoples. The Castilian tercio was, like the Roman legion, a combat nucleus surrounded by swarms of auxiliary troops. Around the Spanish arquebusiers and pikemen in yellow vests marched the Italian swordsmen in black cloaks and the German lansquenets with slashed hose and heavy halberds. Spanish victories were often underwritten by foreign generals. “Not in the Indies,” said Maltrana. “In the Indies, everything is ours: the soldier, the leader, and the navigator. Even the money for the exploration ventures was popular money. The kings only gave subsidies for the first voyages.” Then, private enterprise launched its explorations by sea and land, and in less than a century, half the world had been explored and circumnavigated. Modern commercial companies, joint-stock companies, had made their first appearance in that Spain barely emerging from the chaos of the Middle Ages. A captain with vague news of a new land always found a priest with savings, an eager scribe, a nobleman willing to sell his land, who joined him in the adventurous venture, providing capital with which to acquire ships, weapons , and provisions. The king only gave his permission, reserving a fifth of the profits in return . The soldiers marched off to conquer without pay. They were industrial partners with variable shares, depending on whether they went on foot or mounted, whether they owned an arquebus or only a sword and shield. Sometimes, upon departure of the expedition from a major port, the terms of the venture were set forth in solemn notarial agreements; Others, heroes who could not sign their names, had a mass said, and at the moment of consecration, they drew their swords and, with the other hand on the host, swore to remain faithful to their pacts and commitments. This did not prevent oaths from being sacrilegiously broken when the hour of triumph arrived, over the division of domains as vast as the Peninsula, with mountains that years later would vomit precious metals from the throats of their mineshafts. Some expeditions left hastily, before completing their preparations, for fear of capitalists’ repentance or the demands of creditors. Hernán Cortés, on his voyage to conquer Mexico, had had to set sail hastily, before completing his provisioning of provisions, for fear of seizure by moneylenders. Legal formalities accompanied adventurers on their distant undertakings. The notary was an important figure on every expedition. The Catholic Monarchs had recommended, at the beginning of the discoveries, that the treatment of the natives be treated with kindness. For this reason, the first navigators, whenever they approached an island or a mainland coast and were greeted by the Indians with arrows and stones, before taking the offensive they would call the royal scribe, ask him for testimony of how they had been received in a friendly manner. war, finding themselves in the imperative need to defend themselves; and once this formality was fulfilled, they would fire their longboats and attack, sword in hand. The three men, gazing at the ocean from the side of that ocean liner equipped with the same comforts as a grand hotel, remembered the poor vessels assembled by the heroes of the discovery. The caravels, light, fast-moving vessels with little space for cargo or passengers, had only served on the first voyages of exploration. Shortly after the discovery of the Indies, it was the nao that crossed the Atlantic, the heavy galleon, round of hull and sail, high at the stern, whose belly could carry the people, animals, and tools necessary for the new lands. The overwhelming monotony of these months-long voyages was only interrupted by the dangers of the ocean and by those caused by the lack of foresight and ignorance typical of the time. Many ships were lost. The first ships of discovery were manned only by men. Later, the galleons of colonization carried women and children, families en masse who traveled to the New World, and when they thought they saw its shores, they were swallowed up by the storm, sinking forever into the depths of the sea. Experienced sailors, trained on previous voyages, were insufficient in number for the ever-increasing expeditions to the colonized lands. Pilots from the seas of Europe advanced blindly across the Atlantic, following uncertain courses on newly drawn portolan charts. Just when they considered themselves still far from their destination, the coast suddenly appeared before the flat nose of the galleon. At other times, they thought they were near the Indies, and a more accurate estimate of the leagues traveled made them realize with terror that they were still halfway there, with their provisions exhausted, and, what was more horrifying, with only a few barrels of water. The men wanted to kill, maddened by thirst; The women, on their knees, taught their little ones, begging for a few drops of liquid in charity. The unknown tragedies that this silent and immense blue witness had witnessed! The shipwrecks that had left not even a plank as a trace ! The ship advanced under the direction and despotic authority of the pilot, a kind of sorcerer who spoke to the winds and the waves. The captain was the leader of the battle, the man of the sword, the first of all in the presence of a hostile ship or an approachable coast; but at sea , like the others, he obeyed the grave pilot, a foreboding figure who examined the color of the waters, the flight of the seagulls, the intensity of the winds, the hues of dawn, and the bloody clouds of sunset . He occupied a place high aft, called “the tabernacle.” He sat in an armchair similar to that of an ancient barber’s, and from it he shouted his orders to the bowmen, grooms, cabin boys, and pages, a thinly-breasted, half-naked, and starving crew, long in liaison with all sorts of parasites. At nightfall, the fires and lights on the ship were extinguished for fear of fire. The kitchen stoves remained cold until the following morning. There was no light except that of the binnacle fire; and upon lighting it, the page on duty would say, as was customary: “Amen, and God grant us good night; safe voyage, safe passage for the ship, Sir Captain and Master, and good company. ” Two pages remained near the binnacle, watching over the hourglass, an hourglass that ground out—allowed to pass through—its contents in half an hour. Thus they measured time in the darkness of the night. And following a tradition, the pages would say upon entering the guard: Blessed is the hour in which God was born, Saint Mary who gave birth to him, Saint John who baptized him. The guard is taken; the flask is grinding, we shall have a good journey, God willing. When the sand had just passed through the flask, that is, every half hour, One of the pages had to shout so that the sailors could hear: ” Good is the one that goes, better is the one that comes; one is passed and in two it grinds, more will grind if God wills. ” Tell and pass on what a good voyage he has. “Ah, from the bow; alert, good watch!” And the sailors in the bow would answer with a shout or a grunt to make it clear that they were not sleeping. Crew members and passengers would form little groups in the darkness, talking about the mysteries and legends of the sea, giving names and magical properties to the stars that shone between the rigging and the black sails. At midnight , when everyone felt their eyes closing and went in search of their hammocks and mats, the guard was relieved, and those who were to keep watch until dawn would enter the quarters, and the pages would shout again: “To the quarter, to the quarter, gentlemen sailors of good part. To the quarter, to the quarter, in good time for the lord pilot’s watch, for it is time.” Leap, leap, leap. Saturday, at dusk, was the ship’s grand celebration. The Salve was recited “and other prose songs,” as Columbus said in his journal. An altar was improvised with images and lit candles, and crew and passengers gathered around it. “Are we all here?” the master asked. “God be with us,” the people responded in chorus. The master took off his hood before replying: “Hail, let us have a good voyage.” ” Hail, let us have a good voyage.” And everyone on board—foremen, cabin boys, sailors, soldiers, gentlemen, ladies, servants, and children—sang the Salve in the dying afternoon, while the sun dyed the sails orange and the sea lifted the heavy hull of the galleon with its crashes. The prayers didn’t end with the Salve and the litany. A page serving as an altar boy next to the master would then recommend in his childlike voice: Let’s say a Hail Mary for the ship and company. “Welcome,” the crowd would reply. And when this prayer was finished, the master would greet everyone with grave composure. “Amen, gentlemen, and may God grant us good night.” Not all navigators were pious and trusted their fate to heaven. In the first century after the discovery, the legend of the pilot Carreño, a daring and blasphemous Argonaut, enemy of God and the saints, spread among the seafaring world . Despite the diabolical atmosphere surrounding his name, the crews remembered him with envy during the great calms, when the galleon remained motionless for weeks on end in a sea like a mirror, without the slightest breath of breeze. This cursed man of the ocean, reminiscent of the “Flying Dutchman” and other pilots in mortal sin, had made a voyage from the Indies to Cadiz in just three days. But it must be noted that the ship was manned by a legion of demons disguised as sailors, who had offered their services. The voyage took place in a continuous hurricane. Passengers and soldiers could not stand on the ship, which was trembling from the speed and close to breaking up. The pilot, Carreño, sitting in the tabernacle, had to hold onto his steering knuckle so that the ship’s crazy motion would not throw him into the sea. The demons, mischievous spirits, executed the maneuvers in reverse of the nautical commands given by Carreño. When he ordered the crew, agile and malicious as a troop of monkeys, “Long sheet,” the playful demons seized the foremast and mizzen sails. And when “Iza” commanded, they subsided. But devils always prove innocent when they have to deal with the malice of man: their destiny is to be deceived by the sinner in the long run, and the clever Carreño, upon understanding the villainy of his unruly sailors, ordered from then on the exact opposite of what he truly wanted them to do. Thus the ship was saved, and in three days, by deceiving the devil, Carreño was able to pass from one world to the other. Thirst was the torment of long voyages interrupted by calms. The water became corrupted, and the overly salty food excited everyone’s desire for drink. The emigrant families sustained themselves with the provisions they had made before embarking. The ship’s hearth was called “the island of pots” because of their large number, as each group looked after its own. And when mealtime arrived , the same pages who had just laid out a tablecloth on the floor for the sailors, with wooden plates, would shout the signal. “Table, table, Sir Captain, pilot, master, and good company! Table set, food ready. Water used for Sir Captain and master and good company. Long live, long live the King of Castile by sea and land! And whoever makes war on him, may his head be cut off. And whoever doesn’t say amen, may he not be given anything to drink. Table in good time, whoever doesn’t come, may he not eat!” And at the beginning of the voyage, the crew ate salted beef ; later, bones without marrow dressed only with a few nerves; on Fridays and vigils, beans stewed with water and salt; and during heavy feasts , pollock, which was a very luxurious dish. Most remained hungry, but they were content as long as the page in charge of the wine crate frequently passed before them, cup in hand. The passengers forgot all the torments and miseries of the voyage within sight of the Indies. They opened their chests to take out white shirts and new dresses; they cleansed themselves of their small, repugnant and annoying fellow travelers , who once again took refuge in the cracks of the ships; they girded on their swords. As for the poor ladies, emaciated from seasickness and privation, they were transfigured upon reaching the new lands. They untangled the strands of their neglected hair, enlivened their faces with white suliman and red cochineal, “emerging from below deck,” according to a contemporary traveler, “so well-played, curled, cocked, and tucked in, that they looked like the granddaughters of those they had on the high seas.” Glory, wealth, and even the government of nations were within everyone’s reach across the seas. Following the fifes and drums of the troops and the waving of flags with double-headed eagles, the poor gentleman went in search of glory, but also of misery. After long campaigns in Flanders or Italy, he was assured of an equally long wait in the antechambers of palaces, with the memorial on his knees, demanding a servant’s reward for the iron balls and the knife wounds received in battles against the Turk and the heretic. High positions were occupied by courtiers of traditional nobility, the descendants of those who had fought in the Peninsula against the Saracens. By embarking for the Indies, anything was possible. All it took was to found a town to be ennobled by this feat, adding the honorific Don before its name. Young men of unruly life, accustomed to nightly fights with the patrols of bailiffs and long stays in jail for debt, became magnificent lords on the other side of the ocean who dethroned emperors, installed others in their place, or ended up sitting on the throne themselves. Some, at the hour when their mothers, wearing little red baize trousers, were feeding the hens in their farmyards in Extremadura and Andalusia, married, like knights- errant, great princesses with pale complexions and slanted eyes, creatures of enigma and reverie who wore on their foreheads the multicolored tassel of authority and on their chests golden plaques with sacred hieroglyphics. And every day, for a century, the doors of the Basque farmhouse creaked at dawn , of the brown adobe wall of Castile, of the whitewashed Moorish hovel crowded in the Andalusian alley, of the Extremadura corral wrapped in the smell of pig dung, and the young men set out, lightly clad and agile of leg, singing like the youths Don Quixote met on his forays, with an old sword slung over their shoulders. In the guise of a pilgrim’s staff, with his bundle of clothes and all his fortune hanging from it: new breeches, breeches, two shirts, a rosary, some worn playing cards, the most necessary thing to become a viceroy or a marquis with a sonorous and exotic title on the other side of the sea. And from all corners of the Peninsula, following converging routes like the ribs of a fan, these joyful pilgrims of adventure and hope came to join in firm friendship, perhaps for the rest of their lives, at the foot of the caravels and galleons that swayed heavily at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, awaiting the Lombard shock of departure. They were “the second wave” of explorers, those who would circumnavigate the newly discovered world, through shipwreck and death. Years later, those of “the third wave” embarked, the conquerors of kingdoms and founders of cities, who, ill-disposed toward the peace of triumph, ended up quarreling among themselves in a stupid and ferocious faction war. The kings lived with their backs turned to these mysterious lands, whose vaunted riches only became a reality a few years later. Preoccupied with their wars and European affairs, they looked on indifferently at this exodus and freely opened their hands to any demand for new conquests and navigation permits. “An author of that time,” said Maltrana, “wrote a book entitled ‘The Six Adventurers of Spain, and How One Goes to the Indies, and Another to Italy, and Another to Flanders, and Another is in Prison, and Another is in Litigation, and Another Enters Religion. And How in Spain There Are No More of These Six People Aforesaid…” Indeed, there were no more. This was the state to which those with the will and courage could aspire. The Indies represented, according to Cervantes, “the refuge and shelter of all the desperate of Spain”; and since despair was the natural state of the Spanish people of that time, the book must have had a second part, true and logical, recounting how the adventurer from the Indies stayed there forever; and the adventurers from Italy and Flanders, bored with a poor and inglorious heroism, ended up leaving for the New World; and the prisoner did the same upon leaving jail; and the litigator followed the same path, finding himself with no other sustenance than cheap soup; and even the friar ended his days in a colonial monastery indoctrinating copper-colored virgins and tending the orange trees recently brought from the Peninsula… “In this flight to new lands,” said Ojeda, “who will ever know the exact number of those who left and never arrived?” How many ignored catastrophes! Some foreign authors claim that in three centuries it cost Spain thirty million men to colonize the New World. They are surely exaggerating; but one must consider that this great colonization from half of the present-day United States to the passage of Magellan was undertaken by Spain alone, using its own resources. Today, the American has changed greatly from its original type. What a mixture this represents! The enormous expenditure of virility that was necessary to clarify the Indian blood of its native copper! During the first century of the conquest, adventurers embarked on the first ships they found available, antique vessels barely repaired and guided by any coastal pilot willing to lead the expedition. The administrations of that time were unfamiliar with statistics. Furthermore, clandestine voyages without papers were frequent. No one worried about the safety of other people’s voyages: everyone looked out for themselves. They trusted in God and feared nothing . An expedition under the command of an old captain of the Indies was leaving Cadiz for Pearl Island, off the coast of Venezuela. The day was calm, the sea smooth and calm; but the galleon was so disjointed and rotten that it had barely sailed for an hour when it instantly sank in sight of the city, drowning all its members. crew members. “This catastrophe,” Maltrana said, “made some noise, because among the adventurers was the only son of Lope de Vega, a young poet eager to follow one of the six careers of the hidalgos of that time. But these shipwrecks occurred very frequently, due to lack of foresight or audacity, without any news of them surviving… If only this sea could tell us all the unknown dramas of the discovery! ” Dr. Zurita nodded gravely. Its great overseas enterprise had cost Spain dearly. Perhaps its decline stemmed from this. “That’s right,” Ojeda replied. “Some attribute this decline to the European wars; but the nations that fought with us suffered equal losses, and they did not decline because of this… Others blame it on excessive religiosity, which led us to absurd enterprises. Perhaps this is true, but only in part.” There were nations then as fanatical as ours, and yet they were not in mortal danger… The principal cause of our decline, or rather, of our anemia, must be sought in the colonization of the Indies. An organism heals from the wounds it receives, however tremendous they may be. What is dangerous, what is mortal, is a bleeding that lasts for years, that lasts for centuries: an unstoppable flow with which life escapes… Ferdinand described old Spain as one of those excessively prolific mothers who march on their somewhat unsteady legs among their children, tall, robust, smiling with the confidence of health. They suffer from all illnesses and have none: their only certain ailment is weakness, anemia, the scarcity of a life that they have generously distributed and squandered. Each child has taken a shred of their existence with them. “And imagine,” Ojeda continued, “what it means for Spain to have given birth to nearly twenty cubs who are on the other side of the sea living on their own, some advanced and cultured, others impulsive and wild, but all of her blood and her surname and with the illusions of youth. ” Maltrana nodded at these words, but added an opinion of his own. Spain’s evil had been not resting until old age. “Our country is, due to its history, something similar to a pot that boils for centuries and centuries without anyone removing it from the heat to cool its contents. The great peoples of Europe, after the melting pot during which their races mingled and their antagonisms were erased, were able to rest in peace. This repose has served to solidify them, to grow, and to acquire new strength. Spain did not; Spain did not know rest. For seven centuries it has boiled with the bubbling of racial struggles and religious antagonisms.” Finally, the fusion of the various ingredients is verified in some way. The national mixture is now made, perhaps poorly, but it is now made. The vessel must be removed from the heat so that the contents can crystallize and become something more than liquid and vapor. But at this critical moment, Spain discovered the Indies and, through monarchical alliances, found itself mistress of half of Europe. And instead of resting, it boiled again with greater heat, swelling with a mad, absurd bubbling, the most extraordinary, daring, and insolent ever recorded in history. A relatively small nation, poorly situated at one end of the old world, and which also sought to unify by expelling the Spanish Jews and Muslims for being of a different religion, simultaneously undertook the task of colonizing half the globe and maintaining under its authority distant European nations that were neither of its language nor of its race. And the liquid, swollen by the fire, acquired fantastic proportions, appearing much larger than it really was; It spread out in waves from the vessel, to be lost uselessly, until it finally went out in the fire. And when the pot finally rested, cooling, it had only faint residues inside. The best had escaped in glorious vapors or was scattered throughout the world in stains, in small lumps, without forming a homogeneous mass. “Oh, if only we had rested in time like other peoples!” said Maltrana. “If only a century or two had passed between the national constitution and our great undertakings!… But we stretched our legs beyond the sheet, which was short. A more glorious and useless waste of life and energy has never been seen.” Dr. Zurita protested at this last point. “Not useless. As far as the undertakings of Europe are concerned, undoubtedly… But there remains America, all the republics that speak Spanish, and that beyond their differences in national constitution are equal in soul and customs.” Ojeda nodded. The mad waste of Spanish energy had only been reproductive in the Indies. Traveling through various republics of the New World during his time as a diplomat, he had appreciated the historical greatness of Spain better than by reading apologetic books . In a cold American country, where pine and fir trees grew like those in Europe and the mountains were crowned with snow, the Spanish language met the traveler, and with it the old houses with colonial coats of arms on the gates and the pompous gentlemen with solemn manners resembling the noblemen of old. Even the President of the Republic had a stale, sonorous surname, like that of the swashbuckling gallants in Calderón’s plays. Then, upon crossing into another country of coconut palms and tangled forests, with rivers like seas, plains of infernal heat, volcanoes with smoking peaks, and lakes suspended between mountain ranges bordering the clouds, he once again found himself dressed in white, straw hat in hand, the same courteous and ceremonious gentleman; the lady with short feet and Andalusian eyes, discreet, playful , and devout like a Lope-style veil; the old colonial convent with its tiled hooded towers that echo the chiming of the hours on scorching afternoons or moonlit nights over streets with potholed ironwork impregnated with the scent of orange and jasmine. And another president received him in audience, bearing a surname of ancient stock, and identical to the others in his chivalrous bearing and his exploits as a willful and courageous leader. From the borders of Texas to the ice of Magellan, Spain lived and would live for long centuries in the sententious, transatlantic doctor, descendant of Salamanca and Alcalá; in the graceful and devout lady who imitates the latest novelties in external elegance, but preserves the soul of her grandmothers; in the adventurous leader who renews the medieval romances of the Peninsula on the other side of the ocean; In the irresistible admiration for courage and audacity felt by even the most enlightened, placing courage above all human virtues. A continental cataclysm could sink the Iberian Peninsula beneath the waves; and if with this the Spanish nation disappeared, the Spanish people, the Spanish word, the Spanish soul would not die. Across the sea, on the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific, or nestled on the slopes of the Andes like the nests of condors, existed thousands of cities unified by language, customs, and a peculiar concept of honor. Eighty million people spoke and thought Spanish . Catholicism, firm and dominant in some nations of the Americas, weak and compromising in others, was also a traditional force that kept alive the past, common to all of them. Europeans learned Spanish to communicate with the young peoples of the Americas. Spanish was the third world language thanks to its spread in the New World. Spain was reborn in the verdant beauty of its daughters. “And this is something,” said Ojeda. “Our crazy wastefulness of other times has not been completely lost thanks to America. ” His friends nodded. No, it hadn’t been lost. “Only a country like the Peninsula,” continued Ojeda, “with an African climate and at the same time plateaus of glacial cold, could produce a race prepared for the colonization of such a vast and diverse world. This is the only way to understand how the same men could found cities at an altitude of more than two thousand meters, where breathing is difficult, and cities at sea level, below the Equator, in a hellish environment. Only a sober, hard-living people like the Spanish could undertake the task of populating a world where people were even more sober and where there was little or nothing to eat. The danger for the conquistador wasn’t the Indian arrow; it was the loneliness and the immense distances, and above all, it was hunger. Zurita intervened, with the haste of someone hearing about something they know better than their interlocutors. “I can say a lot about that. I have colonized, you know, friend?… I have lived in the desert, and there I learned what the ancient Spaniards were like and how much we owe them… We have been unjust to them. They educate us poorly out of patriotism: they instill lies in us from childhood.” When I was in school, the hatreds of the struggle for independence were more alive than they are now, even though more than half a century had passed. Spain was a cruel stepmother, and the Spanish were brutal “Galicians,” who only knew how to enslave and exploit us… And this was taught to us in Spanish, and besides, the teacher and the students all had Spanish surnames. We spoke of the “Galicians” as if they were a barbaric people who had conquered our country when it was already established and fully civilized, delaying its progress, which is why we had gloriously expelled them after three centuries of tyranny… As a man, I remained in the same ignorance. Those of us who are born in an already established city don’t ask ourselves how it was formed and who laid its foundations. When we want to leave it, it is to go to Europe and rage with emulation, seeing that there are things better than ours. We never look back, nor do we worry about our origins. The doctor paused, as if bothered by a bad memory. “I myself,” he added, “feel a certain remorse when I think of my grandfather. Poor man! When I was angry with him as a child, I called him “Galician” and recalled the great deeds of Independence, which had served, in my opinion, to kick a band of exploitative foreigners out of the country… When I traveled through the interior of my land, I saw clearly; I realized the suffering and labor of those men who spread the civilization of their time across the desert. Only those who live in cities and don’t go out into the uncultivated countryside that has yet to be touched by the hand of man can speak with contempt of our distant ancestors.” The doctor recalled his life as a young man, when he had colonized virgin lands recently abandoned by the Indians. “I had to suffer all kinds of privations: I even went hungry many times.” And yet the railroad was nearby, and I could travel up the rivers on steamships instead of rowing, and the ocean liner brought me European orders in less than a month… Then I realized what the early Spaniards had done, with no means of communication other than the pack train or the wagon, having to spend six or eight months traveling distances that today the railroad covers in two or three days. When they wanted to travel up the Paraná, going from Buenos Aires to Asunción by rowing and sailing due to the river’s twists and turns, this trip took them three times longer than going to Spain. Ships from the Peninsula arrived very rarely, if they didn’t sink. And despite so many obstacles, our ancestors founded the nuclei of the cities we have today, created the first livestock farms, adapted the products of the Old World to our soil, prepared everything so that the Europeans who arrived later would not die of hunger… The Spanish set the table in America, made the seats and provided the bread. This is an image that comes to mind. Later, other more advanced peoples have brought the refined sauces of civilization, the beautiful table decorations; but without the first, who prepared the most necessary, there would be no banquet. “That’s right,” said Maltrana. “But he who produces in life the precise and vulgar never achieves the fame of he who makes the superfine and pleasant. No one knows who invented bread and who wove the first cloth. No nation has erected statues to them. And believe me, the inventors of bread, cloth, and the cooking of food were greater and more worthy of glory than the authors of all the machinery of our time. ” “In the formation of the American countries,” Zurita insisted, “what happens is the same as in the great buildings being built now. Very few see the interior steel scaffolding; no one wishes to know the names of those who worked on the deep foundations. All admiration is for the ornaments and flourishes of the façade… And the one who laid our foundations and raised the solid part of our palace was Spain.” The other towns arrived much later, at the time of decorations and balconies, to provide comfort and beauty. The hardest work, the thankless and dangerous masonry work, was done by “the old woman.” “And the higher you want to elevate your building,” said Ojeda, “the more grand and solemn you want it, the more you will have to dig down in search of the foundations to reinforce them, or else it will collapse. ” “You have to have lived in the desert,” continued the doctor, “to realize what the conquistadors brought with them and the services they rendered to civilization. I suffered greatly creating my rooms, and yet I thought: “This horse that carries me from one place to another was brought by the Spanish. Before they came, it didn’t exist. These cows and these sheep that I can kill and eat, they brought too. The biscuit I put in my mouth comes from the wheat they planted first.” And I couldn’t move in my poverty without realizing that the few comforts that surrounded me were due to the daring Spaniards who advanced and died in the desert so that one day I could advance too . And I asked myself: “But what was there here before they arrived? What did people eat?” The people were few, and there was only corn, cassava, and guanaco meat. This is judging by what I’ve seen in my homeland. They say that in Peru and Mexico there were greater means, because the people were more numerous. That must have been the case, but I fear that in the stories there is much exaggeration by writers, marvelous tales… what you call “literature.” Ojeda, who was listening thoughtfully, spoke in turn. “And you have to think, doctor, about the effort it would take to bring each of those products destined for acclimatization to the New World, in small ships, with people crowded together. Crew members and soldiers slept on the boards.” The captains and dignitaries had a rolled-up mattress on the stern for comfort . The provisions were salted or vinegared to withstand the temperature changes. The great calms of the ocean, with their prolonged immobility, made the water supply scarce. Many sold their clothes one by one in exchange for a few glasses of earthy, overheated liquid, and arrived naked at the end of the voyage. And in the midst of this raging thirst, they had to save liquid to give water to the horse, the breeding bull, the whelping cow, the potted orange tree, the planted olive tree, and all the new animal and plant life they carried there as treasures, valued more than human lives… And as if so many tribulations were not enough, they had to fire their way through enemy ships, English, Dutch, or French, which, depending on the fluctuations in Spanish policy, came out to meet them to prevent their voyages. “Spain,” Ojeda concluded, “gave America everything it had, the good and the bad. ” “And it didn’t give more because it didn’t have more,” Zurita said. “I don’t think other countries had more to give in those times… But we, Legitimate descendants of the Spanish, we have inherited from them the bad language, the tendency to speak against Spain and hold it responsible for everything. “There we have our friend Pérez,” Maltrana laughed, that handsome, rosy-cheeked young man who admires England even in his dreams. He holds the mother country responsible for everything in America: the dryness or the excess of rain, the laziness of the Indians, even the scarcity of railroads. ” “The inherited bad language, it’s true,” Ojeda said. “The proud individualism of the Spaniard, who believes himself cheated by being from his country and speaks against it all the time, convinced that if he were born in another land he would have been much greater. ” “An injustice,” Zurita said, “is also to talk so much about the cruelty of the Spanish toward the Indians. How can you civilize a land without first sweeping away the people who occupy it if they oppose that civilization? In the former Spanish America, the most advanced peoples are now those with the fewest Indians. ” In the United States, so few remain that they are shown in circuses as a curiosity. In my country, they are only found on the northern borders, and they are becoming fewer all the time. Chile now retains only a sample of the ancient Araucanians. “It’s curious,” said Maltrana, smiling again. “Almost all the American republics, in their hatred of Spain, have praised the primitive Indian who stood up to the conquistadors, painting him as a hero possessed of every virtue. But many of those republics, after their independence, have dedicated themselves to killing the Indian, suppressing him with a cruelty more cold-blooded and reasoned than that of the viceroys and governors, organizing the methodical extermination and distribution of children, so that not even a single offspring would remain… Grandchildren of Galicians and Basques have sung of the Indians’ attempts at rebellion against the mother country, seeing in them the first cries of Independence, when they were nothing more than racial revolts, color uprisings.” Had the Indians triumphed, the first thing they would have done is kill the white Creoles, grandparents or parents of the leaders of American emancipation. “I’m not one of those,” the doctor protested. “I believe the main defect of Spanish colonization was its determination to transform the Indian, to make him Christian: a difficult undertaking with few results. Look at the example of the great modern nations: when a refractory people stands in their way, they suppress them… England, with its Protestant virtue and biblical lament, has erased entire races from the planet. Spain couldn’t do it. It had to populate a hemisphere; it lacked people for such an area, and it had to compromise with the natives. In addition, we must take into account the devout spirit and the pernicious facility of the Spanish to hook up with the first Indian woman they came across and form a holy family with her, full of children.” Modern peoples , when they conquer a country, send remittances of white women so that the colonizers don’t waste the national seed on interbreeding. And if, despite this, a mestizo emerges, they are not recognized. “The conquistador,” said Maltrana, “advised by the priest, believed he was living in mortal sin if he did not marry the mother of his children, and sometimes the Indian concubine, through the exploits of her husband, became Doña Inés, Doña Luz, or Doña Violante with a noble coat of arms and land governorship. ” “In the United States,” said Ojeda, “the European people maintained their white purity, and that is why they got to where they are. Each person, when emigrating, took his wife, and marriages were always made within the same race. But that land is, as it were, at the gates of its ancient metropolis; travel was faster, more frequent, and the number of people transferred was greater.” Furthermore, they lived for a long time concentrated on the coasts, leaving the rest of the country to the savages, advancing slowly, with sure steps, until, almost in our time, from a With a single blow they overflowed across the vast expanse, determined to wipe out the Indian, who was refractory to culture; and the Indian was finished… Spain, from the very beginning, wanted to see everything, explore everything. Its first discoverers were in places to which no civilized person has since returned. And this mad scattering of scattered and curious forces had as a consequence, in many places, that instead of the Indian becoming Spanish, it was the Spaniard who became Indian, joining, through love and family relationships, the race he was trying to dominate. “That’s how it goes for peoples of such origin,” the doctor said, smiling. ” I, my friends, have very personal opinions when it comes to the countries of America. I am American, but not Indian. When I see a nation where the people are mostly white, I say to myself: “These people will work in peace, and they will surely go far.” When I see coppery faces and pig hair everywhere, I twist my face: “Bad; “These can only produce intrigues, politicking, ridiculous vanity, revolutions to seize power, dances, music, and poetry… lots of poetry…” The two friends laughed upon hearing the doctor’s last words. “I have worked in the fields,” he continued, “and I know from experience that a business can only be started with white workers or with immigrants from Europe, who know the value of money, save money, and have a clear understanding of life’s duties. What I have suffered from the Indians and mestizos! They work like crazy when hunger strikes, but barely get paid for a week, they disappear to get drunk, and leave you stranded. How can you carry on a business with such assistants! More than once I have envied the conquistadors, who, according to the customs of their time, could lead, with a stick in hand, people incapable of serious and continuous work. Only someone who has colonized can understand the behavior of those Spaniards.” They had to establish the civilization of their time with no help other than that of grown children driven only by fear. The doctors, who live in the cities and have found everything done without knowing exactly how it was done, can indulge in sentimentality and declamation. They then spoke of the “great crimes” of the conquistadors. “They were a harsh, violent people,” said Ojeda, “and even among themselves they settled their disputes with blood. But they were no better or worse than the men of the sword who were waging war in Europe during the same years. The world’s injustice toward the conquistadors of America is curious! Some describe them as exceptional monsters of evil, something of which there is no example in history; And a century after they carried out their conquest, the Thirty Years’ War and other religious wars were raging in the heart of Europe, with mass beheadings of peaceful peasants and the burning of entire villages and all their inhabitants… “Equally ridiculous,” said Maltrana, “are the laments about the work of the Indians in the mines. Anyone would believe that only they worked. The Indian served to drag the minerals, just as free men serve today in mines that lack machinery. But working with the Indian were Spanish workers, miners sent from the Peninsula, who suffered as much or more than they did… Humanity will always have to perform, in order to live, heavy work, overwhelming functions. Today, after so much civilization, hundreds of thousands of whites suffer equally in the mines, and this sentimentality is unjust, it is silenced when the victim is one of their own race and only becomes tender when the one who suffers is of another color… Since Spain was gravitating over Europe for a century and a half and left many people resentful of its domination, there has not been a lie or exaggeration that revenge has not failed to launch against it afterwards. “A great many of the lies that circulate about our colonies,” said Ojeda, “are the work of an editor. The booksellers had great influence on the history of America. Its very title, disparaging Columbus, was given to it by a bookseller on the French border, the publisher of the letters of Amerigo Vespucci. And many of the traditional lies circulating against colonial Spaniards were invented by a Flemish bookseller. He was Theodore de Bry, a printer from Liège, who from 1570 to 1602 published books and prints to fuel European curiosity about events in the Indies and hatred of Spain, the then ruler of the Old World. The good Flemish writer produced patriotic works, discrediting the Spaniards who governed his country by every means possible. But this impassioned work was unworthy of the credulity accorded it by general ignorance. The statements of the editor Bry, who had never been to the Indies, who printed everything offered to him as long as it was against Spain, and who lived a century after the discovery, were accepted with the same respect as if they were documents from eyewitnesses. He invented portraits of Columbus, and he also invented ridiculous stories about the Admiral’s life and the injustice and cruelty of the Spanish. “The bookseller Bry,” Ojeda continued, “was the author of that dull and imbecile tale about ‘Columbus’s egg’… The fate of certain nonsense! Very few know what the discovery was or have an approximate idea of Columbus; but everyone knows the truism about the egg, a dull fable worthy of a Flemish wit. ” “It is true,” said Maltrana, “that a good part of what has been spread against the Spanish in America was invented in Europe by people who were never there. Some American authors of the 18th century protested against the exaggeration of these inventions, but their voice was not echoed.” Then, at the beginning of the Independence, the American revolutionaries adopted many of the European assertions as their own, blindly accepting them with the passion of the struggle, and such lies still linger in the teachings given in the schools of the New World. “At the beginning of the decline of our country,” Fernando added, “in Italy, Flanders, Holland, Germany, England, and France, countries that had much to avenge, since for a century and a half they had been greatly annoyed by Spanish preponderance, volumes rained down on the great cruelties suffered by the Indians. Rousseau made primitive man, free in the midst of Nature, fashionable, and the American Indians were the perfect type of the victim imprisoned and disfigured by civilization. Follicular abbots, to flatter the public, wept over the misfortune of some poor Indians whom they had only seen painted in prints, like Carnival masks.” “Baron von Humboldt,” Maltrana interrupted, “the only foreigner of ability who saw the Americas of that time up close, traveling throughout almost all of them, said that the Indians governed by colonial authority, clumsy and formulaic, but at the same time tolerant and lax, could well be envied by the peasants of Europe, who lived in greater misery, and especially by the peasants of France before the Revolution… Many of the colonial crimes, which were at the same time crimes of the rest of the world… literature, pure literature! ” “Don’t take this as a joke,” Ojeda said. “Literature played a big part in that. When the emancipation movement began in America, Chateaubriand reigned over the world and Atala was the sublime book. “Sad Chactas!” all the ladies of both hemispheres sang in tearful voices, accompanied by harp or guitar. And the fashionable, interesting, gallant, and philosophizing Indian was, for the revolutionaries, one more argument against Spanish tyranny. “And the funny thing was,” said Maltrana, “that the Indian, in almost all the countries of America, instead of going with the revolution, which pitied and praised him, stayed away from it or defended the king until the last moment, forming part of the monarchical armies, where for every soldier In the peninsula, there were forty or fifty blacks. And once the revolution was over, the enemies of tyranny saw themselves victorious, and they rushed to finish off the “sad Chactas,” slaughtering them in many countries of our America, burning their tents, dividing up their children, or involving them in civil wars to serve as cannon fodder. Once again, they spoke of the first conquistadors. At the beginning of their exodus, the Spanish people were at the height of their vigor. Seven centuries of continuous struggle with the Moors had virilized their customs. Men of war played at stopping a millstone in full rotation. Another, with the courtesy of a giant, would pull out the holy water font in a church so that a short lady could dip her fingers more comfortably . Every Spaniard was a soldier. The constant riots, rides, and alarm calls on the borders of the Muslim and Christian kingdoms forced the peasant to plow the land with their weapons ready. An agricultural operation often cost a battle. The Arab taught him to ride untamed steeds; the country’s tradition, dating back to Hannibal’s auxiliaries, made him a tireless laborer. Guerrilla warfare, surprise attacks, and ambushes, lightly armed, prepared him to search the jungles of America for the elusive, invisible, and sure-fire enemy. Similar to the Roman legionaries, who fought on land as well as at sea, the adventurers of the conquest were simultaneously navigators, tireless horsemen on the vast plains, and hardy wanderers in the virgin forests, suffering the scratches of thorny vegetation, the stalking of Indians, the attacks of wild beasts, and the torments of hunger and thirst. Some who landed in Mexico ended up settling in the far reaches of Patagonia. Others, abandoning the comfortable life on the shores of the Pacific, set out through forests and deserts, following the course of rivers like seas, to reach the Atlantic through the mouths of the Amazon. Their tireless foot was as valuable as their iron hand and the keen eye of a bird of prey. Hunger, a hunger that only the Spaniard, accustomed to the sobriety of his race, could endure, accompanied him on his explorations across the barren plateaus of the Andes and the endless swampy plains. He ventured into deserts from which all animal life seemed to have fled. The sad blue sky flashed and trembled, charged with electricity, without shedding a tear of rain; the bronze ground did not allow the slightest blade of grass to adorn its crags; the llama and the vicuña changed their feminine trot to avoid entering this desolation, sometimes glacial, sometimes torrid. Not a single plant or beast could be found in the solitudes of leagues and leagues… And there man passed, there the Spanish adventurer walked without a guide, driven by his heroic ignorance, which made him march in a straight line, following the illusory fluttering of the Chimera, always in search of mountains of gold. Some were students ill-suited to scholastic robes or farmhands who, dazzled by the magical splendor of the Indies, improvised warriors in new lands. Most were combatants in the European wars, second sons of illustrious houses, poor hidalgos who had served their apprenticeships in the tercios of Italy and Flanders and attended the sack of Rome: soldiers proud of their exploits and somewhat undisciplined, who considered their leaders as equals. Each of them was capable of taking command, and in difficult times, acting on their own, they remedied their leader’s faults and achieved victory. Their pride was accustomed to the respect and fear of the captain. When the latter couldn’t hang him, he flattered him courteously. Generals in Spain called their men “lord soldiers.” The Duke of Alba, accustomed to treating kings and popes fiercely, called the warriors of his regiments “Most High and Powerful Sons,” praising “the great love and affection he had for them.” And from among these haughty, cruel, and chivalrous men of war, who carried their arquebus like a scepter, their battered helmet like a crown, their rags like a glory, emerged Ercilla, Cerotes, Calderón, and many other geniuses. In eternal pact with hunger and poverty, condemned from their youth to see their exploits ill-rewarded and with no future but an old age of beggary, the humblest of them could nevertheless, if luck helped them in the Indies, become lord of vast lands and viceroy of an empire. “Literature,” said Ojeda, “had a much greater influence on the enterprise of conquest than is believed . The years following the discovery were of great diffusion for heroic readings, a diffusion that lasted a century, until Cervantes wrote his famous work. In 1492, books of chivalry were printed for the first time; Nebrija published the first Castilian grammar; the first farces were performed in corrals and convent atriums; Granada fell; and Columbus set sail. All in one year: the discovery of a new world, national unity , the birth of theater, the definitive formation and regulation of the language; and the popularity, through the printing press, of books of chivalry, which in expensive calligraphic folios had until then served only as entertainment for opulent magnates like Don Alvaro de Luna… The poor nobleman, the rowdy youth, the adventurous traveler, saw firsthand the sergas of the chivalrous Amadís and shouted with enthusiasm at the exploits of Palmerín and Tirante el Blanco. “Sensitive and believing souls,” continued Fernando, “savoured the exploits of the mystic warrior Perceval and the love of the knight Tristan de Leonis with the unfortunate Queen Iseult, stories of love and death from the medieval troubadours, which Wagner has revived in our time as subjects for his poems… The evenings in inns and taverns passed briskly around the oil lamp, which traced a red circle on the pages of the marvelous printed story. A student clergyman or a bachelor read aloud, surrounded by a circle of sallow faces, with a furrowed brow and a mouth throbbing with emotion… One of the innkeepers of _Don Quixote_ declared the old books of chivalry, forgotten by a wayfarer, to be the finest treasure in his house . These wild and heroic stories lifted the spirits, taking away all meaning from the word “impossible.” Most readers and listeners wore swords at their belts, and upon hearing of the outrageous battles involving giants split in half, dragons ripped to pieces, the escape of immense armies of scoundrels, monsters, and savages, the defeat of terrible enchanters, and the liberation of captive princesses, they would think with emulation and envy: “I would do the same if the opportunity presented itself. But… where to go?… How to begin?” The adventurous knights of real life, known to the people, the brave Juan de Merlo, lance-breaker at the court of Burgundy, or the fighters of the “honorable step” with Suero de Quiñones, had wandered from court to court without greater feats than the tournaments. To what part of the world did the islands and lands of enchantment fall for men eager for marvelous adventures?… And while an entire generation dreamed with their eyes fixed on the book and one hand on the cross of the sword, the radius of the Argonauts on the other side of the Ocean was increasing. Behind the islands of recent disappointments, the immense mainland extended a world of mysteries. Those who returned from there, their helmets adorned with rare plumage, spoke of armies of coppery and fierce men who tore out the hearts of their enemies to offer them to their gods; of slender and agile Amazons with only one breast, the better to draw the bow; of mustachioed tritons in the rivers, sirens at the estuaries, pearls in the gulfs and great blocks of native gold, of which they showed fragments… The rich islands were not fictions of books! There were lands where a A paladin could create a kingdom with the blows of a sword!… And the youth rushed to fill the ships of Seville and Cadiz with their weapons and their dreams; and once in the other world, they began the epic of the “sailors of the mainland,” more painful and more heroic than that of the sailors of the sea. In the jungles of America, never explored, they saw hippogriffs, licornies, and griffins just like those in the beloved books; snake bites were not fatal if an amethyst was applied to them; the bezoar stone cured all ailments, and Charles V himself requested this enchanted remedy from the conquistadors for his own. Mysterious trees brought death to all who rested in their shade, and others suggested sweet dreams of intoxication. Groups of armed men, with no guide other than the lying, fantasizing Indian or the echo of a confused tradition, traveled from Florida to Patagonia, from Callao to the mouth of the Orinoco, in search of the Jauja Valley, a heavenly place of delight and abundance, the Amazon Empire, the “City of the Caesars,” a golden metropolis that no one had ever seen, or the Fountain of Youth, the supreme hope of the gray-bearded conquistadors who felt their vigor was waning. Pedro de Alvarado had to fight against the spells of a fat Indian woman, a fearsome sorceress equal to the enchantresses of ancient poems. In one battle, he killed with a lance a green eagle that was trying to gouge out his eyes, and as it fell, the bird of prey took the form of a dead Indian. He was a chieftain who, thanks to the witch’s enchantments, had been transformed into an eagle to blind the conquistador. Reasonable and balanced men would not have continued forward. An ordinary vision of reality would have driven them to retreat or to lie on the ground, discouraged. But hope, a charming siren, swayed in the air alongside these heroic madmen in their hours of fainting. When they marched almost crawling on the barren plateaus, their entrails gnawed by hunger and their legs petrified by the cold, hope , like a flash of lightning, revived their vigor. Perhaps upon crossing the next height, they would see amid the snows a leafy valley with gold-plated palaces. Why not? More portentous visions had met the paladins in mysterious lands. And by tugging at their belts to loosen the buckle a few notches, they silenced their hungry stomachs and continued forward with their muskets on their shoulders, their graceful figures, and hope fluttering before their eyes. The gold, which fled from them on the peaks, undoubtedly awaited them in the deep valleys of suffocating torridity, like rays of sun petrified by the burning ground. And in search of the great king who every morning, after bathing in the sacred lake, rolled in mounds of gold dust, covering himself from head to toe in this dazzling crust, the adventurers advanced through endless swamps, sinking into the mud with the weight of their armor, splashing like steel hippopotamuses in centuries-old mud. They marched for days, weeks, months across the almost liquid plain. They slept on fallen tree trunks, having to scare away the approaching alligators in mid-sleep . They cooked their food on a tripod of branches, devouring the badly charred waterfowl or lizard up to their chests in mud . One false step was enough for them to disappear. Poor nutrition and fevers turned them into ferocious specters wrapped in iron shrouds. Misfortune and the desire to live transformed them into cruel, merciless beings. Death was with them and for them. Not only did they have to defend themselves from the invisible hollow, from the jaw of the saurian and the fang of the reptile: the guide, the Indian who marched at their side, was a disturbing enigma. It was impossible to guess the truth in the servile grimace of his copper-colored figurehead. Many times, when the invincible man, the man of steel with thunder on his shoulder, walked most carelessly , the Natives fell upon him, entwined him in the vines of their arms, and together they splashed into the lagoon like a cluster of throbbing limbs, content to perish in exchange for drowning the white man. Those who, through the benevolence of death, undauntedly defied the weather, hunger, men, and beasts, continued their advance, seeing in such misery a necessary preparation for obtaining glory and riches. Awaiting them on the other side of the swamp or the jungle was the city of enchantment, with its dazzling roofs and a monarch possessed of mountains of emeralds, who would eventually give them his most beautiful daughter and with her all his treasures. Perhaps at the last moment some seven-headed dragon spewing flames would block their path; but they took charge of slicing it open with the good sword of Toledo and the help of their patron, Señor Santiago. “Such was the influence of the book of chivalry,” Ojeda continued, “that Emperor Charles V issued a decree prohibiting the importation and reading of such works in the Indies. Adventurers with a chivalrous spirit, afflicted by the abuses of the governors, took justice into their own hands, just like the hidalgo of La Mancha. Taking their cues from books, chivalric corporations were formed in the nascent cities of the Indies, whose members, bearing the title of “conspirators,” pledged to defend with the sword the rights of the widow and the orphan and to combat the injustices of the powerful. The conquistador adapted to the new land and the customs of the indigenous people with astonishing speed. Spanish individualism found an irresistible charm in the nomadic life of the Indian, with few laws, no authority, little work, constant travel, and only one affection: family. ” “So it was,” Maltrana said. In all histories of the conquest, there is talk of Spanish expeditions that discovered fellow countrymen from a previous expedition who had been living among the Indians for several years. A shipwreck, a delay on the march, or an unfortunate battle would result in their capture, and if they managed to escape at the first opportunity, they would eventually join the tribe and form a family. The Spaniards would astonishment find the young man from Sanlúcar, Triana, or a small town in Extremadura with his chest painted, a crown of feathers, and a ring in his nose, leaning fiercely on his bow and laboriously mumbling a Castilian he had almost forgotten. He would weep when he remembered the Virgin of his land, but when his fellow countrymen urged him to follow them, his tears were of despair. “Oh, no! And the family?…” And he presented the respectable copper-colored companion, with devilish eyes and cheeks covered in chaff, and behind her, the brood of mestizos, agile as deer, with bellies eager to bury all living things. The Spanish soldier adapted to indigenous warfare with equal ease. The river crossings, the endless lagoons, the torrential rains, the difficulty of conserving gunpowder, made firearms increasingly scarce . The lance, the sword, and the shield accompanied the conquistador on his inland expeditions. Combat, for the old soldiers who had seen the most famous battles in Europe, was henceforth called “guazabara.” The tactic, captured in Vargas Machuca’s _Milicia Indiana_, consisted of giving the “trasnochada” and giving the “albazo,” that is, surprising the cunning and elusive enemy in the middle of the night or at daybreak. The adventurer replaced his warrior boots with the alpargata or the coltskin sandals; his breastplate with the padded cotton breastplate, which served as a pillow at night; his helmet with the leather morion; his cape with the Indian poncho. “The Indian finally came to him,” Zurita interrupted, smiling, “but he traveled half the distance by going to the Indian woman. And the result of this encounter was a new race, a whole world: the America we know today . Ojeda had been absorbed for a long time, without hearing what they were saying. Isidro and the doctor. The conversation he had had with Mina that same afternoon resurfaced in his memory, and the artist’s memory evoked that of Wagner and his heroes. Why was he thinking about this? “Perhaps,” he told himself mentally, “because those conquerors were epic heroes, heroes in the midst of Nature, like those in the Nibelungen poem…” His vague imagination began to contract, until it took shape in precise figures. He saw Wotan, the majestic and weak god, forced to punish his disobedient daughter with momentary anger. “Father,” the Valkyrie sobbed , “since you have excluded me from the race of the gods, and like a weak woman I must sleep on that rock until the first who passes by takes my virginity, may I not be the wife of a weak mortal, of a coward!… Spare me this disgrace… If I am to fall enslaved in the arms of a man , let the flame spring up around me at the echo of your word; surround me with a rampart of fire, so that only a hero with a firm and strong heart, brave as a god, can awaken me and make me his. ”
Like Brunhilda, the dark-skinned virgin had slept, not for years, but for centuries, guarded in her lethargy by the blue expanse of the oceans, more insurmountable than the barriers of flame. Only a strong-hearted hero could awaken her… And upon hearing the conquistador’s iron footsteps, the eyes of the virgin Indian blinked, she stretched her arms, and her breasts came to crush the breastplate of a suit of armor. It was the promised hero; the love that awakens beneath the caress of a metal gauntlet; the fertilizing embrace accompanied in its tremors by the clinking of weapons. And to reach her, the hero had not had to overcome the obstacle of fire, which is overcome with only a surge of courage… His firmness and patience had been as great as his courage in the face of the oceans, daunting in their immensity; the mountains that grow and repeat themselves as one advances through their ruggedness; the dark, labyrinthine forests, where sunlight and footprints are lost; the desolate plains that never end. Chapter 8. On the eve of the passage of the Equator, as the light of dawn penetrated the bowels of the ship, a soft melody of discreet brass spread with it, a muted music that only aspired to gently awaken the passengers, so that they could resume their sleep with greater pleasure. The musicians advanced quietly along the corridors still illuminated by the electric light, and, stopping at a crossroads, they put down their instruments, repeating the solemn dawn. The sleepers stirred in their beds. Everyone knew the meaning of this music heard in dreams: Luther’s _Choral_. It was Sunday, and the Protestant ship announced it to its people with this instrumental psalm, which reminded many of an opera by Meyerbeer. Finally, the music stopped, with no other consequence than that it disturbed for a few minutes the snoring of the passengers, uselessly called to meditation and prayer. But after four hours, an extraordinary sight brought many of the women out of their cabins earlier than usual. The South American ladies, dressed in black, with hats of the same color and veils over their eyes, climbed the mahogany staircase toward the salons, passing among the stooping, shirt-sleeved waiters who scrubbed the steps and balusters. They all walked with lowered eyes and a certain awe, as if something extraordinary and sad had just happened on the ship, darkening the splendor of the tropical morning. In their black-gloved hands, they carried small books bound in gold and mother-of-pearl. Behind them came the men of the family, with the air of bourgeois in their Sunday best, attending a tiring and unavoidable ceremony. The white suits, loose collars , traveling caps, and canvas shoes were missing this morning. Isidro met Dr. Zurita on a landing of the stairs, He marched like a majestic shepherd, respected and never obeyed, following the female flock of his family: his wife, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and daughters. A straight and splendid neck rose from his black tie to his ears. His legs flapped in the tails of a morning coat, an uncomfortable garment in the equatorial region, which weighed heavily on his shoulders , mottled his temples and mustache with beads of sweat. Seeing Maltrana, he gave her a resigned smile, pointing with his eyes to the end of the stairs, to the salons, toward which he was marching, following the majestic rustle of skirts. Some German passengers, dressed in white with morning carelessness, climbed onto the promenade deck and looked for a moment through the salon windows. Then they discreetly headed aft in search of the gatherings that were beginning to gather in the smoking room, like men who surprise a family gathering and don’t want to disturb it with their presence. The steward remained by the steps, recommending silence during the cleaning tasks, avoiding the clanking of buckets and the noisy rubbing, having the waiters speak in low voices, as if they were in a sick room. A ringing of bells emerged from the rear salon, muffled by the closed glass windows. Isidro, who had gone up to the promenade, looked out a window. “The best of the ship” was there, crowded, huddled before the musicians’ platform. The ladies, in the foreground, occupied the chairs, and behind them the men, standing elbow to elbow, holding their handkerchiefs to their sweaty foreheads. The fans turned, and over the black rows of female breasts, the fans fluttered incessantly . Maltrana fixed his gaze between the two columns of the platform, where there usually stood a sort of glass counter filled with postcards and “travel souvenirs” sold by the library waiter. The counter had disappeared beneath a lace-trimmed tablecloth. Two candelabras with tapers flickered in the splendid morning, their colorless, fireless lights; a porcelain crucifix occupied the center. Before the improvised altar stood the bishop, covered in a gold chasuble and white vestments still bearing the folds of his confinement in his suitcase. Kneeling at his feet was the abbot, his river beard draped over the black front of his cassock. All eyes were directed toward him: only the family of La Boca followed with loving gaze the movements of the Monsignor as he said Mass. The lecturer, despite his modest position as an assistant, was admired by many, like those great actors who, even when silent at the edge of the stage, command more attention than those speaking and gesticulating in the foreground. When his baritone voice responded to the bishop’s words, it held such charm and authority that the noble ladies lamented the shortness of these replies. And he, convinced of his success, made himself small, humbled himself before the officiant, like a simple acolyte, sometimes looking at the audience out of the corner of his eye so that they wouldn’t miss even the smallest detail of his religious devotion. He hadn’t intended to give the lecture, but he offered something more interesting: the spectacle of a great man, whose portraits appeared in the newspapers, assisting at the Mass for that obscure bishop, who seemed stunned by such an honor. The abbot sometimes abandoned his withdrawn attitude to direct the officiant like a maestro. All the objects of worship were his: the sacred cloth, the chasuble, the chalice with its twisted pieces, and the divine Hosts. This extraordinary man, taught by experience, forgot nothing on his travels. In one suitcase, the illustrated newspapers with his biographies, the books he had written, and the portraits he was to give away with dedications; in another, the articles for the Mass. Stored in velvet-lined cases, well-kept, removable, and clean, like professional tools. A head moved forward next to Maltrana’s, pressing itself against the glass, at the same time as an elbow touched his. It was Ojeda. “Are you hearing mass?” “No, Fernando.” I was thinking about the whims of historical fate; how chance can lead people down the most diverse paths… Look with what devotion those ladies are following the mass. Some even have moist eyes. A mass in the middle of the ocean, imagine! And to think that if America were discovered by the English, or if the great Charles were to be persuaded in Worms by the puffin Martin, all those people would be there by now, Bibles in hand, singing psalms to the accompaniment of a harmonium. At other windows, the blond heads of several children were pressed against the glass . With their mouths open and a vertical crease between their brows, they anxiously watched the genuflections and maneuvers of the golden man and the gestures of the black man who followed him in all his movements. They were young Germans who were seeing a mass for the first time. Maltrana examined the audience gathered in the lounge. “A large crowd,” he said. “No party on board has ever brought together so many women. I even see three chorus girls dressed in black with clothes borrowed from their friends. They’re Polish… And further away, look at Doña Zobeida wrapped in her American cloak, and our friend Conchita in a Spanish mantilla… In the center is Nélida, a Nélida who seems like another, humble beside her mother, her head bowed, nothing striking, her beautiful big eyes moist. Poor thing! The impressions on her are as fleeting as they are intense. She’s moved by the spectacle. A little longer, and she bursts into tears… But let’s get out of here; we’re disturbing everyone. ” Don Carmelo, the policeman, who is standing next to the abbot to assist him, has glanced at us several times. The respectable matrons raise their heads, and I must watch my reputation. I don’t want them to say that Maltranita is impious. That reputation is sometimes useful in Europe, but in America it means very little. They left the window to begin a stroll along the deck, which was deserted at that moment. “There you will see,” Isidro said a few steps later, continuing his reflections aloud, “the great difference between what is imagined and what is real. How many times have I read a description of a mass on the high seas! You yourself, poet, if you were to compose some verses about this, what beautiful things you would say!… The august silence; the ocean withdrawing to better witness the divine ceremony; The splendid morning, the people weeping, a heavenly breath descending upon the ship like angelic music… And consider the reality: there is no music other than that of the ventilators and fans; the men are dripping with sweat and looking at the doors, yearning to flee; down below, the plates and forks of the heretics clatter, having their first meal; on the bow and stern, the emigrants shout, swear, and sing; the waiters go up and down the stairs with their cleaning supplies… No; there is definitely no religious poetry on these modern ships. “Try not to repeat such things in the presence of your friends,” Ojeda said in the same mocking tone. “As you said before, impiety is of little use in America, and Catholicism is something that Spanish education left deeply rooted in women. Men are indifferent, they are unbelieving, but they never dare to be impious.” For that, one must think, and his thoughts are entirely occupied by business. Once again, as on the previous evening, the memory of the conquistadors surfaced in his conversation, but only briefly. The man of prey, the navigator of the sword, had often been a mystic. When he felt tired of adventures and glories, he would ungird his sword, abandon his corselet, and cover himself with the friar’s habit. At other times, in the prime of his youth, a reversal of fortune, a A disillusionment of love, so that the ostentatious and cruel captain became a desert hermit, feeding on roots in front of a skull and a wooden cross. These Spanish-style mystics, with a proud and domineering mysticism, instead of raising their eyes to heaven to allow themselves to be absorbed by its grandeur, pulled the sky down to them, seeing in each act of their individual energy a spark of God’s will incarnated in their persons. They were mystics of action, like the ancient soldier Loyola, like the wandering Teresa of Jesus, a kind of Don Quixote in a cap, always on horseback through the fields of Castile; and this vigorous and militant mysticism , which saved the Catholic Church by blocking the path to the Reformation, had spread throughout the New World with the conquistadors, predisposed to miracles. Whenever they found themselves in a difficult situation fighting against the Indians, the apostle Saint James would appear to them on his white and luminous steed, cleaving through the dense copper-colored hordes, just as he had routed the Muslim infidels in Spain. “The devotion of those men,” said Ojeda, “has filled America with prodigious images, as many or more than in the Peninsula. There is not a city there with three centuries of existence that does not have a saint of indisputable miracles…” The sculptors of religious images from Valencia and Seville sent consignments of virgins and Christs to the convents of the Indies and to the noblemen retired from adventures in their good encomiendas. But these commissioned images, upon touching American soil, grew in size and performed miracles, just as did the desperate and hungry who, upon arriving there, became heroes. Crucifixes were seen sailing upriver against its current; Virgins who immobilized the cart that carried them to express their desire not to proceed further and to have a temple erected there; images that, hidden in the ground, were announced with music and mysterious lights. All the divine prodigies of the mother country were repeated in the Indies, as the copy repeats the original. The black virgins of Spain, inexplicable to peninsular devotion, were reproduced in America, to the great enthusiasm of the black people. “And all this past lives on ennobled and indisputable under a patina of centuries that makes it ever more venerable. Believe me, Maltrana. When you get there, put away your mockery and try not to talk about religion, if you are seeking support from the ladies. Leave that to the foreign trade commissioners . Impiety cannot be an export item for us. ” Traditional beliefs are the work of “our old lady,” and if we attack them, let’s pretend we’re hitting our mother’s house with a pickaxe. After sitting for some time on the terrace of the smoking room, they continued their march, arriving for the second time at the parlor windows . The audience was the same; no one had moved from their place, but the celebrant was a different one. Monsignor was downstairs, eating his lunch, surrounded by the admiring family, who urged him to restore his strength after his recent fatigue. Now it was the French abbot who, donning the same vestments in full view of the faithful, was saying the second Mass. In vain did he display a majestic solemnity in words and gestures: his audience continued to admire him, but they were tired. Sweat ran down the ladies’ faces, carrying in its tortuous streams the black of their dark circles, the red of their cheeks, and the whitish mud of rice powder. The awareness of these ravages of heat made them shift nervously in their seats, fans held over their faces. The men’s starched collars were losing the armored smoothness of their ironing; they rippled like porcelain walls about to crack. Pearls of sweat hung from their hairy ears. The priest, accustomed to sensing the mood of his audience, quickened his gestures, carried the ceremony at a gallop, frantically muttering his Latin, resuming them before he had finished his answers the assistant in the black cassock. This assistant was Don José, the Spanish priest, shrunken and humble, trying to win the sympathy of the ladies who admired the abbot. The two friends, leaning on the railing, suddenly heard behind them a clatter of chairs being moved, doors suddenly opened, hurried running, sighs from compressed chests, something similar to the terrifying flight of the audience from a burning establishment. The mass had ended, and the ladies were running to their cabins to change their clothes and repair the disarray on their faces. The men breathed for a few moments on deck and lit a cigar before going to remove their black garments. The bell rang again, and Isidro ran to look out the windows. Another one! It was his friend Don José, who, covering himself with the sweaty garments of his predecessors, was about to say the third mass, assisted by Don Carmelo. The priest was preparing to officiate, with no other devout people present except the chairs scattered around the lounge in the disarray of the escape. Only a few domestics, sent by their mistresses, hurried in so as not to be left without Mass. Doña Zobeida and Conchita had advanced to the front row seats, consoling the officiant with their presence in the face of this general retreat. “My poor Don Pepe!” Isidro exclaimed. “He was counting on this Mass to make himself visible to the ship’s lordship and make good friends!… And they leave him alone, like an unheralded artist! That ‘s not right. We have to do something for the countrymen, don’t you think, Fernando?… If only we were to take the plunge! It’s been so many years since we’ve seen that up close!” And the two entered the lounge, taking their places in the front row. The atmosphere, still closed and heated by so much breathing, was stiflingly dense. Conchita greeted them with a weary gesture. Doña Zobeida, noticing them, had tender glances. Thank you very much, in the name of the good little priest. For her, this Mass was of greater merit than the previous ones. Don José, turning to face the faithful, could not repress a blink of surprise at the devout immobility of his two friends. And this gratitude, along with the lateness of the hour, made him dispatch his Mass quickly. At the end of the ceremony, Don Carmelo was the first to flee, putting his hands to his face, which was dripping with sweat. “Damn my weapon! Nearly two hours in this oven… The commander, because I am Spanish, always gives me these orders. With what I have to write at the police station!” And he hurried out, crossing paths with the abbot, who was returning to get his vestments to place them one by one, neatly counted and clean, in their travel cases. The band was playing its morning concert. All the armchairs along the promenade were occupied. The ladies, dressed in white, enjoyed the comfort of a light coolness after the anguish they had endured in the salon. The printed program of the festivities solemnizing the crossing of the line was circulating: four days of banquets, concerts, and athletic games. Many laughed at the jokes the steward had sprinkled into the program, innocent, overwhelmingly heavy jokes that seemed stored in the ship’s storeroom with the rag flowers, the flags, and the cardboard shields, to reappear at a fixed date on every voyage. Ojeda, upon stepping onto the deck, was stopped by Mrs. Power’s smile and abandoned his companion, leaning on the railing beside her .
“What a woman!” Maltrana thought. “She seems to smell like Fernando. You’d think she had eyes in the back of her head that could see him.” She is facing the sea and as soon as we approach, she turns her head smiling in advance, certain that it is he who is approaching. A chorus of shouts, loud laughter and applause sounded from the terrace of the smoking room, and Maltrana, eager to know everything that was happening on the ship, ran towards this place. It was Nélida, surrounded by her admirers and other people who had been Attracted by the new appearance of some of them. The Belgian baron, his German rival, and others with mustaches now appeared with their upper lips freshly shaved, and this novelty provoked ironic applause from their friends. Nélida smiled, modestly lowering her eyes. She had declared the day before that she could never love a man with a mustache; she was in favor of the American-style man, with a face clean of hair, like the Greek wrestlers. And this had been enough for those men, gnawed by a silent rivalry, to run to contact the barber, presenting themselves disfigured before the fickle young woman who embraced them all in a common affection, without distinguishing any of them. “This girl is going to drive us crazy,” Maltrana said to Ojeda, who had also run to find out the reason for the commotion. ” Now it seems her taste is for men to shave.” I’m free of that: I’ve always followed the current fashion. But you, Fernando, make sure that little girl has her eye on you. I see your beautiful mustache in danger. “Me!” exclaimed Fernando, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously and looking at Nélida, who happened to be fixing her eyes on him at the same time. “There’s no danger, Maltrana… I’m going back to the Yankee. ” When the two friends sat down at the table at lunchtime, they noticed Dr. Rubau’s absence. “The poor gentleman is very sad,” said Munster. “He told me last night that he would be shut up in his cabin all day. Today is the sixth anniversary of his wife’s death, and every year, wherever he is, he does the same thing. He isolates himself, thinks about her, doesn’t eat; he cries freely .” Maltrana ironically admired the doctor’s behavior. Who could have suspected such romantic desperation in that old doctor, with his seventy years, his dyed sideburns, and his gold-set teeth? And during the mourned lady’s lifetime, perhaps the two would have quarreled frequently, and he would have carried more than one infidelity on his conscience… “Illusion, Ojeda! The capricious illusion, which magnifies things when we lose them and makes us love them with new loves, erasing unpleasant memories.” After lunch, Maltrana disappeared with a mysterious air. He had told his friend about a certain expedition to the most interesting part of the ship: a visit very few were able to make. But he had friends, enjoyed great influence, and accompanying Don Carmelo, the policeman , he was going to fulfill his whim. He didn’t want to say more and went downstairs, leaving Ojeda lying in an armchair on the deck. A sticky heat dampened their foreheads and backs. The sleepers shifted positions to peel the sweat-sticky clothing from their skin. A faint cloud, something like a light white brushstroke, stood out against the blue horizon in front of the prow of the ocean liner. It was a sailboat, still far away, sailing on the same course as the Goethe. The latter would soon catch up; the wind was light; occasionally a gust; then the equatorial calm, dense, stunning, which seemed to hang over the ocean, moved only by slight tremors. Suddenly, a large black circle appeared on this luminous sea. A bar of shadow emerged from the horizon, rolling vertiginously toward the ship, like a piece of cloth unrolling , obscuring both the sky and the water. In this area of shadow, the sea appeared bristling with tiny points, like the surface of a brush. The advance only lasted a few minutes. The ship passed, with a rapidity equal to that of the stage’s changes, from the blazing sun to the livid gloom of a storm. The rain enveloped it with a tragic accompaniment of lightning and resounding thunder; thunder such as can only be heard in the solitude of the ocean. This rain did not come in torrents, but in great masses, as if a lake high above had collapsed, and its entire volume It fell suddenly. It entered in the form of knives through the gaps in the canvas, flooding the deck on the windward side; it slid in undulating rivulets at the foot of the rails; it accumulated in the drainage channels, which gurgled, choked with so much liquid. The awnings and planks groaned as if beaten. And five minutes later, when the frightened people were gathering books and cushions on the decks to save them from the flood, taking refuge with them in the saloons, the sun suddenly appeared; the ship, dripping, shone as if made of gold, and the patch of shadow spread across the luminous sea, ever smaller, ever narrower, until it was lost in infinity, as if swept away by an invisible hand. Soon the equatorial heat had devoured even the most hidden patch of dampness. While a few lingering drops were still trickling down the gutters , the deck planks, scorched by the sun, creaked again under footsteps. A quarter of an hour after the stormy downpour, no trace of it remained. It was remembered as something absurd and unreal, in the stifling heat of the afternoon, under a stark blue sky, on a sea that boiled with the sun’s reflections and gave the retina the impression of an endless lake of warm waters. A group of children and maids had formed up on the forward deck, pointing toward the horizon. The passengers were coming up, pointing their binoculars in the same direction. Ojeda left his seat to join the group, and the sleepers nearby also sat up, running with the childish curiosity inspired by the slightest event in the monotonous existence on board… The sailboat was a short distance from the ocean liner, moving before its bow like a mountain of white rectangular canvases slightly pinkish in the sun. A maneuver by the Goethe cast it aside, and then it appeared visible from stem to stern, its iron hull painted green, sharp and swift, and the sails of its five masts, broad and enormous: a forest of sheets of canvas with steel ribs, catching the slightest breeze, vibrating and rearing under its breath. Some passengers coming down from the bridge were relaying the telegraph operator’s news . It was a sailing ship from Bremen, not bound for America. It was approaching the coast of Brazil to take the winds, then crossing the Cape of Good Hope. It was bound for China to load rice. The Goethe greeted the flag hoisted by the ship with a bellow. Two dozen little men, dwarfed by the distance, crowded around the rail, bare-chested, waving high their white caps, just like those of cooks. Their cries could be heard, absorbed by the silence of the ocean, not the slightest echo of which reached the steamer. Two enormous, shaggy, fierce dogs, standing with their paws on the rail like people, greeted them with writhing barks that transformed the distance into silent gestures. The sailing ship gradually fell behind. It remained parallel to the bow for a moment; then, to follow it, the crowd had to scurry across the decks. Finally, only the emigrants crowded in the stern saw it, the Goethe’s flag standing out against the white pyramid of its sails. It seemed motionless, even though two foam knives swirled along its prow. “Goodbye!” “Have a good trip!” shouted the crowd gathered at the gunwales in several languages… And the sailboat grew smaller, as if going backward, nodding violently at the foamy wrinkles sent toward it by the invisible turning of the propellers. At last, it seemed to stand still, sinking into the distant limits of the solitary horizon, into the limitless plain where the ardent calms of the day would lull it to sleep with its sails dipped; where it would advance at night like a ghost, surrounded by phosphorescent foam, the enormous, yellowish moon swaying among the undergrowth of its masts. Ojeda was surprised not to see his friend on the deck. Something of great interest. He must have been worried enough to let this encounter, which was tantamount to a major event in the monotonous life on board, go unnoticed. As the groups broke up, some returning to their armchairs and others to the café, Fernando found Conchita strolling along with a graceful sway, elbows out, riding on high, noisy heels. The South American ladies, seeing her pass, called her “the little Spanish lady.” Her sharp, black eyes fixed on Fernando. “Good heavens, you wicked person! You don’t want anything to do with countrywomen : you think they’re so little. Anything for ladies who speak a foreign language and even God doesn’t understand… No, son: I don’t want anything to do with you! I’d rather walk alone… There’s your Yankee looking out to sea with half an eye and the other half looking for you. Come closer, she’s waiting for you .” And Conchita walked away with a loud click of her heels, at the same time that Fernando, attracted by Mrs. Power’s clear eyes and her smile, half-friendly and half-ironic, walked toward her, leaning on the railing to begin his second flirtation of the day. It was impossible to do anything else in this floating confinement, where escape was useless, since upon turning to the opposite side of the deck, the fugitive found himself with the same people. The conversations with the American woman were beginning to tire Ojeda. These fruitless flirtations seemed monotonous, saccharine, and interminable, like the psalms of an evangelical chapel. Always the same: sentimental glances, melancholic words alternating with cold, biting mockery for those who passed by . If he expressed a desire to leave, a malicious glance that was equivalent to a promise and certain double-meaning words kept him motionless. When, suddenly enthusiastic, he tried to advance, she would smile with malicious innocence: “I don’t understand… I don’t understand.” And if she finally confessed her understanding, it was with a frown and a cold, sniffy protest: “Shocking.” Sometimes she would withdraw, half offended by Ferdinand’s verbal audacity , and he would breathe a sigh of relief, both satisfied and annoyed. “Go with God and never come back!” he would say to himself angrily. “The truth is , I don’t know why I waste my time with this woman.” But not many hours passed before a friendly relationship was resumed . Maud would come out to meet him, feigning distraction; she would wait for him as he passed, leaning on the railing, gazing at the sea in the attitude of an actress being spied on by a camera, and a smile, a movement of the eyes, a slight cough were enough to bring Ferdinand back to her. “She’s teasing me,” he protested mentally. “She’s having fun with me… Oh, if we were on land I could stop seeing you! What a kick you’d get, my daughter!” But they were in the ocean, enclosed within a space of a few hundred meters. An unbreakable chain held them both, and when one moved away, the other necessarily followed behind. They had to resign themselves to a painful and contradictory courtship, a tug-of-war that seemed very much to that woman’s liking and made her open her eyes of smiling cruelty, of sadistic spasms, every time he, his senses excited by mysterious allusions or promising glances, contracted furiously with desire. Her only concern upon emerging from these torments was that Isidro not find out the truth. How she would mock him upon learning of Maud’s behavior!… And driven by his manly pride, that boastful vanity of the male who compromises with lies to preserve his prestige, he accepted Maltrana’s congratulations and envy, who imagined him a triumph. From time to time, remorse and fear would take hold of him. Oh, if only the other woman could watch from afar what was happening to him on the ship! If only Teri could see him as one sees through a keyhole!… Shame made him remain motionless in his armchair, reading a book, indifferent to his surroundings. At other times, with the desire to isolate himself More than that, he would move his seat to the top deck and hide behind a boat, reveling in the delight of his triumphant will, his energetic resolve in deciding to be faithful. But the narrowness of his confinement conspired against his virtue. It was impossible to remain isolated. The necessities of life, the calls to the dining room, brought them all together. Besides, that woman seemed endowed with a diabolical sense for sensing his presence. She discovered him in his hiding places, however secluded ; she passed before him, proud and alluring at the same time, like a queen convinced of her majesty, with a fluid surrounding her that disarticulated and crushed the best- constructed holy resolutions. Ferdinand recognized, apart from this, that the most fearsome enemy was within him. It was the beast asleep in solitude, rearing up at the scent of Maud’s perfume; The purity forced by the lack of opportunity, which writhed fiercely before the tempting curve, the lingering touch of hands, or the white succulence sheathed in black or gray silk, displayed temptingly between skirts gathered as one climbed a staircase with willful carelessness. Ojeda allowed himself to be defeated again by any of these incidents. Upon reaching land, he would be a different man, he would regain his fidelity; but here they were in the middle of the Atlantic, and who would ever know what would happen! He had to surrender to his destiny; follow the irresistible suggestions of the “great impure one.” And Maud the domineering woman saw him once again subject to her tormenting charm. He stirred around her, submissive and supplicant, with alternations of anger and flights of spite that only lasted briefly . For a moment, he had believed himself freed from such servitude upon meeting Mina. This sad, sick little woman was not a danger. He could be with her without disturbing the balance of his tranquility. Mina, with her sentimental sweetness, seemed to brighten the monotonous existence on board. It was a relief to finish the voyage without regrets. But Maud, as if she guessed her thoughts and feared an audience, had attacked the German woman from the first moment. She congratulated Ojeda with cruel irony on his magnificent conquest. What luck! The ugliest and most poorly dressed woman on the ship… A kind of governess married to a drunken musician, at whom everyone laughed , even the mob of comedians who accompanied him. In her merciless mockery, she didn’t even spare the child: a fat boy with hemp hair , the dirtiest of all the children on the ship. She hoped to see Fernando carrying him in his arms while he made love to his mother. She bet that at night he would put him to sleep on his knees to the accompaniment of songs and take care to change his underwear . With the irritating injustice of which only feminine spite is capable, she also mocked Mina as a singer. She had covered her ears one afternoon when she cautiously approached the saloon windows, when she was at the piano and he stood looking at her like a tenor… And
they said that this unfortunate woman, equal to a maid, had been a beautiful woman and a great artist!… And all Ojeda’s successes on the ship consisted of having inspired such passion!… She had to congratulate him on his good fortune. And to add to the irony, Maud spoke in French with a nasal accent: “My compliments, my dear; all my compliments.” Poor Mina!… Sometimes, while Fernando was talking with Mrs. Power, he had seen her walk past them holding Karl by the hand. She pretended not to recognize them, rolling her eyes, but the bitterness of disappointment was evident in her expression . And when Ojeda was left alone, she seemed to hide, avoiding resuming their conversation. If they happened to meet face to face during their walks on the deck, after a few words Mina would either pretend to have something to do immediately or obey Karl’s slightest prompting to move on. Maud’s scrutinizing eyes did not escape a certain beautification of the A former artist, she has taken greater care in her personal adornment. “Look, sir: your beloved goes to great lengths. Today she is dressed in white from head to toe; a piqué suit, ironed and starched; a veritable breastplate. She is as elegant as a governess from her homeland… Her face is less green, and leaves a trail of cheap odor: she must have bought powder and perfume at the ship’s hairdresser’s… And all for you, great conqueror… She’s even wearing new shoes. I can’t see the worn heels of before.” And Ferdinand, in the selfishness of his desire, welcomed these mockeries with a cowardly satisfaction. They were nascent jealousy, which were going to serve to make Maud appear less elusive at last. That afternoon, her humor seemed less ironic. Her voice, somewhat veiled, sounded with a melancholy slowness; her eyes were moist: their corneas shone with excessive wateriness, as if they were about to shed tears. From time to time, she shuddered violently , as if an invisible hand were tickling the back of her neck. Holding onto the railing, she would throw back her torso and then lean in close until her chest was touching. With this nervous gymnastics, she accompanied her conversation and concealed a desire to extend her arms and stretch. She was very interested in the passage of time, which until then had not worried her. She anxiously asked how many days it would take until she reached Rio de Janeiro, as if she had been asleep and upon awakening, the image of someone waiting for her had surfaced in her memory . “More than six days left!” she exclaimed with dismay upon hearing Ojeda’s explanations. “Today is Sunday, and we won’t arrive until next Saturday. How long! Almost a week to see my John…” And with some shock, Fernando noted in her words a great loving sincerity, the vehement desire of a newlywed returning to her husband after his first absence. In the large cities of the United States, business had occupied her thoughts as a practical and calculating woman; later, in Paris, she had been stunned by the cheerful life of her companions. But now, on the ship, leading an existence of inertia, without worries, without friendships, with long periods of confinement in the cabin to avoid the company of people, the image of her husband resurfaced in her with an irresistible novelty, accompanied by long -forgotten shudders. Besides… the equatorial heat! The suffocation that took hold of her at certain hours of the night, pressing her chest, making her ears ring, unfolding before her closed eyes a ribbon of unspeakable visions, finally interrupted by sleep!… Ah, John! Poor big fellow, how she longed to see him!… Fernando grimaced as he heard her say this, her gaze lost on the ocean and the monotonous voice of a sleepwalker. “A beautiful role you play!” And bowing ironically, she announced that she was going to withdraw so that she could think alone about the upcoming interview with her husband. “No; stay,” she ordered. “I have time to remember him… Let’s talk… Tell me those pretty words you know how to say and that seem like comedy: exaggerations, lies, the things of a gentleman who talks about dying if they don’t love him.” After this, Ojeda believed he had another woman at his side, as if the icy shell behind which she had remained until then, ironic and hostile, had broken, and from the fragments of the broken defense something warm and vibrant had just emerged, moving toward him with the humility of a female who yearns to be defeated. The German woman passed near them holding her child by the hand. She didn’t look at them, but Maud’s gaze was on her: an aggressive gaze, of deadly anger, that seemed to bore into his back. Fernando remembered that this was how the other woman looked; That’s what Teri’s eyes were like when, on her travels, a hotel companion inspired jealousy in her. Mrs. Power’s eyes, when they stopped seeing Mina, turned toward Fernando with a possessive eagerness. She smiled as she listened to her companion’s words , his anguished plea, as if asking for something. essential for the continuation of existence. “Perhaps tomorrow… perhaps never,” she said, smiling with her cruel coquetry, which Ojeda thought was forced this time, sensing beyond the cold words a hint of emotion. Then, as if afraid of losing her composure and saying too much, she quickly left Fernando. It was impossible to talk to him: always asking the same thing. He retreated to the cabin. He was too bold with his words, and the conversation had to be cut short. “We’ll talk tonight, if you’re more sensible… Your friend is coming this way; he’s got company now… Don’t look so sad. Trust in luck… Who knows!” And she walked away laughing, mockingly and temptingly at the same time, while Maltrana approached, wearing a waterproof cape over his linen suit. He stopped in a sun-drenched space on the deck and there he remained motionless, trembling and pale, enjoying the equatorial heat with visible delight. “I’m not going any further,” he said. “If you want something, come closer.” Ojeda obeyed him, puzzled by the bizarre appearance he presented in that cape over his light suit, shivering with cold and seeking the warmth of the sun when everyone on the ship was feeling distressed by the stifling temperature. “Where are you from?” ” From the Pole,” Maltrana replied. He stretched his hands toward the sun, turned his face to feel the heat on both sides, and finally removed his raincoat and left it on the railing, preferring the direct rays of the star to the warmth of his wrapping. “Let me warm up a little. Don’t look at me like that. You’ll be surprised to see me looking like a chilly cat, seeking the sun when everyone else is sweating… But when I tell you I come from the Pole!” Maltrana slowly explained his mysterious expedition. He came from the deepest part of the ship, from the refrigerators, where the supplies were stored . Only he, who enjoyed good friends, could see this. To maintain the low temperature of these warehouses, they were only opened very rarely, and he had taken advantage of the opportunity to extract food intended for the following day’s celebration, going down to visit them with his friends from the police station. “What’s coming with us, Ojeda!… And I, unhappy, who in other times admired the shops on Main Street on Christmas Eve!… What we eat and drink during the trip! Do you know how much beer we have with us? Twelve hundred barrels. That’s easy to say, but you have to see it… Do you know how much wine? Twelve thousand bottles. This figure is also easy to say… ” “But you have to see the bottles,” Ojeda interrupted mockingly. “That’s it: you have to see them together with the barrels; an enormous cellar; enough to get an entire town drunk… And sliding down the ocean with us come tons and more tons of flour, mountains of boxes of preserves and extracts; Birds, fish, oxen, what do I know!… All the reserves of a besieged city. He described the journey through the gloomy bowels of the ship, its descent into hell… of snow, led like a Virgilian guide by his friend Don Carmelo. Wet and slippery stairs; walls that shed tears; electric lights blurred and dim beneath the iridescent halo of humidity; thick pipes conducting the cold along the walls. First, they had entered storerooms where the coolness was still tolerable. Isidro had felt a selfish and malignant satisfaction there, thinking of his good friends sweating and panting on the promenade deck. The tickly, mischievous cold crept through every opening in their clothing, awakening pleasant shudders. The police station officers wore thick coats and waterproof capes. He laughed petulantly, proud of braving these temperatures in his little white suit. They went up and down the stairs; They wound through intricate, low-ceilinged, narrow, steel-walled corridors, resembling the passageways of a battleship. In one department, vegetables and flowers; in another, fruits: pyramids of apples and oranges, bunches of bananas, regiments of pineapples lined up on shelves like pot-bellied soldiers armored with copper and green plumes. A scent of a great market wafted through the doors: the scent of slowly dying flowers , of fruits and vegetables halted in their fermentation by the catalepsy of the cold, of wines and beers shaken in their confinement by the ship’s continued instability. “We finally reach the refrigerators,” Maltrana continued. “Doors almost as thick as they are high, steel dice that turn very lightly on their hinges and open and close like cannon butts… Crack: a turn of the wrist and everything is just right, fitted together, without the slightest gap.” When they’re opened, outside air rushes in and instantly condenses, forming a white smoke next to the electric lamps: something like raining salt or crushed ice . A fantastic sight, Ojeda… At first , your feet only feel cold; then the damn thing rises and rises between your trousers and your leg, and after a few moments, you think you’re wearing ice gaiters… And what “landscapes” you see in those depths! Isidro evoked memories of the enormous red and yellow ox quarters, with the frozen fat dripping from them forming stalactites. These meats had the density of inanimate things: a hardness like stone. They gave the sensation, to the sight and touch, of enormous prehistoric maces, with which you could split an elephant’s skull. “The fish room is a polar landscape. Piled up ice rocks, and inside these masses of cloudy crystal are fish of a thousand shapes.” They look like petrified rags, so stuck to their enclosure that they have to be extracted with pure axe blows… The birds, placed on shelves, you’d think they were made of papier-mâché, like those displayed at theater dinners. You rap on a turkey’s breast with your knuckles, and it makes the same sound as a drum or a hollow skull… And all this stone, this cardboard, when it comes out of its enclosure, becomes something to behold. Because you’ll admit, Ojeda, that we don’t eat too badly here. He, who had so eagerly desired to visit this section of the ship, had hurried to flee, shivering under a raincoat provided by the compassion of Don Carmelo. He felt his cold intensify as he remembered the winding corridors with striped tiles dripping liquid moisture from every crack; the deep-hinged doors, like windows, through which one had to pass by ducking one’s head and raising one’s feet high; the enormous white pipes conducting the cold, covered with a lining of ice, bristling with frozen needles, which shone like diamonds in the diffuse lights. “It’s better here, Fernando… Blessed be the warmth!… But we must recognize the importance of this invention, which puts the cold at the service of man and allows one to freeze to death, just as at the Pole, while being right on the Equator. Down below, I was remembering the Spanish Argonauts who in these seas sold their trousers for a glass of warm water… And we who drink cool water all the time!… Come closer, Ojeda; I need warmth and I avoid the shade.” He was bothered by a boat on the top deck suspended above their heads, which repelled the sun or let it pass, following the slow swaying of the ship. The two friends leaned on the balcony of the smoking room terrace, seeing at their feet the northern emigrants who filled the aft esplanade. Maltrana had been among them for a long time before going down to the meatpacking shed. “You’d think it takes courage to stay among those people. Despite the temperature, they still wear their sheepskin coats and astrakhan caps. All these hairs, as well as their beards, seem to be boiling in the sun. And add to that the fermenting food scraps; the steaming bodies…” Twice a day, The sailors flooded the deck; but despite the hose, soon that part of the ship smelled like hell. A warlike ardour had awakened in the emigrants in the stern, driving them against each other. The young Russians, with golden beards and red shirts, boxed with the Germans with knobby, white arms. Broken noses were visible, displaying the patches left by bandages sold at the pharmacy. The strongest men proudly displayed their biceps adorned with blue tattoos. A giant strolled among the groups, devouring with savage bites a crust covered in raw, bloody meat—an excellent food, he believed, for maintaining strength. Every afternoon a fighter would come down to the sick bay with his face numb and disfigured. Now, the sailors off duty flocked to the aft esplanade, drawn by the brutal interest of these fights. They no longer enjoyed the company of the “Latinos” camped on the bow. They found themselves disoriented among the Spaniards, Italians, and Arabs, too loud and unintelligible to them. They preferred the silent Hercules, the red-haired women with short ballerina skirts, high boots, and a scarlet scarf shaped like a small roof over their poor eyebrows. Maltrana abandoned his friend. He felt the need to recount the interesting descent to the refrigerators “to his many friends,” that is, to all the passengers who could understand him. The dinner bell, which was given in the middle of the night at the beginning of the voyage, with the spotlights lit, now sounded while the sun was still on the horizon. Those who awaited the magical spectacle of its setting, gathered on the top quarterdeck, had to forgo the daytime apotheosis, rushing to their cabins to dress quickly and not be late for the dining room. Ojeda, upon sitting at his table, saw that the next one, Mrs. Power’s, was unoccupied . “She’s not eating here today,” said Maltrana with the authority of a man well -informed about everything that was happening on the ship. “Her compatriots invited her, that ugly Yankee who sings, and her husband, the one in the clown jacket… Here they invite each other, as if the meal were different. An extraordinary bottle of champagne is quite the gift… Stand up a little and you’ll see her. ” Sitting up, Fernando glimpsed Maud’s ash-blond hair among the heads at the next table . Isidro asked Munster about Dr. Rubau. No one had seen him. He remained in his cabin, to solemnize the painful anniversary with this confinement. The music played, as it did every day, at the dining room doors; the list of dishes was the ordinary one; the lounge was unadorned, and yet the people looked at each other with a questioning air. A mysterious promise hung in the air: something was surely going to happen. And the presumption of an unknown event brightened their eyes and provoked smiles. Men and women seemed to have regressed to childhood in this life of isolation and blue monotony. At dessert, the ladies jumped nervously in their chairs, stifling a cry of fright; many men shuddered, with the nervousness aroused by an unexpected crash. The roar of a rabid beast sounded next to a dining room window, a bleating amplified by the tube of a horn. Then came the clatter of several lightning bolts imitated by the clashing of tin cans and the sinuosities of thunder reverberating on the head of a bass drum. All eyes turned toward the dining room entrance. Someone was about to arrive. And in the doorway appeared a hideous and grotesque figure, a black and red figurehead. His progress among the tables was accompanied by loud laughter and movements of repulsion from the ladies, who avoided his contact. He wore a black tunic, a kind of cassock with a wide sash of green seaweed, from which hung numerous raw, bloody fish from the kitchen. Another circle of seaweed crowned his wig. reddish-brown, and between this wig and his flaming whiskers , his ruddy, plump, pimply face expanded, the face of a persevering and kind-hearted drunkard, such as one sees at a beer hall. As he walked, he leaned on a trident with several sardines strung on it. Two wine bottles hung across his chest, joined like twins, and when he stopped between tables, he would seize this grotesque instrument and, with his eyes fixed on the necks, scan the dining room, as if looking for someone. “Captain!… Where’s the captain?” he would ask in a hoarse voice. He would remove the fish from his waist to distribute them among the tables, and the women would shriek when they felt the soft, slimy coldness of these presents in their hands . Thus he advanced throughout the dining room, followed by the endless laughter of the good Germans, who found this spectacle irresistibly funny . And his hilarity won over the others, who were already prepared to rejoice at anything that disturbed the normal life on board. By passing between the tables and looking through his optical apparatus, he found the one occupied by the ship’s commander, and, leaning on his trident, he began a speech in German, in a rude and authoritative voice: “I am Triton, and my lord Neptune sends me…” The Germans greeted the figurehead’s words with bursts of joy, repeating them in translation to the neighbors who could not understand them. Neptune, seeing from his depths that a ship was about to cross the equator, entering the other hemisphere, sent his emissary Triton so that the passengers making the voyage for the first time would pay homage to him by submitting to the ceremony of baptism. The speech was accompanied by allusions to the seasickness of the travelers, to the tribute their upset stomachs paid to the immense blue, the better food for the fish; and each joke the disguised sailor cracked, like a lesson learned by heart, was greeted by the audience with peals of laughter equal to those of a free school. The captain was to hand over the list of all the passengers who had not been baptized. The next day, Neptune would board with his retinue for the grand ceremony, and in the meantime, two representatives of the god’s armed forces were to remain on the ship so that none of the neophytes could escape. The emissary reached for a sailor’s whistle, blew it, and immediately two ridiculously handsome German gendarmes entered the dining room , their helmets dented and too small for their enormous heads, narrow frock coats, short trousers, and a rusty saber thrusting at their flanks. The people, upon seeing them appear, laughed more spontaneously than at Triton’s entrance. Their short masks and brush mustaches gave them the appearance of sulking bulldogs and a distant resemblance to Bismarck. The captain handed Triton a sealed envelope containing the list of candidates for baptism, they drank a glass of champagne together, and then, followed by the gendarmes, the Neptunean envoy left, again to the accompaniment of shaking cans and the clatter of bass drums. Many passengers hurriedly left the dining room. They had to see the emissary’s departure, his return to the oceanic domains to report to the god of the commission he had carried out. People crowded the railings of the promenade. The ocean was illuminated with fantastic reflections: white, then green, and finally red. From the decks of the boats, the fiery sulfur of flares dripped into the sea. Under this fiery glow surrounding the ship, the Atlantic undulations took on the dense appearance of boiling metal. Beyond this zone of trembling light, which grotesquely colored faces and made eyes throb with disordered vibrations, lay the tropical night, solemn and tranquil, with its dark waters populated by swirling phosphorescence and its clear sky, in which a great number of new stars appeared smiling. Rolling in mystery. The sound of a splash sounded in the sea, and a swaying light began to move away from the ship. It was Triton leaving. A bellow from the bow and stern of the emigrants, who were only distantly participating in the celebration, greeted the mock retreat of the underwater figure. “Goodbye, drunkard! Phrases to Neptune!…” The buoy, with its lantern, left the space illuminated by the flares. Its light grew ever more dim, absorbed by the blackish mystery of the ocean. It seemed to flee at the impulse of a hidden engine; it hid in the long curves of the waves and then shone on the peaks, like a fallen star, to slide back to the bottom of another valley. The people grew tired of following it with their eyes and scattered along the promenade and the winter garden, where the coffee was waiting, steaming in their cups. Ojeda struck up a conversation with Mr. Lowe before returning to his table, which was now occupied by Maltrana. The athletic young man, having shed his glorious striped jackets for the evening, couldn’t help but adorn the lapel of his tuxedo with buttons and flags of sports clubs. Upon seeing Fernando, he laughed maliciously, showing his sharp teeth, abounding in golden fillings. “What a lady, Mrs. Power!… We had her at our table today; and do you know what she said?… The poor thing is sick: the heat, the loneliness, the nerves… She asked my wife if she could borrow her husband for a while. A favor between friends… It seems she can’t wait any longer.” His laughter revealed the proud satisfaction that the mere possibility that a lady like Mrs. Power could see in him a remedy caused him. “It’s just a joke,” he continued. That lady is very gracious and not at all hypocritical… But I believe, sir, that she desires you… Take advantage… Do her that favor. Lowe, who did not hide the fear his wife inspired in him with the domineering frowns on his horse-like face, assumed, upon finding himself alone with Fernando, the malicious expression of a man for whom the world holds no surprises. He delivered the good news out of camaraderie. Men owe each other these reports. Ojeda had an obligation to attend to a lady… And he spoke of love as a hygienic service indispensable to life, and one in which one can claim the assistance of friendship. That evening, nothing extraordinary disturbed life on board. The concert attracted only the children and maids, who before going to bed formed groups around the circle of music stands. The passengers, scattered along the promenade, discussed the following day’s festivities . A sudden fraternity united them all. The last social and patriotic differences that had kept them separated into indifferent or hostile factions were crumbling . The desire for communication and mingling that stirs an entire people on the eve of a national event was palpable . The majestic “penguins” no longer formed a separate group and mingled with “the powers,” who in turn had broken the cycle of their hostile isolation. The dance of the crossing of the line!… The girls talked about their costumes, which they had carefully packed in their trunks, or announced original improvisations. The mothers, who until then had greeted each other with ceremony, fondly remembered their mutual friends who lived in Paris and vaguely believed they had met at a tea party at the Ritz Hotel or at a tango reception on the Champs-Élysées. An imposing matron stopped Conchita with sudden kindness. “And you don’t dress up, my daughter?… With such beautiful eyes!” With her graceful air of a little Spanish girl!… And, moved by her sudden tenderness, she offered to lend him a rich antique mantilla she had bought in Madrid. Sullen-faced ladies, who were complaining about the immorality of their fellow travelers, stopped curiously at the windows of the smoking room. This was the den of vice, the place where the big women of the operetta smoked and drank among the men with their feet on a seat or on the floor. edge of the table… And a slight invitation from friends or relatives engaged in endless games of poker was enough for all of them to decide to enter with the same air of blushing aloofness and sinful audacity that had accompanied them on their surreptitious visits to the cabarets and balls of Montmartre. It’s good to see everything!… Besides, they were having a party, the great party of the voyage. Never before had the smoking room been so crowded. The servants ran around in a flurry of confusion, not knowing where to turn amidst so many contradictory summons. Corks frequently popped . Champagne overflowed from the glasses, running onto the tables in foamy torrents. The ladies smiled, recognizing the charms of this forbidden place, and even finding a certain exotic distinction in some of the blondes they had only seen from afar on deck and now occupied the nearby tables. This proximity seemed to add a new pleasure to their bold entry into the smoking room. “The sea is the sea…” When they reached land, they wouldn’t even remember such promiscuity. Ojeda sat at a table with Mrs. Power and the Lowes. He wasn’t sure if it was he or his Yankee friend who had invited her, but Maud had interpreted it as if transformed when she sat on a couch in the café. Ojeda’s three companions drank deeply. Mrs. Power’s eyes were slightly watery. Suddenly, they widened, as if dilated by the wonder of an internal vision, at the same time that twists of blush streaked her cheeks. Her mouth dilated in search of air, even though all the windows were open and the fans were whirring dizzily. “How hot!…” Her longing for fresh air made her empty the glass in front of her, slightly clouded by the ice-cold wine. She smiled, looking at Fernando with caressing eyes, which he thought he was seeing for the first time. “Give me a sigarreta.” The Lowes greeted Mrs. Power’s display of Spanish with admiring laughter. And, enveloped in the smoke from the cigarette Ojeda gave her, she continued to stare at him with a bold determination, as if concentrating all her will on this contemplation, heedless of the comments of those nearby. Maltrana, who was moving from one table to another chatting with his “dear friends,” accepting a drink here and drinking half a bottle there, noticed Maud’s eyes. “That lady’s eyes!… As if she were going to eat him!” From a nearby table, he spied on them with a certain envy. Around midnight , they left their seats. Lowe got up at dawn to go to the gym, take a shower, and follow other athletic requirements. His wife needed to save her voice. The four of them left, followed by Maltrana. They said goodbye at a staircase, and the couple marched toward their cabin. Ojeda and Maud were left alone, facing each other. He felt a certain hesitation, afraid of the icy and contemptuous “good night” with which she had cut short his ardent words on other occasions. He didn’t need to speak. It was she who spoke, but without moving her lips, with a malicious blink that transfigured her face, giving it the rictus of a prehistoric female stirred by passion. A slight whistle came from her lips that was equivalent to an imperious command; at the same time, she waved the index finger of her right hand as if calling him. Maltrana followed them down the stairs, advancing cautiously so as not to be seen… But he didn’t need to take great precautions. The two walked without noticing their surroundings, without knowing for sure where they were going, driven by instinct toward her home. Isidro, hidden in a corner of the corridor, heard the sound of a door rudely opening. He advanced, and before it closed with a kick, he could see in its luminous background how arms intertwined with the concentrated fury of fighters eager to knock each other down, how two heads came together as if trying to bite each other. The creaking of a bolt and the solitude of the corridor suddenly awakened Maltrana’s anger. He loved Ojeda very much… but some loved him so much and others so little! He felt the torment of that masculine rivalry that respects in a friend the triumphs of intelligence and wealth, admires and desires even greater ones, but is moved by a dull envy when the victories are of love. When Maltrana returned to the smoking room, he felt uneasy in its noisy surroundings. It was not yet his time: there were still some tables occupied by respectable people. His young friends had announced that the real party would be after midnight. This time, some of the ladies from the operetta had seriously committed themselves to being part of the party. Isidro felt a fierce resolve when he thought of Fernando. With those from the operetta or with others; it was all the same. He could not be crushed by his companion’s good fortune. He needed to forget his humiliation at all costs , even if it meant disturbing the night’s rest of the ship’s chambermaids or the girls in the ironing room. He fled the café, as if he hated people and needed darkness and silence. On the deck of the boats, he sat in an armchair, damp with humidity. This gloomy isolation calmed his nerves… No one. The passengers were already in their cabins or were still on the promenade, circling the vicinity of the café, like night birds attracted by a beacon. The silence was absolute on this floating mountaintop. From time to time, a bell chimed on the bridge, a roar from the serviola, which answered from the foremast pulpit, the faint footsteps of barefoot sailors gliding like ghosts between the boats and ventilators on the top deck. Against the dark sky, speckled with tiny pinpricks of light, the masts and chimney were outlined as if drawn in India ink. The stars flitted from one side of the masts to the other, like the crackling of playful insects jumping among the rigging. Some, dimmed by the trembling of the chimney smoke, redoubled their twinkling. They were like sequins, half detached from a cloak and about to fall. In the darkness of the horizon, some distant glimmerings were visible , three red brushstrokes on a line of barely perceptible points of light : the sparks of an ocean liner crossing paths with the Goethe, sailing in the opposite direction. Maltrana, with his head on the back of his seat and his gaze raised, contemplated the enormous mass of the chimney, which covered part of the sky. He felt the tension in his nerves loosen in the silence and solitude. His masculine pride seemed ridiculous; he was ashamed of his envy. How much did that black beast that held them on its steely back care for all the miseries and mischief in which they made it an accomplice ! How much did those appetites and needs of the anthill installed in the floating shell matter to the dark Ocean, withdrawn in its mystery, and to the pinpricks of light that shone simultaneously in the heights of the sky and in the folds of the water ! The memory of the first Argonauts, Jason’s companions, came to mind, and with them the poem of Apollonius of Rhodes, singer of the fabulous adventure of the Golden Fleece. The mast of the Hellenic ship was an oak placed by Minerva, and this enchanted mast, the soul of the ship, spoke, giving saving oracles in moments of danger. Why couldn’t that gigantic chimney, which among the completely useless masts of modern navigation was the representation of movement and life, the great propellant, as the ancient mast had been, supporting the sails?… This oceanic animal with its iron shell had a soul that normally escaped through that tower with a measured breath, or mooed with the fury of instinct on nights of danger before a nearby reef or a dense fog. Its interior compartments seemed sensitive to the influence of the environment, like the mucous membranes of an organism. Animal. Maltrana thought he saw him in different appearances at different times of the day: sleepy and clumsy at dawn; cheerful and smiling after the morning ablutions; heavy and nodding after midday, when the ocean fell asleep under the sun’s heat; melancholic and murmuring like an ancient garden at dusk, when the decks were tinged with orange-red, the shadows of people lengthening with the slenderness of cypresses; noisy and frivolous at nightfall, with a joy like the boiling of champagne, the smile of painted lips, the languor of eyes enlarged by kohl. His friend at the police station spoke of the ship as if it were a living, nervous organism, subject to external influences. Its character changed with every voyage, depending on the people inside it. Sometimes they were diplomatic commissions or political figures who were about to govern republics, and then they seemed to sail with calm majesty, solemnly entering the flag-waving ports amidst cannon fire and cheers. The people spoke to one another with cool restraint, measuring their words, not daring to raise their voices. Even the cabin boys had a certain formality. It was enough for His Excellency to step aside to read in a corner of the deck, for that corner to be immediately sealed off by bundles of ropes, and beside them a sailor on guard with instructions that no one should come and disturb a study on which the fate of several nations might depend. And what His Excellency was reading was a serial novel. On certain voyages, merchants predominated, and for twenty days the promenade deck was like a stock exchange lounge. Millions rolled in from morning to night, and the ship moved with the insolent aplomb of a well-lined banker who fears nothing of fate. The enormous sums, composed purely of words, seemed to truly weigh heavily on her insides. At other times, elegant ladies abounded: the bridge occupied every table; the sea air lost its saltiness under a wave of expensive perfumes, and the ship was rejuvenated by the splendid dresses swirling on its decks, the garlands hanging in the salons, and the rice powder carried by the wind. As it bobbed over the ocean, it seemed to take on the tremulous expression of an old flirt talking with his friends about worldly scandals and rags. On some voyages, beautiful and liberal women, generous with their charms, were introduced among the traveling flock, and the monotonous peace of the Atlantic instantly disappeared. Men ran anxiously after carnal alms; Conflicts and fights arose, everyone was agitated like mad, and the transatlantic liner, gloomy and ill-tempered, sailed with its daily routine disrupted, its internal services in disarray, eager to reach the end of its voyage as soon as possible to recover from this illness. The ship had a soul—Maltrana, sleepy in an armchair, was certain of it—a soul that spoke through its chimney, as the ship Argos spoke through its mast; a conscience that perceived the motive behind its actions, the purpose of this continual coming and going across the Atlantic, plowing it with its steel keel. He was not alone in the oceanic immensity. Others like him advanced behind his wake at intervals of hundreds of miles, or marched ahead on the same course. And from the opposite hemisphere, a similar line began the return journey, all moving like a string of diligent ants on the endless Atlantic plain. Some of these monsters took off daily from the European soil , scraping the depths with the invisible claws of their propellers, their bellies filled with human flesh shaken by mirages of hope. They departed from the frosty and misty docks of the Baltic; from the black coal ports of England, in whose greasy atmosphere floats a perfume of tea and tobacco with opium; from the coasts of oceanic France, which oppose their living banks of shellfish and the Pine forests of their heaths, exposed to the assaults of the fierce Gulf of Gascony; of the bays of Spain, cups of tranquil blue, in which seagulls braid their wings, frightened by the screech of a crane or the moo of a siren; of the ports of call of the Mediterranean, asleep in the sun; white cities with the harsh dawn of lime or the aristocratic softness of marble; cities whose wharves smell of withered vegetables and ripened fruits, and send down to the ships, with the offshore wind, the nuptial breath of the orange tree, the incense of the almond tree, the spirited strumming of an Iberian guitar, the joyful tapping of a Provençal tambourine, and the languid arpeggios of an Italian mandolin. Motionless in the Flemish canals of black, bubbling water, the crystalline melody of a carillon, lost in the mystery of the night, had descended to their sleeping decks. Great swing bridges had opened before them, repelling the masses of people and carts, to give them passage onto the navigable rivers of Holland. Seeing themselves on the open sea, their prows, like intelligent snouts, sniffed at the horizon, divining the path through infinity. Around their rumps, the gray or black waves of the northern seas, the blue Atlantic undulations, the immense sleeping liquid beneath the equatorial heaviness, the green Ocean with golden scales off the Brazilian coast, the almost fresh waters of the southern coasts, tinged red by the floods of the rivers, churned in soapy foam. Once, a voice without vibration spoke to Maltrana, echoing in his brain without first passing through his ear: “And so we march through the blue mystery, in search of a distant dreamland for our cargo of miseries and ambitions.” Years ago , we all followed the same course with the tenacity of a flock that knows no other path. We were headed to North America, an insatiable gulley of men, a boiling cauldron of races, a land of absurd prodigies and insolent opulence… But now, the path has forked: we discover new worlds. The herd of steel and smoke divides, and while some follow the ancient path, we turn our prow south, carrying adventure and hope on our backs, in search of new peoples, peoples of hope, peoples of dawn, whose names ring with the tinkling of gold. Chapter 9. The first act of the equatorial celebration was the nine o’clock musical parade across all the decks, then gliding into the passageways and recesses of the cabins. Many passengers were still in bed, and as the echo of the instruments faded, they resumed their sleep. They had gone to bed late. The previous night, the cafe lights remained lit until dawn dimmed their brilliance. The crew, while cleaning the decks, had splashed with their hose some patent leather slippers that stumbled about, unable to find their way, and tuxedos whose blackness was constellated with ash and champagne stains. The little passengers were the only ones who ran boisterously upon hearing this first announcement of the festivities. Children and maids marched at the head of the band, admiring the costumes the musicians had donned in honor of the grotesque solemnity; their faces with patches of red ocher and their cardboard noses. A waiter dressed in a red hide and with an abundance of feathers, led the way to the music, whirling a drum major’s truncheon. The morning passengers greeted each other on the promenade with high praise for the day. The water was gray, the sky overcast; the equatorial Ocean looked like a northern sea. The cool breeze blowing from the bow banished the dreaded heat. It was a magnificent day for the crossing . At eleven o’clock, news circulated that made the lazy ones leave their cabins and quickly filled the decks. Land was visible… And everyone ran to the port side with vehement curiosity, as if they wanted to satisfy their eyes with an unprecedented phenomenon. Land!… This The word evoked something distant that had once existed, and that people, accustomed to oceanic solitude, now considered unreal. Many searched for this land in the gray expanse with a simple glance, and only after long hesitations did they manage to distinguish a small black blur, a short, wavy line that seemed to float on the waters like a pile of garbage. It was St. Paul’s Rock, an agglomeration of basaltic stones in the middle of the equator; a tiny piece of land forgotten by volcanic convulsions, which continued to emerge boldly between Africa and America, without fauna, without flora, barren and cursed in the solitudes of the ocean, far from any inhabited country. “The only place on earth that has no owner,” said Dr. Zurita in a group. “The only island that has not tempted anyone’s greed… How could it be, that not even the English had thought of planting their flag on it?” Rows of binoculars were trained along the side of the ship, and in the circle of their eyepieces appeared a pile of rocks flanked by other loose rocks shaped like islets; black, rough boulders reminiscent of the skin of pachyderms, around which the surf raised enormous sprays of foam. The calm sea was disturbed by this unexpected obstacle. One could discern the existence of underwater caverns, invisible gorges and channels, in which the ocean writhed furiously, losing its sleepy calm, rearing up with foaming torrents of rage, its gigantic cataracts tumbling into the black abysses. Not a person, not a blade of grass, not a bird on the bare rock, which during the daylight hours must have burned and reverberated like an infernal landscape. “There are only sharks there,” said a passenger, as if he had lived on the island. They breed in their caves, and then go in search of food in the warm seas , all the way to the coasts of Brazil or the Antilles. The memory of these oceanic mastiffs made women shudder. They imagined them swarming like schools of sardines in the caverns and reefs of that islet; they saw them in their thoughts, passing over and over beneath the belly of the ship, treacherous, cautious, with their heads larger than the rest of their bodies, waiting for someone to fall in so they could crush them between their triple rows of teeth. The men evoked the ferocious tragedies of the deep, when the hungry shark, finding nothing on the surface but schools of flying fish, would descend thousands of feet in search of the enormous squids that wave the vegetation of their tentacles in the shadows. The shark, overwhelmed by the suffocation of the depths, had to make its hunt quickly. The tooth battled the sucker, the devastating tail swipe battled the sucking tentacle, the tearing mouth battled the sucking mouth. And in this invisible battle that unfolded below, several kilometers vertically away, in the shadows of dark waters, further obscured by the clouds of ink exuded by the octopus, sometimes the shark remained a prisoner of the viscous and greedy net; other times it rose victorious, its leathery skin swollen from the suction of the suckers, and in the starlight, floating on the undulations of the surface, it devoured the remains of the prey snatched from the abyss. This evocation made many remember where they were. That luxurious hotel, with its music, its troops of servants, and its salons, was nothing more than a floating, well-appointed box, beneath which life continued to beat fiercely and blindly, ignorant of justice and mercy, just as in the early days of the planet. Humans advanced , eating, dancing, and making love to each other through places on the globe where the cruel and blind forms of prehistoric bestiality still existed. They lived the same way as on land, without remembering that they were marching on a mobile aquatic column of six thousand meters in length. height, the ship’s height being like a capital. St. Paul’s Rock gradually fell to the stern of the ocean liner. The barren islet was called unpleasant by the ladies, who stopped looking at it, already lacking interest. Seen without binoculars, it looked like something repugnant floating on the water: the digestive remains of a leviathan; a pile of excrement from the fabulous Roc bird. The groups broke up to scatter along the promenade, and in this general rout, Ojeda and Maltrana found themselves face to face. Isidro fixed his eyes with a malicious expression on his friend’s face. “How was your night?” Fernando made a gesture of indifference. “Very well.” “You look pale,” he added, “with dark circles under your eyes. Anyone would say you’ve had bad dreams… or that you’ve been up all night without sleeping.” “When I tell you that I had a great time!” And Maltrana, faced with his friend’s impatient tone, didn’t want to insist further. “Your appearance isn’t better than mine,” Ojeda said, smiling. “Surely you went to bed late… Look at that face? Very well: you don’t have any signs of a stroke. This party has been better for you than the last.” Maltrana was indignant. Did he perhaps think his friends were barbarians? The general brawl the other day had been unexpected. People were getting to know each other better; socializing can tame beasts. They were now like brothers and forgave each other insults. An insult was forgotten over a new bottle. And since Fernando, eager to keep the conversation away from himself, insisted on knowing the details of the party, Maltrana spoke with a certain reserve. “Nothing; a cultured, very decent gathering. We even had our ladies, the most distinguished, the most chic.” This time, the ladies of the operetta, solemnly invited by me on behalf of my friends, deigned to come… One has one’s prestige and one’s successes, friend Fernando; not everything has to be for others. So that he wouldn’t insist on the latter, Ojeda asked him if the butler had had to intervene, as he had the other time, to restore order. “No,” Maltrana said after some hesitation. “Things proceeded peacefully in the smoking room. Many bottles uncorked, much singing. The ladies found the seats hard and in the end were smoking with their heads resting on one man and their feet on another… Complete order!” The butler appeared at the door to smile like a satisfied teacher of his students. One of them, who was doing gymnastics with an armchair, dropped it on his companion’s head. We cleaned the blood off, and then the two shook hands. In the end, nothing. It wasn’t with bad intentions… The ladies, who didn’t understand a word and only knew how to drink and smile, would deign to take the arm of a friend for a mysterious and poetic stroll through the top deck or through the cabin corridors, returning a little later to accept new invitations… I tell you, it was an honorable and distinguished party. Ojeda smiled incredulously. He had heard something about broken furniture and fights with the steward. “A trifle. A joke from my American friends…” But the conflict was immediately resolved. They had all left the smoking room, attracted by the moon, an enormous moon that covered the Atlantic with living silver and sent streams of luminous milk running down the sides of the ship. The honorable society contemplated the spectacle with an alcoholic sentimentality that brought tears to their eyes. The ladies, in poetic faintness, leaned their blond heads on the nearest shoulder. One burst into hysterical weeping. “The moon… the moon,” each murmured in their own language. And so they remained motionless for a long time, as if they had never seen her before, mesmerized by that plump, luminous face suspended on the horizon. An American threw a bottle in the direction of the star. They had to give the great lady something to drink. And immediately, as if this madness were contagious, a shower of empty or unopened bottles was heard. falling into the ocean. They passed before the luminous circle like a cloud of black missiles. When the provisions were exhausted, the muscular commission agents and the shepherds from the prairie took up the chairs and tables from the deck, and everything began to pass over the side, falling into the water with a noisy splash. Some clapped their hands, writhing with laughter at the unexpected spectacle; others shouted, excited by the vigor and rapidity with which the objects leaped from the ship into the sea. The stewards ran to report these outrages, and the steward appeared, shouting and placing his arms crossed between the side and the gunners. Efforts had to be made to pacify the cowboys, who found the game very much to their liking. They were ready to pay for all these damages and for whatever the respectable gentlemen in their company might inflict. “And a gentleman who pays can do what he wants.” They pulled bills by the handful from their trouser pockets, indignant that they had been disturbed for just a few dollars, and only calmed down when they found themselves back in the smoking room with all the honorable society, in front of some bottles a friend had hidden under a table. “And that was that,” said Maltrana. But Ojeda insisted. Near dawn, many passengers who lived in the vicinity of Isidro’s cabin had woken up. Shouts, banging on the door, desperate ringing of the bell, the arrival of the steward with his round of servants. What had that been? “It was my doing,” replied Maltrana, lowering his eyes modestly. ” What happened the other night happened to me. As soon as I drink a little, the memory of my neighbor, the gloomy man, assaults me, and I want to discover the mystery he keeps in the next cabin.” He had told his companions of this novelistic neighborhood, taking everything he carried in his imagination as real and indisputable. A great lady, a Russian princess or an Austrian archduchess—Maltrana doubted this —had been imprisoned on the ship. No one had seen her, but her beauty was extraordinary. And her captor and guardian was that unpleasant man, always dressed in black, with a stern face… Everyone listened to him with great interest: some selfishly moved by the lady’s beauty; others, nobly indignant that a man could carry out this kidnapping next to them. The oldest cowboy opened his eyes with childlike astonishment. “And the mistress was being locked up against her will! And this was possible!” A few minutes later, Maltrana was seen cautiously advancing down the corridor that led to his cabin, followed by several companions who marched in single file, holding their breath as if about to surprise a sleeping enemy. They knocked on the mysterious man’s door. “Sir, open it gently.” It was in his best interest to avoid scandal and for his crime to remain a mystery. It was Maltrana who advised him, for his own good. He should give them the key to the next cabin and go back to sleep, if that was his wish… It was useless to resist, for he was arriving at the head of an army of heroes… Should he play deaf? At one o’clock!… At two o’clock!… And the heroes fell with all the force of their bodies upon the door of the neighboring cabin, to break it down and free the lady. “Don’t be afraid , princess: don’t shout. We are friends.” Maltrana’s advice was useless, for the princess neither shouted nor approached the door. Every blow from the old cowboy shook the entire row of cabins. There was a burst of shouts and curses from people suddenly awakened. The sound of a bell vibrated furiously in the distance. It was the mysterious man calling for help. “When the steward arrived and saw us trying to force our way into the princess’s door, he became as furious as I’ve ever seen him: with the rage of a rabid lamb. He disrespected us, threatening to call the commander to have us put in the bar. He promised to change my cabin today, so I wouldn’t repeat my attempts. And all.” This strengthens my belief even further that there is a secret, a great secret, in that locked cabin. You should have seen the steward’s indignation when he caught us in the process of discovering it… And it won’t be discovered, we must lose hope. Ojeda seemed to question him with his eyes upon hearing this. “It won’t be discovered,” Isidro continued, “because I just gave the steward my word of honor not to concern myself further with my neighbor or to pry into the next cabin. Only then does he leave me in mine and not force me to move to a less comfortable one… The mysterious man triumphs. How can it be!… I just saw him, and to punish him, I haven’t greeted him… And I will always refuse to greet him, although he pretends it doesn’t matter to him. That will teach him to keep quiet and to be a decent person. ” And as if it pained him to have to abandon the enterprise, he said to Ojeda: “You could dedicate yourself to this business.” If you want, I’ll lend you my cabin to spy from. Look carefully… she’s a princess. And surely if you’re the one looking for her, she’ll show herself. You ‘re more presentable than I am: more handsome, more elegant. Fernando made a gesture of indifference and detachment that seemed to offend Maltrana, as if it were directed at a member of her family. “Poor princess! To see her abandoned like that!” “I understand. For the moment, you have things you consider better… But perhaps you’re mistaken. Who knows! Who knows!” Ojeda continued listening to his friend, but with a certain distraction, turning his head whenever he noticed someone pass behind him. The deck was completely occupied by passengers: some in mobile groups; others seated around in armchairs, blocking the way. Everyone was upstairs… except for her. Fernando longed to see her and was afraid at the same time. He felt the anxiety of the first interview after possession, when one reflects coldly, the blinding raptures now gone, and the consequences of the gesture are calculated. What expression would be theirs when they met as friends, forced to pretend after a hidden intimacy?… The roar of the fireplace sounded, indicating the time for noon. “Let’s have lunch!” Downstairs, in the dining room, Fernando felt his unease grow as he saw that all the tables were filling up and Maud’s remained unoccupied. The courses followed one another; lunch was drawing to a close, and she hadn’t appeared. Maltrana, taking pity on his impatience, asked a waiter for the American lady. “Was she sick?” And the servant returned shortly with news. She had asked for lunch to be served in her cabin. Perhaps she was feeling unwell. This made Ojeda eat quickly, with a visible desire to escape as quickly as possible… “Maud was sick!” He advanced through the passageway that led to the luxurious apartments on the same floor as the dining room. He walked confidently over the plush carpet to the vicinity of his own cabin, but as he turned toward Maud’s, he crept forward cautiously, like someone on a date who fears being seen. At the end of a short corridor, next to a skylight, was Mrs. Power’s door , with a card bearing her name. The door remained ajar and motionless, held in this position by an interior hook to admit the fresh air of the passage. Fernando looked through the open space, seeing nothing but half a table occupied by toiletries. Among the brushes, perfume bottles, and sprays, there seemed to reign a photograph of a man enclosed in a nickel frame. He was a handsome man, with a strong jaw, a trimmed mustache, imperious eyes, and a large flower in his buttonhole . Undoubtedly Mr. Power… Ojeda remembered that the night before, Maud had immediately thrown herself out of his arms , rushing to that table, eager to make up for an oversight. It was no doubt to hide the friendly Mr. Power, who once again occupied the place of honor, after hours of ingratitude and sin had passed. He knocked timidly on the door, and a questioning voice, Maud’s, answered affably: “Who?” But as Ferdinand gave his name, there was a certain movement of surprise and a commotion on the other side of the door, as if Mrs. Power had sat up in surprise and irritation. “Ah, no! Imprudence, no!…” Her voice trembled, angry, hoarse; a voice suddenly stripped of its silky femininity. And as if she feared that the audacious man would carry his boldness so far as to lift the hook that secured the door, it was she who anticipated his action, blinding him with a rude push that endangered one of his hands. Ferdinand remained confused before the hermetic wooden door. He stammered excuses. He had come to inquire after the lady’s health: he feared she was ill. But she cut short these humble words imploring forgiveness with others brief and rude as commands. He could withdraw. One did not come without permission to a lady’s cabin. It was a compromising imprudence, unworthy of a gentleman. He felt more stupefaction than shame as he withdrew humiliated. But was it Maud who was speaking thus? Was what had happened the night before a dream? He replayed incidents and words in his memory, anxious to find something that could have offended her. For he was certain that only an involuntary offense on his part could have been the cause of this behavior. Women are so susceptible! He could not attribute this change of mood to a disappointment suffered by Maud. No; not that. He affirmed it, proud of his manly power. He remembered with satisfaction the sighing thanks of the American woman, her stammering praises of the tireless vehemence of a race which, in certain extremes, she considered far superior to her own, methodical and prudent; the humility with which at dawn she had begged for mercy, overcome by fatigue and sleep. “This will pass,” Fernando said to himself. “A whim… perhaps a certain embarrassment; fear of seeing me again. In the afternoon or at night we’ll talk, and as if nothing had happened.” Up on the promenade deck, he saw the people crowded around a starboard rail, looking out to sea. A waterspout: a torrent of water on the horizon. He looked like the others, but without seeing anything extraordinary. The sky had cleared with the changeable rapidity of the equatorial atmosphere. In its limpid blue, only a black cloud remained floating near the horizon. This cloud, which they all contemplated, looked like a flower with vaporous petals, with a long stem descending in search of the water. But this stem suddenly lost its rigidity, taking the form of a leech that stretched without reaching the ocean with its mouth. A violet-colored space remained between the Atlantic surface and the end of the sleeve; and yet, this did not mean that the colossal suction was still taking place. The sea rose beneath the basket-shaped cloud, and this aquatic circle crowned with foam shifted as the cloudy cone moved across the sky. The storm finally dissipated, and the uniform smoothness of the horizon was restored. The passengers, the spectacle over, returned to form groups on deck or hid in the smoking room and the winter garden. They joked about the ceremony that was to take place that very afternoon. They leaned out from the bow balcony to see below the great christening font, improvised on the bow with timbers and tarpaulins: a swimming pool that continuously received sea water through a spout and spilled part of its contents with the roll of the ship. The napping passengers left their cabins at four in the afternoon and went up to the decks, blinking in the glare of the sun. Music, accompanied by shouts and a great din of children, resonated throughout the ship. Neptune had just boarded. No one had seen where he was, but the presence of the god with his bizarre entourage was indisputable. People lined the promenade to watch the carnival procession parade by. First, the band, preceded by the small passage: nannies pushing children’s carriages; restless children jumping and They jostled one another, shouting at the top of their lungs to the march the musicians were playing. Next came a redskin with great plumes and an enormous axe, their nakedness covered with sweaty slate, and two blacks almost naked, with no other superfluities than horsehair loincloths, as hollow as a dancer’s skirts, and a lance slung over their shoulders. These counterfeit blacks, their bodies gleaming with shoe polish, showed their blue eyes from under their curly wigs. Next came four gendarmes with battered helmets and rusty sabers; and after this honor guard, white-bearded Neptune, with a brass diadem and a drunken face; an astronomer and his assistant, in long calico tailcoats and top-crowned hats daubed with stars; a clerk in a cap and gown, followed by his assistant, who carried the books; and the god’s barber, both a favorite and a jester, as well as certain historical beard-shavers who had been advisors to ancient kings. After touring all the floors of the central castle, the procession descended to the waist, settling next to the pool. The emigrants, corralled at the bow behind a rope fence, silently watched the grotesque ceremony. The balconies of the central castle were filled with people. From the prow esplanade, its enormous white façade was encompassed , resembling that of a palace under construction, cut by galleries from one end to the other and topped by a kiosk that served as a bridge. Above the rows of curious onlookers leaning out from the various balconies, others appeared perched on benches and chairs, leaning their heads forward to better view the festivities. The bridge was also crowded with passengers, and among the white caps of the officers who, up high, scrutinized the sea and monitored the ship’s progress, the blond hue of some female heads shone, and colorful veils fluttered. The carnival astronomer and his assistant took their height with ridiculous nautical instruments, and upon declaring that they were exactly on the line, Neptune, with a blow of his trident, began the ceremony. The clerk read from a book held by his amanuensis. The German words, emerging harsh and sonorous from between their red hemp beards, provoked an explosion of laughter and feminine blushes from the balconies. It was the coarse laughter that accompanies equivocal jokes. “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” most asked, not understanding these Germanic witticisms. And even if they got no reply, they laughed just the same. Ojeda and Maltrana, who were on the veranda near the grotesque figures, leaned forward with their heads as if they tried to understand something of this story. “What’s it saying, Fernando?” The words have a certain murmur, as if they were verses. “They’re hallelujahs. I don’t quite understand, but they seem like nonsense to make these good people laugh.” The reading ended with a loud blast of trumpets from the musicians, and the two blacks, abandoning their spears, threw themselves headfirst into the pool, performing various swimming tricks and remaining for a long time with their feet in the air and their heads submerged, their horsehair skirts floating on the surface. The ladies shouted with a laughing uproar; some mothers turned their heads to look for their little girls, to warn them not to look. But calm and confidence were soon restored, for these were civilized blacks, Protestant blacks, who used modest dissimulation beneath their loincloths. His swimming prowess was almost forgotten by the barber’s grotesque preparations . He brought out his implements, and each one was greeted with great laughter: a razor the size of a man; a pair of tongs no less large, used for pulling teeth, all made of painted wood; a brush that was a broom, with which he stirred the liquid in a tank, throwing in handfuls of plaster that appeared to be soap powder. He sharpened the razor on a large piece of cloth held by two cabin boys; he tested the tongs by trying to catch fish with them. the head of one of the black men, who dodged them by diving into the pool; he appreciated the density of the white paste from the bucket, splashing it with a broom from the nearest neighbors; and the good people celebrated all his pranks with great joy. The parade of neophytes began. The clerk read out names, and those who were to be baptized advanced between two gendarmes, barefoot, wearing nothing but underwear or simple pajamas. They were first-class passengers who agreed to take part in the ceremony, and whose presence was greeted by the public with shouts and acclamations. The women laughed with malicious delight at seeing in such a state the same gentlemen who strutted along the promenade or in the dining room with ceremonious stretching. Only Germans making their first voyage to the other hemisphere, friends of tradition, who would have believed their interests had been defrauded and their prestige diminished by someone proposing to spare them this grotesque and painful ceremony, paraded. It was an ancient custom to undergo the baptism of the line, and they did not renounce what was rightfully theirs. Furthermore, it was an honor and a satisfaction to contribute to the joy of their fellow passengers at their own expense. When a name appeared on the list of those destined for baptism that was not German, the clerk would refrain from repeating it and move on to another. Those on board knew from various experiences that only German good humor was happy to play these games. The swarthy people, extremely sensitive and greatly afraid of ridicule, took these innocent jokes as offense. The gendarmes placed the neophyte in the hands of the barber, who made him sit on a ladder at the edge of the pool. The two black men scurried behind him, wetting his back with furious sprays that made him shudder, while the beard-shaver proceeded to dress him. He smeared him with the white paste, struggling to hold the patient still, who was trying to free his eyes and mouth from the torment of the broom. He pretended to shave him with the hideous razor; he tried to insert the enormous forceps between his lips to extract a tooth, and meanwhile, the clerk pronounced the baptismal formula: “By the grace of our god Neptune, you shall henceforth be called…” And he gave him a name: shark, crab, cod, whale, according to his caricatured appearance , nicknames that found an echo in the easy hilarity of the audience. The trumpet roared as the clerk finished his formula; The barber would place his fists on the neophyte’s chest, the blacks would pull him up , and he would fall backward into the pool with a splash that would carry a great distance. He would disappear into the murky liquid covered in gypsum flecks . The blacks would press on him to maintain his immersion as long as possible, and finally, the three of them would resurface in a cluster, struggling with furious thrashing motions that provoked laughter. And the baptized one would emerge dripping, with no other concern than keeping his hands crossed over his belly to avoid indecorous transparencies, bearing on his clothes the dark imprints of the blacks’ hands, while the latter displayed on their bleached arms the white hands marked by the neophyte during the struggle. The clerk would call out names, and some, receiving no response, would provoke the intervention of the police force. Obeying a signal from the steward, the ridiculous gendarmes would set out to search the ship for the fugitive . There was someone who wished to increase the public joy with this incident of his own invention. And when he finally allowed himself to be caught, he appeared, like a tortoise in its shell, under the coils of the cable with which his captors had held him. The barber was furious with him, prolonging the barbaric operations of his grooming, and the blacks engaged in a veritable boxing match to prevent him from leaving the pool. “Herr Maltrana.” The clerk had hardly said this when a wild joy spread through the vestibule, reaching the balconies of the central castle. As far as the The emigrants on the bow emerged from their immobility. All those who until then had remained indifferent to these meaningless men suddenly burst into shouts, agitated like a mob invading a stage. “Maltrana! Let Maltrana come out!” The noble matrons turned their eyes on him from on high and waved their hands for him to obey their wishes. Dr. Zurita and other Argentinians abandoned the mocking tranquility with which they had until then witnessed the “nonsense of the gringos” to signal to Isidro, urging him to please the families. “Ah, brave gaucho!… Let’s see if he’ll do something of his own!” Even the children clapped their hands enthusiastically. “Don Isidro!… Let Don Isidro come out!” The hero stood up, saluting with irony and pride at the same time. “What an ovation!… Thank you, beloved people!” But as he shrank back into one of the horizontal cargo masts that served as seats for him and Fernando, modestly hiding behind his friend, the furious demands of the crowd redoubled. Two gendarmes began advancing toward him. “You’ll see, Ojeda, how this ends badly,” he said angrily. ” I don’t come here to make people laugh… The first guy like that I touch, I’ll give him a beating.” The butler, discreetly guessing Maltrana’s thoughts, made a sign; the gendarmes retraced their steps, and the clerk quickly gave another name: “Herr Doktor Muller.” A burst of Germanic joy erased the last murmurs of disappointment caused by Isidro. There was general laughter when they saw the “doktor” among the gendarmes—the same one Maltrana had spoken of in Tenerife— huge of build, grave of face, with a salt-and-pepper beard and thick, nearsighted lenses. He greeted the mocking applause of the audience with a childlike laugh and went to sit on the pool steps as if on top of a chair. “Duty is duty,” he seemed to say with the cold glances around him. “Discipline is the foundation of society; and you have to conform to what the majority demands.” He took off his shoes, placing them meticulously, one not extending the other by even a millimeter; He took off his glasses, handing them to a cabin boy as if they were laboratory equipment. Without losing his noble calm, looking at everyone with wide- open, vague eyes, he began to strip off his clothes, until the screams of women and the laughter of men warned him not to go any further. Ojeda looked at the “doctor” with some astonishment. He was going to America, hired by a government to teach chemistry lessons at the country’s university. He enjoyed some renown in the laboratories of his homeland… And there he was, enduring the barber’s soaping and antics , shuddering under the spray of the blacks, unaware of the grotesqueness of a situation that would have irritated others, perhaps satisfied with contributing to the rejoicing of this crowd, tired by the monotony of the ocean. The christening trumpet blasted, and the “doktor” splashed into the pool, fending off the black men’s slaps, ridiculous in his nearsighted bewilderment, majestic in the importance he attached to the act and the seriousness with which he walked away, dripping dirty water from his clothes and beard, after recovering his glasses. The celebration continued with a visible decline in curiosity. Members of the ship paraded: cabin boys making their first voyage, stokers on long voyages through the northern seas who had never been to the Southern Hemisphere. And those in charge of the christening took their jokes to the extreme with a confident brutality, focusing on the shaved heads and bare torsos of these who were his companions. Ojeda, during the long ceremony, had looked many times at the balconies of the central castle, hoping to see Maud among the ladies leaning out. But the American remained invisible. Finally, when there were no more neophytes left and the grotesque characters were going to As they retreated, preceded by the music, he saw her at one end of the viewing platform on the promenade deck, hidden behind Mrs. Lowe, her forehead and eyes sticking out over her shoulder, just enough to see. Fernando thought that perhaps Maud had been watching him for hours without him noticing , and this irritated him somewhat. He broke away from his friend to run to the upper floors of the ship, and before reaching them, he heard the music start to play a march. The Neptune-like procession was moving toward the smoking-room terrace, where the ladies were about to be baptized. People were leaving the balconies to hurry to this last place. Near the winter garden, he met Maud, who was marching between the Lowes. They exchanged greetings, and Ojeda instantly experienced a feeling of strangeness. Mrs. Power seemed like a different woman. He almost felt like begging her forgiveness, like someone who makes the mistake of confusing a stranger with a friend. She inclined her head with a small smile: she greeted him like any other passenger. Her eyes met his calmly, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, as if there were no other relationship between them than those ordinary in common life on board. The four of them talked about the baptism, and the Herculean Lowe recounted the incidents. Mr. Maltrana hadn’t wanted to be baptized. Why ? He had crossed the line several times, always willingly participating in this ceremony. On the Goethe, he would have offered himself as well, had the lady not objected . A fun party. But Mr. Maltrana was afraid… Oh! Oh! Oh! And he laughed, showing his long, gold-encrusted teeth. They all walked toward the café terrace to witness the female baptism ceremony. Mrs. Lowe, with the instinct of solidarity that makes every woman know the opportune moment to help a friend, remained clutching Maud’s arm, interposing herself between her and Fernando. He searched in vain for a slight smile, a glance of intelligence. Needing consolation, he inwardly praised Maud’s discretion, the ease with which her race controlled itself, concealing its impressions. “How well she pretends!… No one would guess what is going on between us…” But the memory of the painful scene in front of the cabin door returned to him. The echo of that almost masculine voice, hoarse with anger, trembled in his ears… And with sad humility, he tried to find in his behavior something that would explain this misfortune. “But what have I done, sir? How could I have offended her?” Neptune, standing in the middle of the terrace with his entire retinue, proceeded to baptize the passengers. These occupied several rows of pews, as in a college, and each time one rose to receive the lustral water, the musicians would blast through their long copper tubes a roar of warlike trumpet playing reminiscent of Wagnerian scenes. The god had gallantly suppressed immersion in sea water. In one hand, he held a large spray bottle filled with perfume, and with it he sprinkled the reverent heads: some blond and tousled by the wind; others, lustrous black, constellated by the shine of hair combs. The whole joy of the ceremony lay in the names the divinity bestowed upon his catechumens, amidst approving murmurs or general laughter. The imagination of the steward and the learned chamberlains had been at its best, flattering the passengers with names like the starfish, the rose of the ocean, the zephyr of the equator, and so on. The older ladies were undines, Atlantic nymphs, and naiads, which made them return to their seats blushing, their double chins quivering, amidst the approving and somewhat ironic murmurs of the audience. The good Germans indulged in innocent jokes with their compatriots, to the amusement of the audience. A thin woman was designated a “sardine” at her baptism; another fat woman was given the name “merman.” Maud seemed to tire of this ceremony. She looked around, but avoiding meeting Fernando’s eyes. A passenger approached the two ladies, cap in hand, with a gallant air, as if offering to dance. “Whenever you wish…” The table is set in the lounge. It was Munster inviting them to a game of bridge. At last, his tenacity triumphed. He had found playing partners in those three Americans, convincing them an hour earlier, while they were witnessing the christening ceremony. Maud accepted the invitation cheerfully, as if bridge were a good excuse to isolate herself from unwelcome presences. She left with her friends after an indifferent greeting to Fernando, and he watched her walk away without turning her head, without a hint of hesitation or regret. Once again, he felt afflicted by a fault of his own, which he did not know what it was, but which justified this inexplicable behavior. “What have I done to you, sir? What have I done to you?” With the vile humility of every lover in misfortune, he soon followed her, in spite of the suggestions of a false energy that advised him to appear haughty and indifferent. His legs carried him with irresistible momentum to the vicinity of the drawing-room, and he beheld Maud with the cards in her hand, her brow furrowed, her gaze hard upon her playing companions. When she raised her eyes, she saw Ferdinand framed by the window, staring at her fixedly, and she had a look of anger, as if she had encountered something that shook her nerves and tried her patience. Ferdinand fled, suffering the same sensation as if he had just received a blow on the back… He doubted the reality of the events and even his very person. Was he dreaming? Were his memories of the previous night just his own invention? He wandered around the ship, from one deck to the other, until he found Isidro on the terrace of the café. There was no trace of the christening celebration: the passengers had dispersed. Maltrana seemed furious at the excesses and inconveniences of his popularity. He couldn’t move around the ship without his numerous and dear friends confronting him with airs of protest. The ladies seemed inconsolable. Why hadn’t he allowed himself to be baptized? What an interesting spectacle it would have been! ” As if I were a monkey, my friend Ojeda… as if I had embarked to make people laugh… Believe me, I feel the sadness of a great man convinced of the ingratitude of his people.” And after this statement, accompanied by a comical gesture, Isidro leaned again on the railing, looking at the northern emigrants crowded below, on the aft esplanade. “I’ve been here for a while, remembering the sailors of other centuries and their opinions on the virtues of the equinoctial line. Don’t you remember? The first navigators who had crossed into the other hemisphere took it for granted that all the parasites that lodged in the bodies of sailors and in the cracks of ships died along the line. And this belief wasn’t only that of the Spanish discoverers; the French and English adopted it as well, and for many years it became a universal truth. “Once we passed the Azores,” said Maltrana, ” the heads and beards of the crew members began to be depopulated of bloodthirsty beasts, and by the time we reached the line, not a single one remained to remember. This class of inconvenient guests was not then the exclusive property of one people or another. All of Europe possessed them equally, and even kings enjoyed the pleasure of the scratch and the entertainment of the hunt.” Imagine what those small ships must have been like with their crews crowded together and the wood corroded by all kinds of repugnant bugs… As the heat caused the sailors to walk around half naked when they reached the line and take advantage of the long calms by taking baths, this momentary hygiene exterminated their fearsome companions, justifying the belief that they died due to lack of acclimatization when passing through a hemisphere to the other. The bloodthirsty tiger of the capillary forests, the carnivorous beast leaping in the heights and hollows of the folds of clothing, had figured for centuries as an interesting character in many literary works. Cervantes laughed at him and his feigned death on the border of the two hemispheres when recounting “the adventure of the enchanted ship,” when Don Quixote and his squire were floating down the Ebro in a boat without oars… The deluded paladin believed that within a few minutes of sailing he was close to the equator; and to convince himself, he recommended that Sancho search his clothes to see if he could find “something.” “Something and even somethings,” the sly squire replied, searching his chest. ” I was thinking about this, friend Ojeda, looking at the respectable patriarchs below in their fur capes despite the heat. “Something and even somethings.” For them, the line has lost its former virtue… Look at them: scratching, scratching!… And he pointed to some emigrants who were contemplating the ocean with a thoughtful air, like priestly figures of hieratic majesty, wrapped in long robes, while their hooked fingers ran over their beards, sank beneath their fur hats, or advanced between the folds and creases of their chests. “Let’s get out of here,” Ojeda said nervously, as if the height that separated them from these figures didn’t inspire confidence in him. As they strolled around the deck, they noticed the lack of ladies. Some who appeared for brief moments seemed preoccupied with searching for something important. Then they disappeared, as if a new idea had occurred to them or they had acquired a piece of information that modified their bad mood. “They’re getting ready for tonight’s party,” Maltrana said. ” A big costume ball, and during the meal, more farce like the baptism.” The day dragged on with a crushing monotony. The last solar fireworks were still shining on the horizon when the trumpets announced the banquet. Flags, garlands of roses, all the multicolored trappings of grand festivities adorned the dining room. Service began without many tables being occupied. Many passengers remained in the dining room to enjoy the announced novelties before the others . The ladies delayed their entry, hoping their costumes would be more successful. They waited, like the actresses, for the room to be well attended, and their maids or the men of the family went from the cabin to the dining room to take a look and return with news. Each family wanted the others to go first, and so they let time pass without making a decision. The passengers were on their third course when the costumed women began to appear, all at once. They blushed, acknowledging the applause and shouts of enthusiasm, and thus made their way to their seats, escorted by their families. Passing between the tables were Russian ladies with high tiaras and stiff robes; Japanese women with a slight gait; polonaises with dolmans trimmed with white fur; tempting little sailors who encased their youthful prominences in a white suit lent by a cabin boy. “Ollé! Ollé!… Carmen!” It was Conchita, wearing a white mantilla, short skirt, and sweeping her fan, who entered, protected by Doña Zobeida, smiling and maternal at this triumph. The men also took part in the masquerade. Many wore no other disguise than a cardboard nose or crepe mustaches, which they kept even though they interfered with their food. Some appeared in large hats, ponchos draped over their shoulders, and spurs, which they clanged bellicosely. They were commission agents eager for local color, who claimed to be dressed as gauchos from the Pampas or Chilean rotos. “Ah, cute gaucho! Tiger!” the South American boys exclaimed with mocking enthusiasm. “Ah, rotito! Funny huaso!” And the figureheads, resting their right hands on the old machete or kitchen knife they carried on their belts to “look more in character,” smiled. grateful. “Ich danke… Very grateful.” Some ate in a state of anguish, disguised as dervishes with bed covers. A grave German had put on the life jacket that every cabin had as a mandatory precaution. Enclosed like a crustacean in this cork shell, he was kept away from the table because of the volume of his wrapping, having to make a whole journey each time his hands went from the plates to his mouth. A mocking astonishment had greeted him with a noisy ovation, and satisfied with such triumph, he endured the torment, being the first to admire his prodigious inventiveness. The maids from the luxury cabins went from table to table, disguised as Tyrolean peasants, giving away flowers. Other servants, dressed as German peddlers, offered the trinkets they carried in a box on their chests. A black-painted cabin boy would lower himself by a rope through the skylight that connected the music room to the dining room, and hawk, in the style of a newsboy, the Aequator Zeitung, a small periodical printed on board the press used to print menus and passenger lists. The tiny sheet repeated the same jokes and verses dedicated to the passing of the liner on every voyage. The steward, standing at the entrance to the dining room, wearing a tailcoat with gold buttons, seemed to preside over the banquet, smiling modestly, as if acknowledging the silent congratulations of the public for the well-prepared party. Multicolored pyramids of cones filled with surprises rose from the tables. The diners pulled at their ends, producing a sudden burst, and from the wrappings emerged tiny ornaments : butterflies and gauze flowers, tiny flags, paper hats. The ladies’ breasts were adorned with these glittering trinkets; the lapel of every tuxedo displayed the wearer’s national flag like a decoration. Their heads were covered with tissue paper caps, bird crests, Asian mitres, and clown hats, which contrasted grotesquely with the eager expressions of the gluttons. After the barbecue, the waiters disappeared, and all the lights suddenly went out. This absolute darkness provoked, after a surprised silence, shouts and whistles. The malicious ones imitated smacking kisses in the darkness; others uttered animal bellows. But the din was short-lived. Music sounded in the distance, and red and green lights shone in the dining room, a line of lanterns carried aloft by the waiters. This glow, muffled by the colored glass, discreetly illuminated the room with a soft light. It was the “torch march” of every German festival. The passengers, attracted by the rhythm of the music, began to tap their knives against their plates and glasses in time with their knives. And amidst this general clinking, which almost drowned out the sounds of the instruments, the procession paraded: the drum major leading the band; the entire staff carrying lanterns; the waitresses disguised as flower girls; and a large number of animals, bears, dogs, and lions, bona fide servants, sweating under their fur covers and moving their cardboard heads from side to side, roaring or barking. Two men leaning against each other marched invisibly under a shell that imitated the leathery hide of an elephant, moving the monster’s serpentine trunk and fan-like ears between the tables. Other waiters followed, holding luminous plates, large trays with ice creams inside in the shape of castles, birds, or chalets, all under glass bells of various colors and with a candle in the center. Several young ladies with large hats and loose blond hair brought up the rear , smiling shamelessly at the men and blowing them kisses. They were the honor guard of three matrons with beautiful arms and majestic gait, wearing white tunics and purple Phrygian caps over their black ones. Wavy locks. They were recognized by the color and the heraldic ornaments on their cloaks: the Republic of Brazil, the Republic of Uruguay, and the Argentine Republic. This appearance sent a surge of surprise and anxiety through the passengers, as if they all felt the lash of desire at once. Where had these beautiful young women been hidden until then? Munster needed his glasses to better appreciate the novelty. Isidro, who claimed to know everyone on the ship, sat up in astonishment. Where did these girls come from? In their fresh, hard slenderness, they were superior to all the flaccid, square-waisted chambermaids who served on the ship. But the daring glance of one of those beauties dancing before the three republics and the kiss she blew him with her fingertips made Maltrana suddenly recognize her face hidden behind the wavy curls and the layer of rouge and rice powder. “Christ!” “If it’s the steward of my cabin!” In the somewhat diffused light of the lanterns, he admired the shapes and swaying of these blond young men with their white, shaved skin, as well as their ease of transformation. “Anyone can recognize the same ones who clean the cabins in the morning, shake the beds, and handle the dirty-water containers… Look, Ojeda: who isn’t mistaken? Now I understand everything.” The effeminate troupe advanced between the tables, followed by the astonishment of the ladies and the mocking audacity of the men. Some of them jumped from flirting to action, pinching the unruly young ladies as they passed, who responded with shrieks of fear and modest flinches. Suddenly, the ceiling lights ignited, masks and animals fled, like a coven surprised by the sunrise, and only the waiters remained in the dining room with their trays of ice cream, beginning the distribution. Ojeda had glanced several times at the nearby table, where Mrs. Power was eating alone. She was dressed very elegantly, and several brilliant stones sparkled on the pale flesh of her décolletage. “She seems worried,” Isidro had said at the beginning of the meal. ” She’s definitely in a bad mood. She doesn’t look at you, Ojeda, like she used to. Are you not friends anymore?” The meal passed without Fernando managing to meet the American woman’s eyes. She looked around with a distracted air, avoiding the nearby table. At the end of the parade, when the general merriment had groups mingling , Munster’s obsequiousness made her turn her face toward the neighbors. The jeweler, with a syrupy courtesy, raised his glass of champagne in honor of the lady. Maud nodded in response , raising her glass as well; and to avoid appearing inattentive, she repeated the movement, looking at Isidro and then at Ojeda. Not the slightest emotion in her clear, cold eyes. A gesture of courtesy and nothing more. Munster, proud of the friendship he had with that lady over bridge, invited her to resume the game. Before the dance, they could play another game in the music room: the Lowes were ready… And she shook her head with a tired expression. She didn’t know what to say… Perhaps later she would decide to accept… She was tired. Fernando glared at his table companion. But why was this dyed-haired old man standing between him and Maud with his damned bridge? He thought he saw in him a certain expression of petulance, pride in his budding friendship with that lady who until then had only noticed Ojeda… There would be no bridge: Fernando swore it in his heart. Maud had dressed elegantly to attend the dance, and the evening wouldn’t end without the two of them having an explanation. He needed to know the reason for her inexplicable behavior. After dinner, he saw her in the conservatory having coffee with the Lowes. Mr. Munster came to their table to repeat the invitation, and Maud shook her head in reply. Ojeda experienced his first satisfaction of the entire evening with this. Very good! This way, the importunate old man would learn not to believe himself in complete intimacy. He also imagined, with inexplicable optimism, that this refusal was because of him. Perhaps Maud also wanted an interview, as her inexplicable anger faded. Who knows! An hour passed without anything extraordinary happening on the ship. Down below in the dining room, the servants were clearing the tables, preparing the ballroom for the dance. Masks paraded around the deck. Its two streets resembled those of a city during Carnival. The gentleman disguised in a life preserver sipped his coffee calmly, still in his cork shell. Maltrana preached sobriety and good manners to a group of young people. After the madness of the previous night, it was time to go to bed early: so the party would be over. They shouldn’t overexert their poor bodies. Several trumpet blasts sounded announcing the dance, and soon after, the orchestra broke into a waltz in the still-deserted dining room. The girls ran impatiently; their mothers rose slowly, as if they had difficulty abandoning their encrustation in the cushions; there was a general rustle of sequined skirts and metallic ornaments from the costumes. Mrs. Power said goodbye to the Lowes, passing before Ojeda without a glance. He accepted this indifference as a favorable sign: it was dissimulation. She was leaving her friends to give him the opportunity for a private interview. No doubt she was going to wait for him downstairs in the ballroom . He spent a few minutes following her, wanting to imitate this prudence, and finally, after looking around, he left the table, slipping cautiously down the stairs, as if he wanted to go unnoticed. The first couples were milling around in the drawing room, and families were settling in with a great clatter of chairs being thrown out of order. Fernando looked around , unable to see Maud’s blond hair. Then he examined the groups parked in the dining room. Nothing… He was beginning to feel the sadness of discouragement, when suddenly he made a gesture of satisfaction. He hadn’t thought of it before! She was waiting for him in her cabin; there was no doubt about it. After looking around again to convince himself that no one could be spying on him, he advanced along the corridor with feigned indifference. After a few steps, he was trembling inwardly with the hesitations of fear. Would the scene of the morning be repeated! But no; the memory of the previous night gave him confidence. Not yet twenty-four hours had passed, and nights like that are not easily forgotten. His manly pride gave him courage. Surely she had retired to wait for him. The cabin door was closed, and once again he touched it with a timid appeal. Light could be seen through the keyhole and the small skylight above the frame. To the questioning voice that sounded on the other side of the wood, Fernando replied, to make himself known, with a slight cough and a discreet murmur. It was him… There was a certain commotion inside that indicated anger and surprise; furniture was moved, words muttered in hushed tones, and Ojeda even thought he detected the beginnings of an oath. When was he going to stop bothering her with his improprieties?… This behavior was not proper for a gentleman… It was not… And raising his irritated voice, he said from beside the door, with an imperative accent: “Go away… I’m going to knock.” An electric bell rang in the distance, and he had to flee, fearful of being surprised in his ridiculous immobility before the closed door. In the corridor, he crossed paths with one of the maids, who had come to the summons disguised as a Tyrolean flower girl. Walking with his head down, not knowing where he was going, he suddenly found himself on the promenade deck. He clenched his fists, muttering angry words. How that woman had mocked him! How shameful! Tired of pacing the lonely deck, he sat down on a bench away from the light, gazing over the railing at the ocean. The black calm The night calmed him down and put his turbulent thoughts in order. He suddenly saw with complete clarity Mrs. Power’s behavior, which had seemed inexplicable to him until then… She wasn’t lying when she praised the coldness of his character, which she called “practical,” giving the word the same solemnity as if it were a title of nobility. She spoke the truth when she repeated with a smile of pride that there was nothing poetic about it. He was a man, a true businessman, one of those who only grant a few minutes of their existence to the impulses of affection; one of those who treat the needs of the flesh as vulgar and quick hygiene procedures and only remember love when abstention torments them, devoting half an hour to it between two financial matters, without memories or nostalgia. Why had that woman come to him, disturbing his calm?… It was undeniable that Maud loved Mr. Power in her own way, as one loves an inferior and beautiful being, with the double pride of being admired and exercising the dominion of superiority. The monotonous existence on board, conducive to temptation, the abstentions of a long voyage devoted entirely to business, the influence of the warm atmosphere, the aphrodisiac breath of the ocean, had both broken and softened that woman’s icy serenity. She anxiously kept count of the days still remaining at sea, as one counts the hours until the longed-for relief arrives in a besieged square without provisions . And when her will wavered under the influences of an environment more powerful than her energy, she had set her eyes on Fernando, because he was the closest, the most “distinguished,” the man who, of all those on the ship, bore a certain resemblance to the distant and seductive image of Mr. Power. This manly lady had taken to him the way men take to a woman on the street in a moment of need. And once her intoxication had passed, she furiously repelled him by his insistent pursuits, puzzled by his persistence, like a gentleman who finds himself pursued by a half-hour companion, as if the fortuitous and mercenary encounter could confer rights. Ah, miserable man! With what cruel and painful laughter Teri would laugh if she could know of this grotesque adventure! The man in whom her loving eyes believed they saw every perfection, treated like an object for rent!… And the possibility of this desperate mockery pained him more than the thought of Teri wailing and weeping. With a vigorous reaction of his pride, Fernando shook off this despondency. He had to be a man and accept events without exaggerating their importance. A simple travel adventure, which was going to be ignored; Maud would ensure that what had happened remained a mystery. He had served her well—Ojeda laughed bitterly at the thought of this— they had been happy for a few hours, and then they parted like strangers, without memories or melancholy: just as if they had met at dusk on a Parisian boulevard to spend half an hour together in a hotel and never meet again. Her detachment was undoubtedly due to a belated remorse that had come with satiety… Not remorse: simple prudence; She wanted to remain isolated in the days remaining until she reached the next port. Her husband would be boarding the ship, and she wanted to go out to meet him without fear of the malicious smiles of the passengers. He had been the one chosen for the remedy in moments of turmoil and haste… and what rights did this give her? It could have been the handsome Mr. Lowe or Isidro Maltrana. Ojeda, for his part, also had a great love, and it was better for him to forget the same as Maud… It hurt his pride as a man to see himself treated like this, but it was the pain of a surgical operation that removes the evil… Live! He got up from the bench, approaching the windows of the salons. Some women had gathered on the railings of a gallery that connected the music room to the dining room, watching the couples who They were dancing below. They were ladies who hadn’t chosen to dress up for the party; maids serving the wealthy passengers, simple onboard servants taking advantage of the steward’s absence to take a look around. Ojeda saw a woman dressed in dark clothes, simply, detach herself from this group and cross the winter garden, coming out onto the deck. “Ah, Mrs. Eichelberger!” Fernando celebrated his reunion with Mina, as if she had brought him happiness. He clasped the right hand the German woman offered him with both hands , and she, somewhat moved by his effusive words, turned her eyes around, surprised to see him alone, believing that the slender silhouette and the lit cigarette of the American woman would suddenly appear. She stammered, as if, noticing his embarrassment, she felt a certain shame. She excused herself for her plain appearance, when all the women on the ship had put out their best dresses that night. She wasn’t one to dance, and she didn’t like to remain alone in the parlor while her husband played in the smoking room. Out of curiosity and boredom, after putting Karl to bed, she had leaned out onto the veranda to watch the dance. She lived so isolated! And with a twitch of her hand, hidden between Ferdinand’s, she thanked him for his kindness in taking care of her. Then her face brightened with a pale smile that was meant to be malicious. She was astonished again to see him alone. She had almost decided to renounce his friendship. But Ferdinand interrupted her: “It’s all over: I swear… Over forever! I have no other friend on the ship but you.” And he said it with all his heart, happy to be at Mina’s side, satisfied with the tenderness with which she regarded him. Excellent companion! Fernando, who believed it necessary to be in contact with a woman, regretted not having remained at Mina’s side from the first moment of their friendship. The latter didn’t bother him, praising her husband; she was sweet and seemed to admire him. Quite unlike the other, who, even in her most effusive moments, maintained the poise of a haughty lady descending to speak with her servant. Besides, he was thinking of Teri, of her firm resolve not to debase the nobility of her memories with another “crime,” for that was what she vehemently described her recent adventure as. With Mina, he faced no danger: the poor woman was disillusioned. The failure of her existence made her flee from all passionate complications, preferring a vegetative and humble life. Besides, she seemed ill… She was the desired companion for the monotony of the sea: a feminine friendship of complete rest; and when they parted, they would say goodbye! Each taking with them the melancholic memory of something selfless and pure. They had gone to lean on the port side, gazing at the moon. “Every night it rises earlier and grows larger,” Mina said. How enormous and how white!… In Europe, we never see it like this. Rising out from the ocean, the star was an improbable dome in its breadth. It brought to mind the fabulous egg of the Roc bird in oriental tales , as grand as a palace. Its light silvered the outline of the clouds and spread a vast, unsettled path over the sea, a triangular path from the horizon to the sides of the ship, making the waters boil with a pale ebullition that repelled all idea of heat. Mina contemplated the restlessness of this unreal path cutting through the Atlantic darkness, ever wider, ever brighter, as the star rose on the horizon. “I feel like marching along it,” she said in a low voice, moved by the majesty of the night. “I’d like to jump off the ship and run… run along that silver street to I don’t know where. ” “Alone?” Fernando asked reproachfully. “No; you would come with me… Better with you.” She looked at him for a moment, and then her eyes turned back to the sea. They were moist, as if this contemplation had gathered the tears in her eyes. corneas. They shone with a pearly light similar to that of the moon. Suddenly , her lips began to murmur something like a prayer. They were verses, German verses of extreme sentimentality, which Ojeda understood vaguely, divining the mystery of some stanzas by the meaning of others, better understood. The naive poetry of the lieder passed through Mina’s mouth with the sweetness of a humble brook, which seems to tremble, afraid that its murmurs might be too loud and its tremors might awaken the motionless vegetation that covers it. The two had joined together, shoulder to shoulder, as if intimidated by the religious atmosphere of the night and the fluttering of the poetry that stirred around them… Ojeda experienced a sensation of rest beside this unhappy woman; an impression of peace and sweet awe, equal to that sought by the ancient libertines, fleeing the disappointments of life to rest like hermits among humble people. “And you… you who are a poet…” she said, interrupting his recitation. “Tell me something of yours… It must be very beautiful. ” Fernando excused himself. His verses were in Spanish, and she couldn’t understand them… But as if feeling the need to scatter into the night something that throbbed in his brain, fusing the inner mystery with the mystery of the environment, he began to recite French verses with priestly slowness, followed by the avid gaze of Mina, who made an effort not to miss the meaning of a single word. Sometimes the reciter would stop, sensing her incomprehension, and repeat the verses, explaining them. The ancient artist sighed in raptures of admiration. This music made her tremble, in which the charm of the verses and the voice that recited them with rhythmic melody entered equally. “Victor Hugo is my god…” Ojeda suddenly said, interrupting his poetic murmur, as if he could no longer contain this declaration. “And Beethoven is too.” She looked at him with pleading eyes, imploring a word that could unite them with a new affection. “And Wagner?” Fernando hesitated. He didn’t have the Olympian serenity, the simple majesty of the divine. Rather, he seemed like a miracle worker with a tormented soul, a prodigious magician; but in him, the poetry of the one and the music of the other were confused. He was the rebel archangel, beautiful as fire, who, coming from below, reconquered his divinity. “Yes; he is also my god,” she said after a brief pause. And he resumed his poetic murmur, gazing at the restless silver plain, feeling Mina’s gentle heaviness on his shoulder, as she seemed anxious for support. The deck was deserted. All the passengers remained in the ballroom or the smoking room. From time to time, laughter, shouts, and running around the doors and stairs. Couples were abandoning the dance for a moment to breathe on deck. The young men fanned their flushed faces with a tissue, peeling back their shirt collars, softened by sweat, from their flesh. The women breathed anxiously, bringing their hands to their necklines, but immediately fled this freshness to run to the salon’s furnace, drawn by a new waltz. Turning their backs to the light, Mina and Fernando immersed themselves in contemplation of the night, their gazes not seeking each other, content with the touch of their shoulders, which seemed to unify their thoughts and desires in a single vibration . The music of the dance reached their ears; a divine music: vulgar dances in fashion, two-steps, or tangos, which, influenced by the atmosphere, sounded in that hour of illusions like symphonies of infinite idealism. They felt the sweet disturbance of intoxication: an intoxication of moonlight, of serene night, of sentimental poetry. Ojeda, colder than his companion, perceived within himself an ironic tickling, a desire to laugh at himself, at this tenderness without a defined cause that took hold of him. To look at the moon and utter verses like a student next to a poor woman who was a mother and listening to a vulgar little tune to whose sounds the most frivolous beings of that Noah’s Ark danced!… How he would laugh if with prodigious unfolding he could contemplate himself from afar!… But the inexplicable emotion was stronger than his mocking rebellion, and forced him to remain motionless, silent, without fleeing from that body that vibrated with his touch. Why laugh at this moment, if it was one of happiness and provided him with sweet oblivion?… When he turned his eyes toward Mina, he thought he had found a new woman. Perhaps poetry had beautified her by touching her with the wing of its rhymes; perhaps it was the night that transformed her, enlarging her eyes with a lunar glow, filling the angularities of her gaunt face with mother-of-pearl, replacing its greenish, sickly color with a luminous pallor. The eyes of a humble animal, grateful for the caress, which she fixed on his eyes when she felt herself contemplated!… The blushing confusion with which she turned her head, fearing to persist in a look that might betray her!… She convinced herself that he had not seen this woman until then, had not understood her, limiting himself in their conversations to feeling pity for her misfortunes, as if her life were exhausted and she were like a fallen tree, incapable of blossoming… Suddenly, they found themselves walking arm in arm, without speaking, without looking at each other, but knowing by mutual divination that the person of one occupied the other’s thoughts entirely… No one on deck. Their slow footsteps resounded as if in an abandoned cloister. As they turned around the bow, between the saloon and the forward balcony, where the light was less bright and no one could see them from a distance, Fernando drew her to him, abandoned his arm to wrap a rough tug around her waist, and impulsively kissed her, at random, on the cheek, on the nose, wherever his lips could rest. The German woman moaned with surprise, astonishment, almost fear, like someone who suddenly sees something improbable come true, something they have dreamed of many times without hope. She remained rigid in his arm, offered not the slightest resistance, and with a sigh like a fainting girl, she let her head fall on his shoulder. She was crying. Fernando saw the gasps in her chest and felt the touch of a tear on her neck . He was beginning to regret his brutality. Poor Mina!… But she, protesting this pity, turned her head on his shoulder until it rested against the nape of his neck. In this position, her eyes brimming with tears, yet smiling at the same time, she rose to meet his mouth, returning his caresses with a long, interminable kiss. It was not the face-to-face kiss he had tasted from other women and called the “Latin kiss.” Nor was it the arrogant, up-and-down caress he had known in Maud’s cabin, a tamer’s kiss, selfish and domineering, pressing his head between her clenched hands to keep him in loving submission. It was the sighing kiss of the sentimental German woman strolling among the linden trees at dusk, leaning on the arm of a student and with a bouquet of blue flowers on her breast; A kiss from bottom to top, the pleading caress of a sweet female in which love presents itself accompanied by humility, and who, before kissing, lowers her head as a sign of servitude on her master’s shoulder. Ojeda felt a certain remorse at this crying. Why was she crying? And she, as if ashamed of her emotion, uttered stammering excuses. She didn’t know why she was crying… But she was so happy, so happy! A sound of footsteps instantly separated their mouths, and linking arms, they continued their walk with affected indifference. It was useless alarm: it was a cabin boy descending a nearby ladder. “Let’s return to the kissing corner,” he said impatiently. The “kissing corner” was the part of the bow that connected the two paths of the deck with its curve. And upon returning to this refuge, it was she who, without waiting for Fernando’s advances, rested her head on his shoulder, raising her face in search of his mouth. She interspersed tremulous words between kisses. To see herself in his arms!… One night she had dreamed what was happening to her now. It had been after the first afternoon they had spoken at the piano. And she had emerged from her reverie forever moved, with the conviction that it would never come true, but seeing him as a man unlike any other on the ship, feeling a turmoil in her chest and eyes, a trembling in her legs, a distant music in her ears every time Fernando approached to speak to her… Then, how sad it was to see him with that elegant, haughty lady, who seemed to mock her with his eyes!… The reverie would never come true; an impossible illusion, like so many others in her poor existence… And when she had lost all hope, it was him, him! who advanced into the night with words of poetry, like a magnificent and merciful prince, and held her in his arms and sought her mouth, making her tremble like a servant of love. What was there in her person to deserve this happiness, poor, ugly, poorly dressed, among so many beautiful and happy women, and also dragging her miserable past like a chain?… “I love you!” said Fernando, inflamed by such humility. And he accompanied his kisses with an advance of his bold hands on that submissive body that seemed to surrender itself. But to great astonishment, the German woman wriggled before his bold caresses, detaching herself from his arms with a nervous strength that nothing in her sickly body suggested. Hidden muscles suddenly seemed to emerge, tendons of irresistible expansion in all her limbs. “I don’t want to,” she moaned sadly, as if in the presence of something that destroyed her illusions. “I don’t want that… I will never want to.” Ojeda, faced with the violence of these protests, realized she was speaking the truth. Her body contorted against any caress that strayed beyond the confines of her face, and this vigorous repulsion was so abrupt that he felt himself pushed back, unsteady on his feet, having to struggle to keep from falling. Then, as if repenting of her defense, she threw her arms around his neck and resumed her submissive gesture, resting her head on his shoulder, moaning with the abandon of a sick child. “He would hurt me… Never! To love each other like this, that’s what I want. To be like this… always together… always!… We will be… what’s the word in Spanish? I’ve heard it many times… We will be…” And after long hesitations and furrowing her eyebrows with thoughtful effort, she found the word. “We will be… lovers. That’s it: lovers, both of us. The mouth… the mouth only … And the soul too… my boyfriend.” And as she repeated the forgotten word with relish, she smiled like an abandoned garden beneath the first sun of the arriving spring. Fernando, overshadowed by this refusal, spoke and spoke, holding the former artist’s hands in his own, eager to immobilize her, to tame her resistance, his eyes fixed on her pupils, as if he intended to overcome her with the power of suggestion. His affair with Maud had shattered all the sanity he’d felt when he’d boarded the ship. His nerves still held the memory of recent vibrations; his flesh, barely asleep, shuddered at the touch of another woman. That monastic calm that had reigned on the ocean liner during the first week of the voyage no longer existed for him. He knew what love was like between the white walls of a cabin, and he wanted to continue, with whomever it might be, his passionate encounters in one of these wooden boxes, the buzzing of the engine sounding at his feet, listening to the lazy lapping of the waves by the skylight . This woman came to him, beautified by the night, humble and submissive like a war slave… so much the better! And as if he were her master, he urged her on with commands, sometimes pleading, sometimes imperative: “Come… come.” He spoke of the beauty of her “cabin” on the same floor as the luxury cabins, of its high ceiling, of its spaciousness, with its deep bed and wide divan. He intended to dazzle his poor friend, who was ensconced in the deepest and darkest chambers, near the waterline, with these comforts of the floating hovel. “Come… come.” They could talk there without fear of being caught; exchange kisses peacefully. He would show her interesting books; they would talk about his poets, the great artists. Mina listened to him with adoring eyes and a pale smile of fearful disbelief. “No… cabin, no.” To avoid following the course of his tremulous requests, she interrupted, requesting that he tell her in Spanish the equivalents of certain words. She longed to speak his language . “No, darling,” she sighed, responding to his pleas. “No, my boyfriend… Cabin, no… Mouth… just mouth.” And as she felt the bold advance of ferreting hands on her body, a push was enough to free herself from the confinement in Ojeda’s arms. The sound of footsteps and voices spread across the deck. The dance had just ended, and people were coming up to the promenade, eager for fresh air. How long had the two of them been there? Mina wanted to leave. She and her son occupied a small cabin on the deepest deck of the central castle. In another adjacent room lived Maestro Eichelberger, who didn’t leave until close to dawn. She went to sleep with her memories, to dream of Fernando. She took the happiness of the best night of her life to her deepest refuge. She swore… “And now, goodbye.” Still, taking advantage of the absence of the crowd, which, having dispersed across the deck, hadn’t reached them, they kissed one last time with a long kiss, which the German woman prolonged by closing her eyes, abandoning herself as if she were about to die. Then she jumped out of the window, stopping a short distance away. She smiled maliciously; she raised one hand with her index finger raised, like a teacher making her final recommendation. “Boyfriends, yes… Mouth, yes… Cabin, no!… Cabin, bad!” And after these stammerings in Spanish, which revealed a comical fear of the “cabin,” she fled hastily, turning her head twice to look at Fernando before disappearing. The latter paced around the deck for some time. At first, he felt pleased with his fate. It was a pity Maud wasn’t there to learn how little her disdain impressed him! He saw the American woman far away in his memories, almost without corporeality, like an indecisive image… But after a while he began to experience a feeling of unease. Her recent behavior bothered him as much as remorse. “Very well, Don Fernando,” he said to himself with ironic reproach. You didn’t have enough with the ridiculous disappointment of the other woman; such a grotesque adventure hasn’t served as a lesson to you , and on the same day you set out to disturb the peace of a poor woman who accepts your advances with the sentimentality of a romance and takes love as if she were fifteen years old . What a pleasure to complicate one’s life!… What good sense in a man who was on his way to conquer wealth!… And to get involved in such adventures, he had abandoned everything he had in Europe!… “Don Fernando, you’re a child; that mustache you wears on your face usurps you… You’ll end up making everyone on board laugh at you…” Despite these mental recriminations, he didn’t become sad. The protest stirred in his brain, ashamed and angry; but the rest of his body seemed satisfied, with a reveling of memories and a shudder of hope… Worse was nothingness: spending the days eating or dozing in the armchair with a book on his knees. Entering his cabin after midnight, his eyes fell upon the image of Teri standing on the dressing table, enclosed in a gilt frame. Poor Teri! For the first time all day, he thought of her, only her, without comparing her memory with the real images of other women. This afterthought was accompanied by remorse and fear. What would Teri say if she could see him! To avoid… This possibility, as if he feared that the portrait’s eyes might acquire visual sense, he tried to turn it so it faced the wall. Just like Maud with Mr. Power! But a superstitious scruple restrained him. She was far away… Who knows what might happen to him as a reflex shock from this impious act! He made his preparations for bed, avoiding the portrait. As he lay down on the bed and remained in the shadows, his fears and remorse gradually lightened, until they were nothing more than faint clouds that sleep swept away with the broom of oblivion. In the incoherence of his drowsy thoughts, he saw the bishop’s relatives inciting him to enter the ball. “Monsignor: the sea… is the sea.” He saw Maltrana apostrophizing the Ocean, the great tempter: “Galeoto with seaweed mustaches… Celestina with green wrinkles.” And like him, she repeated: “Let’s be miserable. We’ll purify ourselves when we get ashore.” A sweet cynicism accompanied her last thoughts. The German woman… why refuse her? The other woman was far away; she wouldn’t know anything. The journey was monotonous, and they had to take advantage of opportunities to brighten it up. Once on land, she would regain her sanity… They had to believe in Maltrana’s philosophy . The big question was… pass the time! And Fernando fell asleep. The next morning, he met Mina on the boat deck. She had left her son in the gymnasium and went to Ojeda, blushing and hunched, hesitating in her greeting, perhaps fearing a change of character, a repentance, after the previous night. But seeing him smiling, caressing her with his eyes, clasping her hand with tender effusion, the German woman’s face expanded, as if the sap in her body were thawing with the ardor of a new youth. Driven by this joy, she wanted to boldly express her gratitude. They were half hidden by the cylinder of an air vent. Mina, after glancing from side to side, advanced on Fernando with open arms. “Boyfriend… my boyfriend.” It was a quick but vehement kiss, with a forceful force, unlike the prolonged and languid ones of the previous night. Then, as if this morning greeting had satiated them for the moment, they sought the shade of an awning and, seated in two armchairs, contemplated the ocean in sweet stillness, gazing at each other wordlessly. Fernando examined her in the sunlight, reveling with strange cruelty in his growing disenchantment. The harsh light brought out every detail of a faded beauty: her face, with its faint wrinkles in the prime of youth, the ring of yellowish pallor around her eyes, the anemic pink of her lips, the greenish tinge of her complexion, which the extraordinary care taken with her toilet that morning had not been able to erase. Then there was the child who was due to appear at any moment; her husband, who was in his cabin snoring away his evening beer; the shabby little dress, which she had tried to enhance with cheap lace and a bouquet of artificial violets fixed to her waist… All this gave her new love a certain ridiculous air. Surely if Mrs. Power passed before them, she would be unable to maintain her silent haughtiness and would smile ironically… But an optimistic selfishness protested within her against such scruples. “She may be grotesque, so what?… It amuses me, and that’s enough. Love is always love, however ridiculous it may seem, and this poor woman loves me.” For her, I am the illusion, the memory of a world she lived in and to which she can’t return… What matters is moving things forward: getting something positive out of it. And with devious cunning, she steered the conversation in her desired direction. She spoke with her eyes lost in the distance, wanting to prolong the enchantment of the previous night. She avoided looking at him, so as not to suffer a shyness that cut short her words. She spoke as if she were alone, externalizing her thoughts in a monologue. “Sweet night! Fantastic life of marvelous reveries developed in the shadows!” She had seen herself living with him in one of those American countries toward which the ship was sailing. Eichelberger no longer existed; he had died, or perhaps he was back in Europe. And the two existed united as husband and wife, in the freedom of a new people, having their son with them. Fernando and Karl were the only two beings in this world she could love. To live forever with the adored man and his son, what immense happiness! But it was nothing more than a daydream; an illusion of the ocean voyage. When they left the confines of the Goethe, each would go their separate ways; and even if by a twist of fate they ended up living together, Fernando would not tolerate the capricious and sickly presence of that child who was not his. And she could not exist without Karl. Ojeda accepted these daydreams with a kind smile, while inside her the irritation of protest began to throb. Why give a bourgeois home atmosphere to a love that was still in its infancy?… For that Valkyrie of poetic ecstasies and nostalgic eyes, passion took on a vulgar seriousness, molding itself according to the holy principles of family and good order. If she continued in her daydreams, he was going to propose love to her in slippers by the fire, she with her hair messily combed and her dressing gown, meticulously cutting toast, watching the coffeepot boil; he with an enormous pipe, reading newspapers and stroking the scruffy head of a child who wasn’t his… Thank you very much! But he was careful to hide these inner impressions, directing the amorous dialogue toward his desires. To live together! He had also dreamed of this happiness the night before… For him, possession was a sacred commitment, which bound him forever to a woman, adding the tenderness of gratitude to the selflessness of love. The day she, of her own free will, decided to make him happy with something more than her kisses… Mina, guessing the meaning of this phraseology, blushed, drawing back with instinctive caution. No; she would always say no. In other times, perhaps; when she was young and beautiful; when she was certain she could bring happiness and pride with the alms of her body. But now!… She realized her ruin. She was a shadow of the past, and if she were to give in in a moment of kindness, she would regret it later, seeing in Ojeda a look of disappointment, just as if she had just been deceived. “No, my boyfriend, no.” The important thing was to love each other. The other would necessarily happen when they lived together, but it was of no more value than any of the vile functions that sadden our existence. Who knows if it would result in the vanishing of the illusion!… “Let’s live like this… Perhaps the longer what you desire is delayed, the longer our love will last.” Suddenly, their conversation had a witness. It was Karl, who had left the gymnasium and was standing between the two, looking from one to the other without understanding what they were talking about. In his attentive immobility, one could notice the expression of an old child, the furrowing of the brows of an elderly person who is suspicious and reflecting. His prominent, stubborn forehead seemed to swell and throb. He allowed himself to be caressed by Fernando’s distracted hand, but suddenly he would flee from him and throw himself headfirst into his mother’s lap, remaining with his arms outstretched, as if he intended to be a protective shield for her. He thought he could smell danger, with that mysterious instinct of simple beings who see in the air things and threats completely hidden from people of reason; the sense that makes a dog howl in a house where disaster is brewing; the impulse that guides the fluttering of certain birds over the house at whose door death knocks. Mina stroked her son’s neck, and he welcomed her loving protection with a muffled murmur, like a domestic beast that feels its fear dissipate. But the mother’s thoughts were increasingly distant from Karl. He was all for Ojeda, who brought her back to her past. Her artist’s dreams, her enthusiasm for aesthetic emotion, her veneration for genius, had suddenly reappeared. In her love, there was much gratitude for that man, thanks to whom her former enthusiasm as a singer had resurfaced from the ruins and pessimism of decadence . She still believed it possible to continue her past life; less brilliant than in other times, remaining in the background , but with equal satisfactions. The deception of her marriage to a mediocre artist was going to be nothing more than a shadowy parenthesis. Perhaps her dreamed-of destiny would be fulfilled, and she would end up as the companion of a great man. She would learn Spanish to savor the works of Ojeda, who was undoubtedly a genius. Her love told her so. When they lived together, she would tiptoe into his studio, remaining behind him in loving contemplation, like a slave. And each time he finished a verse… a kiss; with each finished stanza, six, twelve… a shower; And when he finished the work, he would read it with his golden voice, and she would listen, kneeling at his feet, adoring him like a god: “Oh, my fiancé, my Tannhauser!… Colossal poet!” Thus they spent the morning, fantasizing about the future, unable to exchange any caresses other than a few handshakes over Karl, buried between his mother’s knees. The child only abandoned his sulkiness when Mina spoke to him in German about the afternoon celebration. The Olympian Games were beginning, with which children and adults would celebrate the crossing of the line for four days. And these Olympic games consisted of rapidly swallowing cakes, filling a vat of potatoes, threading needles, beating pillows, running inside sacks, jumping over hurdles, and other feats that were repeated on every voyage as they crossed the equator with the precision of religious rites. In the afternoon, it was to be the children’s games. Ojeda made a tired gesture : he preferred to stay in his cabin. But Mina looked at him pleadingly. “My boyfriend… come.” She had to attend to take care of Karl. If only Fernando were nearby!… They wouldn’t speak, they wouldn’t look at each other; but to feel him next to her! To know that she could see him with just a turn of her head!… And that afternoon Fernando went to the terrace of the smoking room, adorned with flags and garlands. The captain, assisted by the “gentlemen of the commission,” directed the games. Maltrana, added to it as his friend’s representative, had ended up usurping first place, shouting and moving more than all the others combined. He lined up the children and, followed by a sailor with a basket, distributed stewed apples among them. Attention! Whoever ate it first won the prize. One… two… three! And the crowd laughed at the grotesque contortions of the little ones, opening their jaws as wide as possible to swallow as much of the sugary pulp as possible, their ears flapping hurriedly as they chewed. A burst of applause greeted the winner, while some mothers ran to their children, bent over in a bow, to pat them on the back of their necks, thus helping them swallow the food they were choking on. Then, boys and girls, spoon in hand, ran from one end of the terrace to the other to collect eggs deposited on the ground without breaking them. The winner was the one who returned to the starting point the fastest. Then they raced to collect potatoes scattered on the deck, and whoever filled their tank the fastest beat the others. The little ones retreated to make room for the grown-ups. A line of ladies occupied a bench, each waiting with a box of matches in her hand. Another line of men came running toward them, cigarettes in their mouths and hands behind their backs. The matches crackled as they were lit, and a round of applause accompanied the first person to return to their seat with a lit cigarette. Then the ladies held a needle in their hands, and the players ran to kneel at their feet, struggling with anxious hesitation to thread the thread they carried in their hands. right hand. The audience began to murmur against the monotony of these games. “The pig!” many shouted. “Let them paint the pig’s eye!” Maltrana, as if summing up the entire commission in his person, bowed with the kind air of a good prince. “Since the honorable Senate demanded it so insistently!” The first officer asked for a piece of chalk and, with the swiftness of a long- held habit, drew the outline of a pot-bellied pig on the ground. The ladies had to advance blindfolded, gropingly tracing the missing eye on the animal’s head. The “worthy representative of the commission,” the title Maltrana gave himself , quickly took charge of blindfolding the players and directing their steps, disputing this honor with certain intruders who were trying to deprive him of his position, divining his advantages. With a rolled napkin, he would cover the ladies’ eyes, indicate the number of steps separating them from the drawing, and then, taking them by the arm, spin them around to disorient them. The players advanced hesitantly, and when they bent down, tracing a cross on the ground, which was equivalent to the eye, a roar of laughter and ironic applause greeted their work. The eye remained a long way from its natural place, or, at most, fell grotesquely onto the belly or tail. Isidro remained imperturbable, fondling beautiful arms with a paternal air, guiding the perfumed busts with protective gentleness. Catching Fernando’s gaze fixed maliciously on him, he answered with a slight wink. “Yes; the position wasn’t bad… Purely platonic, but it’s something.” Ojeda remained all afternoon near Mina, watching these games that seemed to return them all to the joys of their early years. She looked at him out of the corner of one eye, grateful for his presence as a token of love. Mrs. Power, appearing briefly in this part of the ship, quickly guessed the hidden relationship between the two, despite her affected indifference. This discovery seemed to restore her peace of mind. Her old friend would no longer bother her. And she even dared to smile at him ironically, as if congratulating him on his new conquest. Then she disappeared, following the Lowes and Munster, who invited her to continue on the bridge. At nightfall, Ojeda and Mina met her on the rear quarterdeck, above the boat deck. She wanted to watch the sunset with him . From the equator to the coast of Brazil, they were the most beautiful sunsets of the entire voyage. The clear sky had the violet color of twilight. A few white clouds with whimsical outlines appeared scattered along the water . The sun had set behind them, coloring the horizon a blinding red that was gradually fading. Against this golden background, the clouds were silhouetted, taking on the outlines of human forms. Mina was enraptured by their contemplation. They were large angels, white angels marching along a blue path through a golden landscape. One carried a small casket in his hands, another a cup, another a canvas. The reflections of the sun on their peaks had the brilliance of long blond hair ; the loose wisps of vapor were ripples of white tunics stirred by the solemn gait. And Ojeda, inspired by this interpretation and by the strange shapes engendered by the twilight, likewise saw an angelic theory on a golden background, similar to the processions of saints in Byzantine mosaics. The light was fading, and with the rising shadow and the dissolution of the vapors diluted in the twilight, the celestial figures gradually faded . Mina, overcome by the emotion of the sunset, felt her chest tight. Tears filled her eyes. “Angels, farewell!” They had appeared only for a few moments, like the visions of happiness that tear through the gray canvas of our lives. They were leaving, lost in infinity, just as she would disappear, perhaps very soon, swallowed by the shadows. She leaned her chest against Fernando’s, her head on his shoulder, indifferent to the possibility that anyone might surprise them, believing herself alone with him in the middle of the ocean. She sighed tearfully, as if the coming night might bring her misfortune… Ojeda grew impatient. The sunset was very beautiful, but he couldn’t understand such sensitivity. She continued sighing. “Oh, sweetheart! Always!… To live forever together; beyond life; beyond death!…” She remembered the last embrace of the knight Tristan and the beautiful Queen Iseo; an eternal, infinite caress, which the great magician had not wrapped in the mystery of his thrilling music. After drinking the love potion, their enchantment didn’t last for years, didn’t last an entire lifetime: its power extended beyond death… And when, after the tragic end, they lay forever, each in their own stone tomb, in the shadow of a monastery, a bramble bush born from Tristan’s remains grew in a single night, covering itself with flowers and birds, and encompassed both graves with a tenacious embrace. It thickened and twisted like a black, gnarled serpent, shattering the marble, and finally its thrust drew the two lovers together, causing their corpses, separated by the twilights of men, to consume each other in an eternal embrace that proclaimed the majesty of love, stronger than life… stronger than death… A child’s cry interrupted Mina. It was Karl, searching for her on the decks of the boats. The bugle had long since called to the mess hall, without their hearing it. Maestro Eichelberger, tired of waiting, had sat down at the table, sending the boy searching for his mother on all decks. Mina fled. “See you tonight… boyfriend.” But the evening interview was less cordial. Ojeda seemed sullen at Mina’s resistance. In vain, taking advantage of the lack of passersby after the concert, the two of them walked toward “the kissing corner.” In vain, she remained with her head on his shoulder, clasped to his mouth in a prolonged, interminable caress, her eyes half-closed. He wanted something more. He thought this situation was ridiculous. He found no flavor in amorous transports that had already lost their novelty. They parted coldly: she with her head bowed, sad, closing her eyes, trying not to cry; he sulked, sardonic, like a man who is indignant at seeing his hopes dashed. Before going to sleep, Ojeda vented all his anger. “If that fool thinks I’m going to waste my time around her like a romantic lover!” “Mouth, yes; cabin, no…” Let her go to hell if she wants nothing more than that!… No one on board makes fun of me anymore… I’ve caused enough laughter. The next morning they met again on the boat deck, but their conversation was no better. Mina wept. What Fernando wanted was impossible. Why insist on breaking the spell of their relationship with something brutal that would inevitably lead to a separation? In the past, perhaps!… when she was beautiful. But now she realized how lamentable the impression could be on the man who possessed her. Disillusionment; dull anger at seeing that reality was very different from the illusion; surely forgetfulness. “No, my fiancé… no.” After lunch, Fernando didn’t want to look for her. In vain, Mina passed repeatedly in front of a window in the winter garden where Ojeda and his friend were drinking coffee. He showed a visible desire to ignore the passersby. Then, when the games on the terrace of the smoking-room were resumed, the German woman found him a short distance away; but he pretended not to see her, averting his eyes whenever hers crossed his. “My God! And was it possible that their love would end like this?” He had to make an effort not to cry… And all because of her refusals, because of his childish stubbornness, who longed for her possession as if he were asking for a toy!… A cold breeze blew from the stern side that made the ladies shudder, lightly dressed. Mina coughed, bringing her hands to her almost bare arms and chest, with no other shelter than the subtle openwork of a white blouse. The sudden coolness made her imitate some ladies who were going to their cabins in search of a coat. When she was downstairs, in the corridor, lit in the middle of the afternoon like an underground passageway, she experienced the unease of someone who thinks they can hear invisible footsteps behind them. There was no one in this deep alley of the ship, shrouded at all hours in dense darkness. It was obvious that all the cabins were deserted. Even the servants must be walking around upstairs watching the games. If Fernando were to suddenly appear! This thought made her tremble with shudders of fear and sweet unease, certain that if he showed up, his fall was inevitable, convinced in advance of the weakness of his resistance. And he appeared, without her, warned by her premonition, showing much surprise. She turned the key in her hand, opening the door of her cabin, when she saw him advance with quiet steps, made even quieter by the tapestry in the corridor. Mina stopped, putting a hand to her chest, shaken by fear and surprise. But this impression lasted little. She remembered that minutes before she had given up on Fernando’s love. To not speak to him again!… To see his eyes fixed on another!… “My fiancé!… my poet!” She had fallen into his arms, clung to his lips in a long, noisy, aspirational kiss. Then she abruptly pulled away, as if possessed by fear again. “Go away… They could see us.” She had entered her cabin, stood on the other side of the door, but she kept it half-closed to see him for a moment longer, caressing him with her smile and her eyes. When she tried to close it, she couldn’t. One of Fernando’s knees, one of his elbows, rested on the wood, pushing it against Mina, who pressed her entire body against it. And in this situation, as he struggled to open the door and she to close it, the two spoke in low, trembling voices, pierced by feverish tremors, as if they were plotting something shameful in the dark mystery of this water-level passageway. He begged… “Let me in… let me in.” With the cowardly lie of desire, he placed a hand over his heart, swearing the nobility of his intentions. She could rest easy; he wasn’t going to do anything against her will: whatever she wanted and nothing more… He wanted to enter her cabin only to hold her in his arms without fear of being surprised by unwelcome passersby, to kiss her to his heart without the anxiety aroused by approaching footsteps. She had to trust his word. “No… no,” she moaned, struggling to close the door, the pressure of her hands and knees failing to make it open . Ojeda insisted. “Let me in…” He would attempt nothing against her will. He gave his word of honor… And in the confusion of his excited desire, without really knowing what he was saying, without realizing the grotesqueness of his oaths, he sought new witnesses, new guarantors… He promised to respect her for what she loved most in the world, for everything he venerated with the greatest admiration. “I swear… by Wagner! I swear… by Victor Hugo!” The door gave way slowly, as if these words possessed magical power. The increasingly forceful external pressure helped it turn on its hinges, overcoming Mina’s last resistance. And after it had been opened, it slammed shut, leaving the dimness of the corridor in absolute solitude. Poor Wagner!… Poor Victor Hugo!… Chapter 10. After dinner, Ferdinand sat on the promenade, far from the music, which was beginning its evening concert. He was sad, and his sadness was one of deception and regret. That poor woman had spoken the truth: his illusions were going to die at a stroke with the satisfaction of desire. It would have been better to believe her. The whole fantastic edifice raised in the course of their dialogues had been shattered. brought down by a simple encounter with reality. And Ojeda emerged from this adventure with a deeply troubled conscience. What to do now? Poor Mina! She had been the first to notice the sadness and discouragement that had followed his delirious love affair. Upon awakening and calming down, her gesture of resignation, a humble goodbye, had made Fernando understand that she harbored no illusions about the future. Everything was over. And whatever he said to restore the past would be a pious lie, a gallant falsehood to mask his disappointment. For the rest of the afternoon, they had avoided meeting again: she as if repentant of her weakness, he with remorse. After lunch, while Fernando remained alone on the promenade, with the obvious intention of isolating himself from everyone, Mina began the descent to the cabin with little Karl , not to appear again until the following day. That night, alas! It wasn’t going to be a dream… Very well, Mr. Ojeda… You’ve made a poor woman unhappy for a few days, who has committed no other crime than that of loving you a little. On a whim of your desire, you’ve convinced her once again of her physical misery, which she had forgotten… And from all this you’ve drawn remorse and the shame of having to lie, of having to hide. You didn’t want to heed her instructions and you overcame her resistance. Very well!… You’ve behaved like a gentleman. When he was most absorbed in thought, mentally formulating these reproaches, he heard a woman’s voice next to him and saw a figure interposing itself between his half-closed eyes and the stars of the moving sky stretched over the edge of the railing and the edge of the roof. “Always alone, always thinking!… Perhaps you’re composing some beautiful verses.” Fernando sat up, driven more by surprise than by courtesy. It was Nélida who was speaking to him. The first thing he caught a glimpse of was her mouth, a moist pink, with sharp, luminous teeth; the tigress’s mouth admired by Isidro, who smiled at her as if trying to attract him. Disturbed by her unexpected presence, he didn’t know what to say. She smiled at him for this confusion, considering it a tribute to her bizarre beauty, which made even the most serious men lose their composure. “Always alone!” he repeated. “You don’t want to be my friend… I’ve looked at you many times, I’ve spoken to you… and nothing.” She shrank humbly, as if this pretended indifference from Fernando—which he had never noticed—caused her great pain. “And the fact is, I have something to ask of you… I want you to write me something; just two verses: your signature. I want to keep a memento so my friends know that I traveled with Mr. Ojeda, a poet from Spain.” Every girl has something of you: a postcard, a pretty verse on her fan. And I have nothing… Tell me, sir, do you dislike me? While she was speaking, she had sat down in an armchair next to Fernando. At first, she remained upright; but slowly she leaned back, until her legs were horizontal, showing her adorable bulge through her narrow skirt. Ojeda accepted her request with gallant haste, still stammering with surprise. He would write a whole poem, if this would give her pleasure… He felt very honored by her request. Did she have an album? No; she hadn’t thought of acquiring this volume, which many of the young ladies on board proudly displayed . But she would ask the ship’s commissioner for a blank notebook of notes or a simple piece of paper. What interested her was the memory. And at the same time, she naively hinted with her eyes that she had approached him to start a conversation rather than out of any interest the verses might inspire. Fernando continued his excuses. He had never looked at her with indifference. She was the joy of the ship; the most beautiful and interesting woman: he was willing to declare it in verse. But how could he approach her when he saw her? Kidnapped by her adorers, defended by that ferocious escort, which in turn seemed divided and enmity driven by jealousy? “Ah, my adorers!” she exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t speak to me about them; I’m fed up… I warn you, sir, that I detest boys. Selfish, insufferable people! I prefer serious men of a certain age. They know how to love better; they surround a woman with greater attention. ” And she looked boldly at Fernando with provocative eyes, so that he would have no doubts about the person to whom such praise was directed. Ojeda had sat up in his seat to also look at her with daring fixity. A perfume of young flesh, of tempting freshness, seemed to envelop her. It was not the withered sweetness of the German woman nor the ripe fruit splendor of Mrs. Power. Even the image of Teri, which stirred in his memory like remorse, lost some of its beauty when compared to this girl… She was a beautiful animal, exuberant with life, of voluptuous strength, who generously poured out the charms of her springtime. Sometimes she lost the smiling poise of her amorality; she seemed to hesitate with a certain fear, but then she went ahead with greater impetus, guided by her impulses. And this beautiful and unconscious creature, with no other rule of will than instinct, suddenly came toward him on an inexplicable whim. Sweet surprises of existence!… It was impossible to doubt. It was enough to see her eyes fixed on him with an ardor of passion, dilating as if they wanted to absorb his image; her mouth, of insolent freshness and splendorous scarlet, trembling with an amorous yawn, feeling sudden burning sensations that made her tongue dart from its confinement to wander over her lips; Her devouring teeth, which seemed to tremble with the flash of steel ready to sink into flesh… This good fortune could not be explained; but it was indisputable that Nélida, abandoning her troop of adorers, was approaching him, who had made no effort to attract her. And she awakened in Ojeda the sexual pride that lies dormant in the depths of every man; the masculine conceit that considers itself irresistible with just a glance or a word of feminine approval; the blind faith in one’s own worth, which accepts as natural and logical all approaches, no matter how improbable. Ojeda recalled everything he had heard about Nélida’s pranks, excusing them in advance. Perhaps there was much exaggeration in them. The people on board, always unoccupied, lied greatly. And even if everything they said were true… what was so reprehensible about him marching without compromise along the same road that others had frequented before? “The sea was… the sea.” They were isolated from the world, in the midst of solitude, as if life had ended on the rest of the planet, forgotten its laws and concerns. When he returned to land, he would recover the burden of his commitments and old affections. This youthful, spring-like flesh, firm as green pulp, and with a fragrance like that of gardens after dew, was a gift of good fortune to compensate for his disappointment that afternoon. “Let’s live!” He leaned toward her as if he couldn’t hear her clearly, and Nélida, for her part, rested an arm on Fernando’s chair, delighted to feel her skin in casual contact with one of his hands. They spoke without looking at those who passed by them, without noticing their surprised glances and their whispered comments. Some matrons stood dignified and austere, turning their eyes away so as not to see them, but upon reaching the other side of the promenade they would break the news, great news for the people eager for news. “Don’t you know?… Nélida, that crazy woman, has abandoned her escort and is with the Spanish doctor, Maltranita’s friend. Poor man! ” The girls, who admired and feared Nélida as the personification of sin, touched each other with their elbows as they passed by. “A new conquest… Now that serious gentleman has fallen, who does verses… and she doesn’t dance. What a Nélida!… She, with her fine feminine observation, noticed the fluttering of the curious and felt proud of this scandal, which went unnoticed by Ojeda. The only thing he noticed was the increasing familiarity with which Nélida treated him. No real words of love had been exchanged between them . He had only dared to use a few non-committal compliments , but the young woman was already speaking to him as if to a lover. She had absolute confidence in her power over men. She only had to lay her gaze on one of them to consider him hers, without bothering to consult their approval. She was the center of life in that piece of world that floated on the ocean, and the entire male sex had to revolve around her. Whoever she made a gesture to, a slight appeal, had to come and kneel at her feet. And satisfied with this power of seduction that no one dared resist, she continued talking with Fernando and justifying herself for the frivolities of her past, for which he had not asked her any account. She was very unhappy—and as she said this, she accentuated with astonishing ease the tearful gleam in her eyes. She had a fiancé in Berlin who longed to marry her, but Papa’s business dealings had suddenly shattered their happiness, forcing her to embark. What misfortune for her! And she who loved this fiancé with all her soul! Ojeda timidly risked a few remarks. And the other German who passed on board as a relative? And the Belgian and the other friends? But Nélida answered him without the slightest hint of rudeness. These served as a source of amusement. She was young: not yet eighteen . Life is short, and one must make the most of it. Gossip mattered nothing to her; Everything would finally be fixed if she got married, and she was sure she’d find a husband in America as soon as she thought it necessary. Not a local one, because everyone in that country was old-fashioned, jealous, fierce, intractable in their worries. Some gringo, some foreigner tempted by her beauty and Papa’s fortune. And as she said this, she smiled cynically. “This girl is crazy,” Ojeda thought, amazed by the rapidity with which impressions followed one another and the frankness with which she expressed her amorality. “A lovable crazy woman!” As if she suddenly regretted her cynicism, Nélida assumed a melancholy expression. She wasn’t going to speak anymore with those young men who harassed her at all hours. She was bored with their fights and rivalries; they inspired no interest in her. Something was missing in her life, without her realizing what it might be. Perhaps that was why she had committed so many careless acts and pranks on the ship. But that very night she had suddenly guessed what her desire was, what she lacked to feel happy. And as she said this, she enveloped Fernando in a hungry gaze. “How crazy!” he continued thinking, while experiencing the satisfaction of pride. He slightly doubted the sincerity of her words and gestures. Perhaps this approach was nothing more than a whim of her fickle nature. But even so, his vanity was flattered, and he didn’t hesitate for a moment to take advantage of the proximity. Nélida continued explaining the past. Ever since she saw Fernando for the first time, off Tenerife, she hadn’t been able to forget him… She had hoped he would approach, but he always kept to himself, and social routine doesn’t allow women to initiate certain things. Then she had suffered greatly seeing him with certain women—and the daring girl assumed a prudish air as she remembered his love affairs on the ship. She hated the American lady, so uptight and proud that she had never responded to her greetings; He also hated that ugly, shabbily dressed woman who had been with him these last few days. This friendship was undoubtedly for laughs, wasn’t it? A man like him showing off next to a poor mother of a family! And in experiencing such setbacks he had seen Nélida made it clear that Fernando was what she desired. She had often asked her friend Isidro about him, wanting to know details of his previous life. Maltrana could tell her the interest he inspired in all his affairs; how she, who paid no attention to the lives of others—for she had enough to do with her own affairs—had been the first to learn of his intrigue with Mrs. Power, and how she had later protested upon seeing him exhibiting himself next to that poorly dressed green woman. At that moment, Isidro passed by them for the fourth or fifth time, looking, coughing, making efforts to get Ojeda to notice him and give him a reason to participate in the conversation. Nélida called to him. “Come closer, Maltrana. How are you doing?… Tell me if it isn’t true that I’ve asked you many times about this gentleman… tell me if I haven’t complained because your friend regarded me with a certain antipathy and seemed to flee from me. ” Isidro bowed with comical gravity. Exactly. He affirmed it with all kinds of oaths. And as he said this, his eyes went toward Fernando, rejoicing in his astonishment at this unexpected adventure. Ah, a man worthy of envy!… “Nélida!… Nélida!” It was an imperious call from his mother, leaning out of the door of the smoking room. As usual, she let it be repeated many times without paying attention; until finally, grumbling, she left her seat. “Hateful lady!… Surely it’s nothing worthwhile… Some intrigue of those to annoy me because I’m with you. ” “Those” were the adorers, who had been wandering disoriented around the deck since Nélida had fled from their company. She had seen them pass before her repeatedly, talking loudly to attract her attention, then pretending to gaze out at sea while straining their ears to catch a few words in their conversation… She was going to tell these importunate men what they deserved for their tenacious pursuits and for involving Mama in their affairs. What audacity they allowed themselves without any right!… As she began to walk away with a bellicose air, she stopped, retracing her steps. “Wait here for me, Ojeda… Don’t go; I’ll be right back… Just think you’ll upset me if I don’t find you. You know that… stay put!” And she threatened him with a smile, moving the index finger of her right hand. When Fernando and Maltrana were alone, he burst out laughing. “Very well, illustrious friend. You’ve caused quite a scene tonight. Nothing else is talked about on the ship.” The aforementioned man made a gesture of surprise and astonishment. Scandal, why?… A simple conversation, like so many others that took place on deck at the time of the concert. “The girl has a well-earned reputation. And you’re also beginning to enjoy yours, in view of certain recent events. That’s why, seeing you two together suddenly, when until now you hadn’t exchanged two words, everyone assumes a myriad of things. ” And Maltrana imitated the scandalized gestures of the ladies: “Such a serious and distinguished man… always with his books or writing… and suddenly he launches into flirting without any restraint… Even with Nélida, who could almost be his daughter!… Trust men. They’re all the same!” Ojeda excused himself. He hadn’t done anything to approach this girl. It was she who had suddenly sought him out, for no visible reason. “That’s right,” said Isidro. “I predicted a long time ago what was going to happen.” Since you weren’t going to her, she would come to you… And she came: I was sure of it. Fernando made a questioning gesture: “And why?” ” Who knows… First of all, that girl is half crazy: you’ll have noticed. Then, the annoyance of not being sought after, her pride revolted at noticing that she couldn’t get your attention. The most austere matrons consider you handsome, and what’s even better, you are considered the most “distinguished” among the serious men on board. You also have your little bit of mysterious legend. They suppose great Loves in the old world, relationships with duchesses, princesses, or whatever !… In short, with ladies who wear crowns embroidered on their underwear, just like the heroines of certain novels. Imagine what a magnificent and tempting morsel this would be for our beautiful tigress! Fernando laughed at this romantic prestige his friend assumed for him. “Besides, you’ve begun to distinguish yourself in recent days as a rival of Nélida’s, enough to scandalize the good people. Your ‘flirting’ has attracted almost as much attention as that girl’s. She and you are the two most prominent lovers on board. And Nélida can’t tolerate any rivalry… A man who is known for his love affairs and doesn’t deign to set his eyes on her, who considers herself the most beautiful woman on the ship!… She needed nothing more to run to you.” Isidro had closely followed Nélida’s rapid transformation. For two days now, he had been speaking to her about his friend with great interest, asking her about her former life. That night, after dinner, she had quarreled with the young men in her gang in the winter garden, without knowing why. Then, near the smoking room, another argument had broken out, ending in an insulting split. Her admirers had distanced themselves from her, having agreed with each other in a malicious solidarity. They were certain that, finding herself alone, in the isolation the women had left her in due to her previous pranks, she would inevitably return to them, out of boredom and a desire for amusement . But Nélida had taken advantage of this abandonment to go and meet Ojeda, and now the adoring fans, disappointed by their failure, didn’t know what to invent to attract her. “They, no doubt, suggested your recent call to the mother. They must have told her about the scandal Nélida causes by exhibiting herself next to you, and the mulatto woman, who wants to subdue her daughter, without knowing how, has listened to them. ” Maltrana seemed optimistic, congratulating his friend on his good fortune. “It’s done!” That crazy woman could consider her her own. The family shouldn’t inspire her with anxiety; the dangerous thing was the gang, all those young men accustomed to Nélida’s company, some as friends, hoping for something better, others in constant rivalry, but content with the share of the property they now considered in danger. They would be indignant to see a serious man, older than them and who had never participated in their parties, stealing the object of their joy. Watch out, Fernando! You had to look with some caution at this insolent youth, of various nationalities, who had no reason to respect you. “The girl is going to fall on you like a heavy burden. These things are better endured on land ; here you’ll have to put up with her at all hours. You’ve lost your way with women.” The most daring only greet her with a movement of their lips, and lacking the company of her band, she will take refuge in you… Fortunately, she has me, who can lighten this burden for her!… Nélida appeared in the doorway of the smoking room, looking toward the place where the two friends were. Seeing Ojeda motionless in his armchair, she nodded approvingly. Very well. That’s how she wanted him: obedient. As she approached, Isidro left. “See you later… I understand I’m in the way. Good luck!” Nélida resumed her seat, vibrant and nervous, tapping the arm of the armchair with her fan . Ah, her mother! That unpleasant mulatto woman, whom she resembled in no way! Always restricting her freedom, always afraid of what people would say and talking about virtue. And if she were to repeat what she had heard from certain old maids brought from America, who had served her mother since the beginning of her marriage!… The insufferable lady abused her silence by scolding her in the name of morality: an excellent thing for her age, but lacking in significance and utility for Nélida’s green years. She had quarreled with her mother because she wanted to take her immediately to the cabin under the pretext that it was eleven o’clock. Then she insulted her mother in a loud voice. She lowered her former admirers, who were hanging around around two o’clock enjoying her work, and without waiting for a reply, she flew back to Fernando. “If you wish, I’ll leave,” he said. “I don’t want you to suffer any inconvenience on my account.” She was indignant, as if I were proposing something against her honor. She had to stay by her side, now more than ever. It was enough for her to be ordered one thing to make her yearn with an irresistible desire for the exact opposite. Oh, if only she weren’t afraid of disturbing Papa, who was playing poker with some friends! A word from her would be enough for him to intervene with all his authority, leaving her triumphant over her desperate mother… They were going to have to separate in a few moments. “You’ll see how that fool of a brother of mine arrives with orders for me to go to sleep… And I’ll have to obey that lady to avoid causing a scandal. How infuriating! ” Ojeda thought with some anxiety about the complications and setbacks that were going to disrupt his placid existence because of this woman. He would have to win the sympathy of that copper-colored lady, while also battling the malicious intent of the gang… And all of this would yield a problematic outcome, for he wasn’t sure that this capricious and fickle girl would display the same mood from then on. He was about to risk a proposition that would mean something positive, to solicit a promise to meet the next day in a less public place than the promenade deck, when she looked at him imperiously and said in a low voice: “At twelve… I’ll expect you at twelve. Twelve for what?… Where should I be at twelve?… Nélida seemed to grow impatient, while at the same time she smiled with a certain compassion. And everyone affirmed that Ojeda had talent!… At twelve that night; and as for a place to meet, her cabin. Where else could it be? She would be waiting for him with the door ajar. How clumsy men were!… Just like that, with simplicity, without giving any importance to her instructions. When he hesitated before formulating a proposition, searching for words to make it more gentle, she had come out to meet him, rudely opening the way. Fernando nodded gravely, as if it were a matter of honor. Very well; she would arrive punctually at twelve. Nélida gave details of her accommodation. She occupied a small cabin alone; her brother was in another adjacent one; further on, her parents, in a larger one. She would see light in the half-open door. She had only to approach cautiously, scratch the wood… But she stopped in her instructions. “That imbecile is coming!… The order to go to sleep! ” The imbecile was her brother, who introduced himself, greeting Ojeda in a stammering voice, looking at him as if he were an important personage who inspires respect and little sympathy. Nélida, upon standing, stretched with voluptuous expansion. She seemed taller, as if her body expanded from heel to neck with the nervous snaking that ran through it. “Good evening, sir… Delighted with the lovely things you’ve said to me. Don’t forget your poems.” He watched her walk away beside her brother, who trotted, unable to keep up with her long strides. The satisfaction of a new conquest, the anxiety of something unknown that would soon be revealed, the pride of disobeying everyone by imposing her whim, inflamed Nélida’s spirited youth, giving new freshness to her triumphant and majestic animality. Ojeda strolled around the deck to entertain himself until the time of the appointment. What day was it?… Just Wednesday. It was the same day he had entered the Eichelberger’s cabin for the first time. And he imagined that a long time had passed, days and days, weeks, months, since this sad adventure! The hours on board sped by irregularly, with mad swiftness or interminable monotony, depending on the events. Only a few had passed, and once again he was about to cautiously descend into the ship in search of a woman of whom he thought no little. before. If someone had announced this to him in the morning, when he woke up, he would have laughed incredulously. He counted on his fingers, reconstructing in his memory the events of the last few days. Sunday, the eve of the crossing of the line, Maud. Monday, the defeat and mockery that made the memory of Mrs. Power hateful to him. The next day, Mina, the melancholic one, who had prolonged her sweet enchantment until the afternoon of the present day. And now, Nélida, coming toward him against all logic, when he least expected it; Nélida, “she of the tigress’s mouth,” as Maltrana would say, in his fondness for Homeric nicknames, “she of the antelope’s eyes and the spring-like flesh.” In four days, three loves… Life on board sought to erase the monotonous languor of its atmosphere with the rapidity of events. On land, where people, no matter how hard they look, spend many hours a day without seeing each other, it would have taken four months, or perhaps more, to reach this result . Here, everything was easy, thanks to the overcrowding and the tedium of so many different and contradictory beings, forced to coexist like the infinite species of the diluvian ark. Around twelve o’clock, Ojeda stopped his strolls. He wanted to go down to the penultimate deck without being noticed. At this hour, it might have been striking to see him in the depths of the ship, he who had his cabin on the same floor as the dining room. Isidro’s recommendations made him think with some concern about the young men in the gang. They seemed disbanded that evening, lacking the presence of Miss Kasper, who was the central axis, the pole of attraction. Some of its members were scattered around the tables in the smoking room, following the poker games. Two men were marching along the deck, and Fernando was struck by the frequency of their encounters, as if they were constantly watching him. He took advantage of a moment when the promenade was deserted to slip down a stairwell. He went down two floors without encountering anyone. Then he advanced along a passageway, tiptoeing over the thick red carpet with large roundels, the ship’s name displayed in the center. Furious snoring emerged from some doors. He thought there were faint rustling noises behind him , as if someone were following him. He imagined he saw heads peering at him from around a corner of the corridor and then suddenly disappeared. But he could no longer turn back, and he continued onward, looking at the cabin numbers. The door was half open, and before he arrived, the haughty figure of Nélida was outlined in its narrow rectangle of light. She was dressed simply in a blue kimono, the same one Fernando had seen her buy in Tenerife. Strong, white arms, completely naked and spreading the scent of freshly washed flesh, reached out to meet him, clutching at his chest like irresistible tentacles. “Come in, fool!” she commanded imperiously in a hoarse voice, noticing his hesitation. “They’re around… but it doesn’t matter. Come in, don’t waste time! ” And she pulled him roughly, just as in the alleys of many ports drunken sailors are pulled by bare arms with brass ornaments emerging from certain houses. Shortly after sunrise, Ojeda awoke in his bed. Music was playing in the immediate corridor, next to the cabin door. “Today is Sunday,” he thought, in the awkwardness of waking. But a sudden strangeness dissipated the last mists of his dream. He made a quick calculation of the days. No, it wasn’t Sunday. Moreover, the music was cheerfully playing a kind of cavalry reveille that could not be confused with the solemn Lutheran chorale. This reveille was followed by a leaping polka with crazy clarinet capers, and then the musicians retired. “It must be a dawn parade in honor of one of my German neighbors. You’d think it was for me.” And Ojeda went back to sleep. Two hours later, while dressing, he wanted to know the reason for this music, asking the waiter who came in with a jug of water. Hot. The steward answered, avoiding his eyes. It was a gift for the passenger next to him, a German who spent his nights playing in the café until the lights went out. No doubt his friends had dedicated this dawn to him because it was his birthday. And beneath his trimmed mustache floated the smile of a discreet servant who thinks about the time for his tip and lies so as not to upset the gentleman. Upstairs, on the promenade, the first one who came out to meet him was Maltrana. “Have you heard the music?” he asked with a certain mystery. Ojeda wanted to show that he was well informed. Yes; it was in honor of a neighbor of his who was celebrating his birthday. “No, Fernando; the music was for you… Just like those kids do, they’re furious about Nélida’s betrayal.” An irony as heavy and blunt as his shoes. He had surprised the conversations of some of the gang early in the morning , who were proudly commenting on the ingenuity of his joke. Spying on Ojeda the night before and learning of his good fortune, they had held a meeting in the smoking room, later waking the music director to assign him this alborada. It was a congratulation from Nélida’s old friends. At first, Fernando had a burst of anger. “Him with little tunes!” He felt like insulting all those young people, with the temerity that new love communicates to every man. But Isidro laughed at his indignation. What was wrong with that? They could continue bestowing gifts of that kind upon him, if they liked, while he calmly continued enjoying his good adventure. With music, some things are better… And Fernando ended up laughing just the same at a clumsy joke that ridiculed its authors. Maltrana then spoke to him about Nélida. She must have been impatient to meet him. Half an hour earlier, he had seen her on the promenade, looking everywhere, as if she were looking for him. She hadn’t even made her morning preparations. “She walked as if she’d dressed in a hurry, and with her hair disheveled. She must have returned to her cabin to spruce herself up a bit. She’s hungry to see him. But what diabolical secret is yours, Ojeda, for achieving such success? You ought to tell your friends… ” Nélida’s proximity silenced him. The young woman now appeared very different from how Isidro had seen her a short time before. Her short locks appeared curly; she had just put on a new dress; she moved with small steps, standing on high heels; one could discern in her a concern with beautifying herself and pleasing others. Her face, under a fresh layer of powder, seemed elongated, with slight hollows in her cheeks, traces no doubt of debilitating emotions. A circle of shadow surrounded her eyes, making them larger. When she took Fernando’s hand, she held it for a long time, while she fixed him with a questioning gaze… Happy? He smiled with the gratitude of a good memory, satisfied at the same time by the young woman’s anxiety to know his state of mind. Isidro, sensing the inopportuneness of his presence, left without saying goodbye . Nélida, finding herself alone, approached her lover with a surge of enthusiasm. “My king! My god!… My… man!” And she was close to kissing him on deck. He allowed himself to be adored with the pride of a man satisfied with his person. He remembered Mrs. Power, comparing her to Nélida. This one, at least, knew gratitude… They strolled together with imperturbable tranquility. She showed a visible desire to frighten people with her audacity, to inform everyone of this new adventure, which seemed to make her proud. They passed “the penguin bank” and its neighbors, “the hostile powers,” to the sudden discomfort of Ojeda, who wanted to turn back, but didn’t dare say so. Fortunately, at that hour there were only a few ladies, who pretended not to see them, and then, behind their backs, looked at each other with frowns and shook their heads. “What a scandal!” Then they passed Isidro, who was talking to Zurita with his back to the sea. The doctor followed them with a gesture of comical admiration. “Comrade, how brave your countryman is! Every day with one… and at his age! Because he’s no lad… Ah, a real Galician!” Several members of the gang were sitting near the smoking room, and when they saw them coming, they exchanged glances and coughed. Ojeda stood up arrogantly, as if sensing danger. He passed by, looking at them with provocative eyes, but they all seemed suddenly preoccupied with important reflections that made them lower their heads, and they didn’t notice him. Nélida, with a slight trembling, a mixture of fear and pleasure, clung convulsively to his arm. Fernando smiled: it was better that way. If only someone had dared to make the slightest mockery! And she listened to him with astonishment and satisfaction. Would he have been capable of fighting for her? Like in novels or in the theater? And when he answered affirmatively, without boasting, with simplicity, Nélida practically jumped on his neck. “My king!… My man!… What a pity we’re here! Oh, what a kiss you’re missing! ” They met Mr. Kasper, who welcomed them with all the kindness of his patriarchal face. “Papa… Papa.” His daughter kissed his venerable whiskers , insisting on this caress with the purr of a loving cat. The father looked at Fernando with sweet, protective eyes, as if a premonition had made him guess the truth and now considered him one of the family. Mr. Kasper, who until then had only exchanged a few polite words with Ojeda, spoke to her with familiar confidence, praising his little girl. “This Nélida!… A bit naughty. She doesn’t want to obey Mommy… But she’s an angel, a true angel.” And he stroked her short hair with a hand trembling with emotion. They had sat on a bench, she placed herself between them. What happiness! Her father on one side, and her husband on the other. That’s how she wished to remain forever, looking into Fernando’s eyes, hearing Mr. Kasper’s voice, the voice of an evangelical preacher, who, driven by habit, moved from family affection to talk of business. He gave Ojeda advice, showing great interest in her future. It was enough for him to be the girl’s friend for him to consider her affairs as his own. He had to proceed with great caution in the New World. Good businesses were plentiful, but so were the unconscionable people who were waiting for the newcomers to exploit their ignorance. He knew Fernando had capital to undertake something important there. Maltrana had told him this. And out of affection alone , he offered him the help of his knowledge for when they arrived in Buenos Aires… Because he hoped their friendship would not be limited to a simple acquaintanceship on the road: he hoped that on land they would be even closer friends. “Who knows, sir, if we’ll ever do anything together! I have one there…” And he began to explain one of the many ventures that, according to him, had forced him away from his quiet retirement in Europe, not because he needed to work, but because it was a shame to allow such wonderful businesses to be lost . Nélida, almost with her back to her father, didn’t let Fernando listen closely . Her eyes fixed on his, she simultaneously sought out one of his hands and, bringing it behind her waist, pressed it with invisible grips. She wasn’t interested in business; Papa could talk all he wanted in his calm, musical voice: she couldn’t hear him; she was only interested in her own affairs. And she moved her lips without uttering a voice, indicating the silent syllables with marked contractions. Ojeda understood her. “My Lord!… My God!… I love you!” Her hidden hand supported these words with strong squeezes. A friend of Kasper’s came to pull him out of his fruitless preaching, freeing his distracted listeners. They were waiting for him in the smoking room to begin their morning poker game. “See you later, sir. My friends are calling me. We still have time to talk about these things.” And she smiled at Ojeda for the last time, as if she saw him as a future partner in the great enterprises she had generously offered. Seeing that the two lovers were free of her serene and inexhaustible verbosity, they fled the bench and continued their walk. They were talking about going up to the deck of the boats when a voice behind them stopped them. “Nélida… Nélida…” Now it was her mother who came out to meet her to make several unimportant recommendations. Fernando guessed a pretext for approaching him. “Good morning, sir!” Her bright , moist eyes, like the Andean flame, accompanied the greeting with a look of attraction. And without knowing how, Ojeda found himself once again part of the Kasper family, under the protective gaze of the mestiza. They leaned on a railing facing the sea. Nélida seemed restless and disinterested, as if remaining by her mother’s side were a torment for her . Behind her mother’s head, she signaled to Fernando; She spoke to him with the silent movement of her lips. “Let’s go: leave her.” But he couldn’t obey, held back by the lady’s kind words and glances, who was engrossed in praising her daughter’s qualities . “She’s a bit crazy and doesn’t pay attention to what people say. But apart from that, she’s very industrious, you know, sir? And tomorrow, when she gets married and settles down, she’ll be an excellent mother of a family. Believe me, the husband who takes her will not regret it.” And she looked at Fernando with questioning eyes, as if she were offering him this perpetual happiness, hoping to see a grateful smile on his face. Nélida, behind her back, continued her mime. These praises of her abilities as a housewife and the desire to see her as a mother of a family made her shrug her shoulders and contort her face with gestures of disgust. “Let’s go,” she continued silently. Don’t listen to her anymore.” The mother released them, suddenly sensing the inopportuneness of their presence. “Go on with your walk. We old women are always in the way of the young.” She said this with the air of a benevolent and affectionate mother, as if blessing with her eyes the union she saw in the distance. As she left, Nélida tried to excuse her, ashamed of her maternal outbursts. “Don’t pay attention. She’s an old-fashioned lady; an Indian. She fixes everything with marriage: all her thoughts turn to the same thing. As soon as she sees me with a man, she thinks I must marry him… Marriage, how vulgar! How rude! Who even thinks of that?…” And her protest against marriage was truly naive, as if they were proposing something that inspired scandal and horror in her. The only one in the family who kept away from them all morning was her brother. Ojeda was unpleasant to him: he preferred those from the gang. Her seriousness and her age inspired respect in him. Furthermore, he was convinced that this gentleman would never offer him champagne and cigars like the others. Because of this, despite his parents’ example, he kept his distance from the intruder who had suddenly come to disturb his life. After lunch, when Fernando was having coffee with Maltrana in the winter garden, Mrs. Power passed by, greeting him with a slight nod of her head, without the slightest emotion. Ojeda also looked at her with indifference. Her arrogant figure barely stirred a trace of emotion in him. She was like a forgotten book that one suddenly finds and evokes the memory of a reading that had brought delight, but whose text one can barely recall. He then saw Mina ascend the steps, holding little Karl by the hand. The boy looked at her, surprised that she wasn’t heading in the same direction as before. But his mother continued on her way, pulling him along, without turning her head, her gaze lost in thought so as not to meet Fernando’s eyes . A slight blush colored her greenish pallor: a blush of shyness, of regret, of bad memories. The news of her friendship with Miss Kasper had circulated through the ship with the rapidity that an idle and gossipy life conveyed to everyone. Moreover, she proudly displayed her new conquest, and such a display reassured Mrs. Power, who saw all memories of him erased forever. It also drove away Mina, fearful of Nélida’s insolence. A few hours of daring display had been enough to free Fernando from his previous love affairs. The girl created a void around her. All the women seemed to fear the impetuosity of this beautiful human animal, exuberant with strength and youth. Ojeda was not long in seeing her appear. She had made a brief appearance in the winter garden, but fled when she noticed that her titled relative, the German, and the Belgian baron were sitting at the same table as her parents, with a visible desire to approach her. After a brief eclipse, she peered out of a window next to where Fernando and his friend were sitting. The silent movement of her lips was a clear message to him . “Come…” And when he left, he found her at the bend in the walkway that he called “the kissing corner.” Nélida spoke to him with an authoritarian expression. He was her master… her god; but he had to obey her in everything. Siesta time was approaching. In the winter garden, many mouths were opening with lazy yawns. People were slipping discreetly into their cabins. Snores sounded from the long chairs on the promenade. The tough men, insensitive to the voluptuous tropical annihilation, headed toward the stern in search of the gatherings in the smoking room to revive their activity. They felt repelled by the silence and calm that were slowly spreading across the deck of the ship, as if it were a convent cloister at siesta time. “Come down, my master, do you hear me?… You only have to scratch at the door. I ‘ll open it immediately. ” She looked at him with her enormous, avid eyes that seemed to want to devour him. The tip of her tongue poked out like a rose petal between her suddenly scorched lips. Swirling in the breeze, her short hair fluttered around her forehead, giving her face a devilish appearance. Ojeda felt a certain astonishment. Going down to the cabin!… So soon! This splendid and audacious bloom of insatiable desires was beginning to inspire fear in him. But he was careful to hide his anxiety out of sexual pride. “In half an hour,” she repeated. “My God… you already know.” Very well; it would not be missing. And she left with the satisfaction of leaving a happy man behind her. Fernando went down with the same precautions as the previous night, but this time he could not detect the trace of espionage in his footsteps. And when he had been in Nélida’s cabin for a long time, the most painful of his shipboard adventures occurred: a ridiculous scene, which he later recalled with a certain unease, fearing that the mocking Maltrana would ever find out about it. Repeated knocks on the door, and the nasal voice of Nélida’s brother, a voice that stammered more than usual from the trembling of anger: “Open up… open up!” He pushed at the door as if he wanted to break it down. Out of a shred of prudence, he spoke through the keyhole: “Open up: you have a man in the cabin… I’m going to tell Papa.” Nélida didn’t flinch, as if she were used to such scenes. Her anger was greater than her fear. She muttered words of fury at her imbecile brother. And wouldn’t there be a good soul who would kill him, so she could be calm? She guessed that it was her former friends who, out of spite, had sent the informer brother, after revealing Ojeda’s presence in the cabin. “Get in there,” she ordered imperiously, while repairing the disarray of her light clothing. He hesitated, unable to guess the place indicated. Where did she expect him to hide in that small room?… But the girl pushed him roughly, while the knocking on the door and the trembling, threatening voices continued. Doctor Ojeda, as the other passengers called him for greater honor, had to crouch and bend at Nélida’s urging, and ended up introduce his respectable personality under a divan of low height. Then the young woman placed before him , forming a barricade, a suitcase, a sack of dirty clothes, and a large hat box. Fernando thought he would die between the carpet and the springs of the divan embedded in his back. The heat was suffocating in this confinement, far from the fan and the breeze that entered through the skylight. As soon as he was settled in such a pace, he felt all his joints ache and his chest press against the floorboards as if they were about to break. A homicidal rage seized him. Ah, no! He wouldn’t stay there! Only those boys from the gang could endure this, whom she had undoubtedly hidden in the same way on other occasions. He was going to get out, even if he had to kill the imbecile. But it wasn’t necessary. Nélida was giving her little brother a good time!… As she opened the door, she grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to enter with a shove. How long did he intend to bother her with his nonsense?… He was in the depths of his sleep, and she came to interrupt it with her crazy stories. “Look carefully, you fool… Open your eyes, you beast… Where is the man, you idiot?…” And she shook him angrily, while the boy opened his eyes wide, looking in all directions, and especially at the emptiness under the bed, as if only there an intruder could hide. The conviction of his defeat made him sadly lower his head. His friends had made fun of him: it was one of their jokes. And when, confessing himself defeated, he tried to reach the door, his good sister did not let him leave so easily. First, as he let go of her arm, she gave him two good, twisting pinches, and then, near the exit, a resounding slap: “So you can bother me again.” The boy tried to return this farewell gesture in kind, but when he lowered his hand, he only found the door slam shut and almost crushed his fingers. Nélida quickly undid the barricade of objects, and Dr. Ojeda emerged once more, but his hair was disheveled, sweaty, his face flushed, blinking as if he couldn’t stand the light. She laughed at him in this state, while lovingly arranging the disarray of his suit and brushing off the dust of confinement. “My man!… My god! Such a wretch they must see me!… Him, so handsome, hidden in that hiding place… And all for me!” Fernando smiled wickedly. “The others were smaller, weren’t they?… They could have hidden themselves better.” Nélida threw herself forcefully at him with open arms. “Don’t say that, my old man… don’t repeat it. For God’s sake, I beg you! It hurts me so much.” And she kissed him furiously, stunning him with her caresses, to dispel the bad memory and at the same time compensate for the recent annoyance. She blamed her brother for Ojeda’s anger, which evoked bad memories. That imbecile had only been born to hurt her. And this led her to talk about the other brother, “the gaucho,” as she called him, who lived in Argentina and was the only man capable of inspiring fear in her. Her younger brother frequently threatened to reveal to the other all the adventures in Berlin and the pranks of the trip as soon as they arrived in Buenos Aires. And “the gaucho” was formidable! She had known for a long time what vengeance he intended to punish her with. “But let’s not talk about this, my man.” Say you don’t hold a grudge against me for what happened to my brother… Repeat that you love me as always. Ojeda couldn’t feel any resentment; it was incompatible with the gratitude this woman inspired in him after the gift of her beauty, so freely given. But in the hour he spent there, it was impossible for him to cast aside the bad memory of the hiding place and the torturous situation he had endured there… He wouldn’t return to Nélida’s cabin. He felt too weak to face another surprise, defying ridicule, which he considered the most fearsome of dangers. She nodded. They would meet in Fernando’s cabin; she had thought about it. that same afternoon, but she had been expecting the proposal. She had a desire to visit him. It was undoubtedly better than her own: a cabin on the luxury deck with a large window instead of the round skylight below . “Agreed: I’ll go tonight, after twelve. Leave the door open.” This time Ojeda made his annoyance clear. That girl didn’t wait for invitations: she invited herself, without consulting the mood and resources of the owner of the house. Nélida looked at him with pleading eyes. “Don’t you want me to come?” If it was for fear of being caught, she shouldn’t have worried. She would know how to slip away without anyone seeing her. She could walk at night throughout the ship like a ghost, without a trace or a sound. Fernando didn’t dare correct her. He also felt a certain pride in once again facing the sacrifice he had repeated so many times. “Come; I’ll wait for you.” And after this, they proceeded to the painstaking task of leaving the cabin without the enemy being able to surprise their exit. She was the first to advance through the passageway, exploring its angles and nooks. Then she whistled softly, like a scout indicating the path, and Fernando hurriedly left the cabin, followed in his flight by the kisses Nélida sent him with her fingertips. More than the fear of being surprised, he had been bothered by the ridiculousness of this situation. What things a serious man would do, influenced by that shipboard life, which regressed people to childhood! The fear of ridicule awakened his conscience through a reflex action, making him see the image of Teri, who was looking at him with cruel eyes and a desperate grimace… But there was no need to think about this. He would purify his soul when he was on land. For the moment, his abjection was irremediable, and it would only increase as long as he didn’t leave this environment. He was a slave to the “great tempter” Isidro spoke of. All he needed was to crawl like the impure creatures of legend transformed into beasts. During the meal, the astute Maltrana, who seemed to divine his most hidden thoughts, overwhelmed him with innocently expressed expressions of interest. “You look bad, Fernando. It’s as if I’d seen souls during my siesta!… What a color! What dark circles under your eyes!… Eat a lot; the voyage is long, and you need to regain your strength. ” But when he saw that Ojeda was annoyed by these courtesies, sensing his malice, he abandoned all dissimulation, adding with admiration: “Comrade, I envy you and pity you. You’re a brave man, but what you’ve taken on!… Before the voyage’s end, you’ll long to reach land, like a drowning castaway. Tonight’s meal was served with flags and garlands.” At the back of the dining room, illuminated transparent lamps shone with two inscriptions in French and German: “Au revoir! Auf Wiedersehen!” It was the farewell banquet for the travelers: a meal like any other, but with a speech by the commander and another by the “doktor,” who, on behalf of the Germans and foreigners, expressed his gratitude, with slow phraseology resembling the creaking of wood, for the great kindnesses he had shown the passengers. When the doctor-like musings came to an end, the people, standing with glasses in hand, uttered the customary three “hoch!” while the music began the march from “Lohengrin. ” “We won’t arrive in Rio de Janeiro until the day after tomorrow,” said Isidro, always well informed about the progress of the voyage. “But the farewell was today, so that the people who remain in Brazil can devote tomorrow to the arrangement and closing of their luggage. Tonight is the last of the great ceremonies, and the ladies are going to put away their dresses and jewels.” Ocean etiquette only exists between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. At both ends of the voyage, you can go down to the dining room wearing whatever attire you want. Neptunean protocol isn’t offended by this. After the meal, the awards ceremony was to take place in the dining room. the Olympic winners and the young ladies who had presented their best costumes at the crossing-the-line celebration. After this ceremony, the concert would begin, for which so many preparations had been underway for a week. Maltrana spoke of this celebration with pride, introducing himself as its main organizer. He had overseen the rehearsals for several days, moving from the parlor piano, where Mrs. Lowe tested her voice with all the authority her six-foot-six height conferred on her, to the piano in the children’s dining room, where the widowed Mrs. Moruzaga reminisced about her single-woman skills, accompanying with a dramatic tremolo the French verses recited by one of her daughters. In addition, some Brazilian girls were preparing to play a symphony four-handed; the operetta artists would contribute several ballads; one of the Americans was planning to dress up as a black man to roar his music to the accompaniment of loud footwork. And even Fraulein Conchita, yielding to the pleas of several ladies enthusiastic about all things Spanish, had agreed to wear a white mantilla, singing in her faint voice a few songs from her homeland. Maestro Eichelberger, a great pianist, would improvise accompaniment for her. And if the audience requested it, the girl would dare to dance a certain “garrotín” (or “garrotín”), a dance that was exported from a Madrid academy that trains “dancing stars” for foreigners. “But with modesty and decency, child,” Maltrana had advised. ” Compromise yourself here: add some water to your dance. When you get ashore, you’ll be able to show it off completely.” Satisfied with his efforts as an organizer, he spoke of other artists, ignored talents he had managed to discover among the mass of passengers. And he ended by modestly declaring that he too would “contribute his part,” inaugurating the concert with a short speech in honor of the ladies, a beautiful piece of mellifluous oratory that he had learned by heart and that would surely affirm his prestige among the noble matrons. “With this,” he declared, “Maltranita supersedes the abbot of the lectures. You’ll see it, Ojeda.” No; Fernando didn’t think he would. He felt he lacked the energy to face the torment of so much amateur singing in the cramped lounge, among a fanning and sweating audience. He preferred to take a stroll through the upper part of the ship, contemplating the night’s spectacle. So he did. But as he wandered through the last two decks, he always returned to the vicinity of the lounge, merging with the small audience of maids and children who looked out the windows. Before the evening began, Nélida had approached him in her low-cut, blood-red dress. She had to attend the party with her entire family: a real torment! But she hoped Fernando would occupy a chair near her. And when she learned that he wasn’t entering the hall, she almost wept with disappointment. “At least don’t go too far; peek out from time to time. So I can see you; so I can know you’re near me…” During the concert, her eyes darted from window to window, and when she recognized Fernando’s face among the heads of the audience outside, she sent him caressing smiles over her fan, barely marked kisses with a slight advance of the lips, malicious winks that commented on the progress of the concert and the mistakes of the performers. In this way, Ojeda saw how his friend moved around the room with an air of authority, as if he were the hero of the party, making his way between the chairs to go in search of the artists, bowing to them with his “red heels greeting,” giving them his arm to lead them to the platform and staying next to the pianist or singer, looking after their roles, and initiating the rounds of applause. It was his night. The carefully prepared little speech had been a huge success. The glances of all the ladies who could understand him turned toward him with admiration and gratitude. “How cute that guy!” Maltranita!… What a man!… How skillful!… And he modestly accepted these compliments formulated by the ladies according to the admiring terms of each country. In his honeyed declamation he had embraced them all, young and old, extending his praise even to the cassocks among them, which gave him cause to extol religion, represented there by priests of every Latin origin. The Italian bishop’s face widened with a gesture of childlike contentment; the French abbot smiled uneasily, as if he saw the birth of a formidable rival; Don José was grateful for the allusion, admiring him with patriotic pride. “What a lively Don Isidro!… If only I had his gift for the ladies!” When the concert ended, the people scattered onto the deck, eager to breathe fresh air. It was close to midnight. The girls complained of the heat, trying to use this pretext to disobey their mothers, who suggested an immediate descent to the cabin. The more courteous passengers greeted the ladies who had participated in the concert, their chorus of praise echoing the most stupendous lies. All of them accepted without flinching the assertion that in poverty they could earn a living with their musical talent. Mrs. Lowe, escorted by her husband, who was carrying a stack of sheet music under his arm, greeted these compliments with sullen twitches of her horsey face. She felt offended by the audience’s lack of taste: they had only made her repeat her song twice, when she had rehearsed a dozen ballads. The audience missed it. A group of elderly gentlemen pestered Conchita with their congratulations. Some, prudent and calm until then, seemed agitated by an electric tingle. The songs were very beautiful, although they hadn’t understood much… but the dance! That serpentine dance, with arms that seemed to speak!… Doña Zobeida smiled, delighted with the triumph of “this fine young lady,” confiding her enthusiasm to Don José, the clergyman, who also escorted her with all the authority of his cassock. “But have you seen how lovely she is, Father?… Our little girl is the one the gentlemen liked the most…” My late doctor used to say so, he knew about this as he did about everything. For graceful dancing, Spanish women. And losing her shyness, she herself introduced Conchita from group to group, accepting as her own the interested compliments the men directed at the dancer. Maltrana was no less proud of his oratorical triumph. Upon meeting Fernando, he had the smug expression of a comedian leaving the stage… Had he seen him? What was your opinion?… “I think I’ve gotten on my nerves…” My friends look at me as if I were another man. They seem sorry for having treated me until recently as if I were insignificant… They’re going to give me a party at the smoking room: a private party… in my honor. It was a farewell from the happy passengers to the friends who were staying in Rio de Janeiro; but because of Maltrana’s recent success, they also dedicated it to him personally. “You’re going to be famous,” Isidro continued enthusiastically. “Ladies will attend, many ladies; all the chorus girls from the operetta, who have heard me from doors and windows without surely understanding me, but now they look at me with respect, and when I pass by them they murmur something that must be admiration… Come with us.” Fernando excused himself: he planned to retire immediately to his cabin. Maltrana frowned, as if remembering something bothersome, and approved of his resolution. He was right. That party was also to bid farewell to the Belgian baron and other friends of his who were staying in Brazil. In the daze of his glory, he had forgotten that the gang was furious with Ojeda, and at the last minute, with the insolence that comes with wine, they were capable of provoking a violent scene. ” See you tomorrow; I’ll tell you what happens… Don’t worry, tonight I’ll go, like the others, to hit the mysterious cabin. That’s over…” It’s true that the gloomy man hasn’t been seen all day. He must be trembling at the thought that we’ll be arriving in Rio the day after tomorrow. You’ll see how the first thing to appear on the ship is the police to put handcuffs on his hands… I’m not mistaken. When Fernando entered his cabin, he was greatly surprised to see Teri’s portrait… Then he was ashamed of the unconsciousness in which he lived, similar to that of a drunk who remembers his own affairs as if they were someone else’s. The events prior to his embarkation were for him like incidents from a different existence, occurred on another planet, and of which he now retained only a faint memory. He now lived in a new, small, isolated world , wandering through the infinite blue, and he was interested only in the immediate needs of his oceanic existence… Nélida was about to arrive: and who knows with what comments of insolent and triumphant youth she would greet Teri’s beauty, of a melancholic, delicate, and gentle splendor, like that of the first autumn mornings!… To avoid sacrilege, he brought his hands to the portrait, hiding it among the clothes in the wardrobe. As he did this, he trembled with a superstitious unease. He feared that an inexorable, hidden power that he could not clearly define would punish him for his cowardice… Perhaps he would lose Teri forever, after having dared to hide her image. In love, there are so many mysterious affinities, so many inexplicable clashes across time and distance!… But these preoccupations of an imaginative man, disturbed by a life of confinement, lasted very little. A sound of footsteps in the nearby corridor brought him back to the present. It was a neighbor who was retiring. Nélida would soon be arriving, and it was ridiculous for him to receive her still wearing his dinner jacket. After undressing, he covered himself with pajamas, picked up a book, and waited, reading and smoking. The interest of reading soon took hold of him . Nélida, with all her gentleness, lacked the charm of this book: its novelty. A long time passed, and when he was beginning to doubt that she was coming, he noticed a slight noise in the adjacent corridor; less than a noise: a rustling, the ripples in the air caused by the movement of a silent body. It was she, advancing cautiously. He felt no surprise when he saw the cabin door swing open without anyone appearing in the newly opened space. Then Nélida burst in, or rather, leaped, with the joy of a gymnast reaching the end of an obstacle course. She shook the coil of serpents in her hair around her forehead ; she let the delicate kimono, which she had worn tied up until then, float over her body, as if she wanted to withdraw, to diminish in her silent march. “Cuckoo… cuckoo!” she said upon entering, with a triumphant laugh. “Here I am!” She threw herself into Fernando’s arms with a certain emotion, as if this were her first abandonment; then she moved away rudely, driven by her capricious mobility. She turned on all the lights in the cabin to examine him better. She touched the books stacked on the divan, on the small table, and even on the washbasin; she rummaged through the papers; she displayed a childlike curiosity toward Ojeda’s toiletries and clothes. Her desire to see everything took on an alarming quality. “You must have portraits, love letters. Who knows what you’ve brought back from Europe stashed in your suitcases!… Show me your conquests, my old man. Show them to me… so I can laugh.” Then she admired the cabin. It was larger than hers; the ceiling was higher, and above all, instead of a round skylight, it had a window, a real window like those found on land. She jumped onto the couch to sit on its sill, extending part of her body outside the ship. A pleasant shiver ran down her spine: a shudder of freshness from the wind raised by the ship as it sailed and which ran over her skin, swelling the fabric of her loose kimono; a shudder of fear at seeing herself suspended in the void and the night, A slight backward movement was enough for her to fall into the sea. Ojeda held her, clutching her legs. With this recklessness, she could fear anything. And Nélida welcomed his fear as a manifestation of love, caressing his head, burying her hands in his hair, ruffling it. “Imagine, Negro, if I would let myself fall like that… Ah… ah… ah!” And with this exclamation, she stepped back, forcing Ojeda to make a violent effort to hold her back. “Even if they found out on the ship and stopped, it would be a long time. But you would jump into the water after me, wouldn’t you, old man?… You would come and keep your baby company in the middle of the sea, and we would swim together until they found us… And if they didn’t look for us, we would drown together… like this!… close together!” In the excitement of danger, she clung to him tightly, pulling him outward, as if she truly wanted to fall from the window, dragging her lover with her. He roughly broke away from her playful and reckless embrace. They were in the middle of the ocean, far from any coast. A slight loss of balance was enough for her to plummet into those black waters that flowed past and past the ship’s side. It would be a plunge into mystery and oblivion; a hopeless fall. No one could see her; death was certain. And even if someone saw her and the ship stopped, turning back, it would be difficult to find a small floating body in this gloomy immensity that seemed like ink. “Nélida, for God’s sake!” come down from the window. But she laughed at her fear, confident at the same time in the strength with which his arms held her. “Ah… ah… ah!” And she threw her body back into the void with such force that Ojeda had to make great efforts to hold her. “Say that if I fell, you would throw yourself headfirst to save me… Say that you would die for your baby… ” Fernando approved of everything she wanted to ask him, and only in this way was he able to get her to leave the window, tightly embraced, gazing at him with admiration. “Would you really die for me?… Say it again, my rich old man, so I can hear it… Say it again, my black man. ” Nélida’s gratitude lingered for much of the night. In the darkness, with no light other than the faint sidereal glow that entered through the window, she again called Ojeda “old man” and “black man,” two loving words from the new hemisphere to which he had not yet been able to accustom himself, and which in the midst of his passionate transports made him smile. When the electricity flashed again, they were both sitting on a couch. Nélida, due to a sudden change in her fickle nature, now spoke with sadness and fear. She counted the days remaining until her arrival in Buenos Aires. How few they were!… She remembered her older brother, the rude rancher, who in his last letters to Berlin had uttered terrible threats against her, commenting on the accusations her younger brother had made against her. “And that fool, surely as soon as we arrive, will tell him not only about Germany, but about the ship; about you too. Oh! What will become of me?” She, who in her courageous unconsciousness feared no one around her , trembled at the mere memory of this brother, whom she had been able to meet on a brief trip to Argentina three years earlier accompanying her father. “No one jokes with him. He’s a barbarian… And if he were only talking about killing me! Death doesn’t scare me; in the end, we all have to go through it. But he threatens me with something worse.” He wants to cut my face, he wants to burn it with vitriol, so that men will flee from me and I will waste away with despair. How horrible! She trembled just thinking about this torment, more fearsome to her than death, not doubting for a moment that her brother was capable of carrying out such threats. She kept a vivid memory of his sullen expression, his propensity for violence, his gloomy look. Ojeda, listening to her, imagined the type. He was a murderer, who had lacked an opportunity to kill. development of his faculties. How interesting the Kasper family is, with its varied products of crossbreeding!… “Oh! If you truly loved me…” she continued, imploring him with her eyes. “You, who are capable of throwing yourself into the sea for me, could make me happy with much less… Tell me, old man, do you want to do something I ask of you?” Fernando, harassed by her pleas, promised to obey her. What did she want?… A trivial thing, which she explained simply. She didn’t want to go to America: she was marching toward Buenos Aires like an animal going to the slaughter. There was still time for both of them to be happy. They would disembark in Rio de Janeiro, hide, wait for the steamer to leave, and take passage on another ship returning to Europe… Ah, beautiful Berlin! In no city on earth was life more happy. Fernando almost jumped out of his seat in surprise. Return to Europe, when he hadn’t even reached the end of his trip? She could only accept this proposition as a joke. And his business? What was he going to do in Berlin? Nélida felt offended by her lover’s surprise. “You don’t love me, I see it clearly. All men are the same. So many promises, and then you back down at the smallest sacrifice… Selfish!” She complained as if she had just discovered a great infidelity, she, whom Ojeda had seen in love with other men and who was leaving behind her, in Europe, a past for which the avenging “gaucho” was going to demand an account. They had only been in love for two days, and she was surprised to find herself disobeyed, as if men had no other obligation than to follow her every whim and her insolent youth were the center of the world, around which people and events should revolve. “I’ll kill myself,” she said energetically. And if I don’t kill myself, I’ll leave alone. I swear I’ll never reach that land… How horrible! She remembered the months she had spent in Argentina three years before. It was a country for women like her mother. Buenos Aires could still be tolerated; but they were going to live in a city in the interior, near the ranch her brother ran. “For fun, a plaza where a band plays some nights. The girls stroll on one side, like flocks of turkeys, and the men on the other; without speaking to each other, just glancing at each other, what they call “sharpening” there, and without daring to say hello. Then, being shut up in the house all day… talking with Mom’s friends. No: first die! I need to go to Berlin. If you only knew how beautiful Berlin is!” She tried to overcome Ojeda’s resistance with memories of that capital, where she had spent the best part of her life. She hadn’t known Paris. Her father had always refused to bring his family to this city. Mr. Kasper raged, like a biblical prophet, when he spoke of modern Babylon, a corrupt city, inventor of evil customs… Ah, Berlin! Perhaps the Parisian women were more elegant, more refined than the others; but in Berlin everything was grand. The cafés and theaters were more enormous than those in Paris. The nightclubs copied the titles of Montmartre; but if fifty couples danced in one Parisian hall, two hundred did in the Berlin one; if ten bottles were uncorked in one part, one hundred in another; and if there were battalions of untethered women on the boulevards, in the German metropolis army corps could be formed with the women on call. Everything was bulging, immense, colossal in that disciplined city; even the joy and the debauchery that had come as a result of triumph. And the mixed-race German and Creole woman spoke nostalgically of Berlin’s nightlife, of all she had known and enjoyed in her absolute freedom as a “modernly educated young lady.” “You’ve only seen it as a traveler; besides, you know little of the language. You don’t know what life is like there. If only you knew it!… If only you would agree to come with me! ” And in the unconsciousness of her enthusiasm, unaware of the painful The impression she made on Ojeda began to tell him about her adventures. She had a friend, the daughter of a German father and an American mother, whose parents lived in Berlin after making their fortune in the United States. The two would sneak out of their homes at night to go to the most famous cafes in the company of boyfriends they would never marry. This accompaniment did not prevent them from dining with wealthy gentlemen from the industry and banking world who were celebrating a good deal. The owners of the establishments attracted them and flattered them and others of their class. They were young ladies with a charm superior to that of other women. They knew how to keep their adventures within a prudent limit, with more bustle and daring than professionals, but without ever allowing an irreparable outrage. They proved to be experts in the temptation that inflames the customer and makes him return. And to ensure the support of these collaborators, the managers gave them bonuses on what they made the gentlemen spend, a few hundred marks a month, which was an extra income for dresses and hats, thus compensating for the financial haggling of their families. “A great country,” Nélida continued. “There is nothing but living. And you don’t want to take me? We’d both be so happy!… Tell me, why don’t you want to?” Fernando remained undecided. He didn’t know how to answer this crazy woman, of a disconcerting amorality. It was useless to expound on reasons of honor, to speak of his dignity, which couldn’t adapt to this kind of existence. She would never understand him. To get out of the situation, he alluded to the material difficulties that hindered his plan. What would he do in Berlin? How could they live? These adventures require money, and he didn’t have it. Nélida’s eyes widened in astonishment. She couldn’t understand a man without money. Everyone she had known until then had plenty of it, or at least never visibly worried about its scarcity. A man without money! This revelation seemed incredible to her, and she looked at Ojeda as if she had just discovered new charms and perfections in him. She had money for both of them. She didn’t know how much: perhaps fifteen hundred marks. And she repeated the figure several times, giving it great importance because it was her own money: savings from her life in Berlin… Besides this, she had her little jewels, gifts of friendship, which she would take with her. They didn’t need large sums to get to Berlin, and once there, everything would be easy. She had friends, many friends; a woman gets out of trouble easily. Ojeda would only have to take care of her own expenses , and if necessary, she would also help her old man… her ghost. “Nélida!” Fernando protested. But he didn’t want to say more. Why?… Neither he agreed to that trip, nor she, with the mobility of her fleeting impressions, would perhaps remember this the next morning. A loud crash sounded on the upper decks: the sound of voices, running around. Then the heavy footsteps moved away toward the stern, accompanying a violent argument. It must have been the gang members, fighting among themselves. “Leave,” said Ojeda. “It’s three o’clock. Those people walk around the entire ship before going to bed, and they might surprise you. ” Nélida accepted the command, more out of spite than loving obedience. Her farewell kisses were icy. She furrowed her eyebrows; a hostile glow shone in her eyes. “You don’t love me, I can see that clearly… Another person would consider themselves happy if I allowed them to accompany me on my escape, and you seem to regret meeting me… Anyone would say I’d proposed a crime to you.” Fernando murmured a few excuses… It was a matter worth thinking about. Perhaps he would decide the next day. But she, sensing the falseness of his words, refused to hear him out. “Goodbye!” She pushed him out the door, closing it loudly behind her, as if she no longer cared about being modest. “Goodbye!” Ojeda replied when they were alone. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. With a weary expression, his cabin seemed more pleasant without any other presence but hers… Crazy girl, adorable for an hour and insufferable for an entire night!… He laughed openly when he remembered Nélida’s strange proposals. To Berlin!… What had he been doing there?… And all because the girl was afraid of her half- wild brother. It was a solution worthy of his bewildered mind. With these comments, he undressed, and when he turned out the light, he experienced between the sheets the voluptuousness of one who finds himself alone after having suffered annoying company. Ah, women! What a pity not to be able to live without them! Ojeda, who was beginning to fall asleep, turned over in his cloudy thoughts the vulgarized phrase of the Scandinavian playwright. Whenever a romantic setback forced him to separate from a woman, he would say the same thing to himself: “The isolated man is the strongest …” Alas! It was easy to isolate oneself when the body seems to creak with fatigue and satiety robs temptation of all its charm. But time passed; the scorned woman gains greater value with each return of the sun; and desire, reborn in the depths, scratches at them like a relentless demon, saying mockingly with each swipe: “Here, isolated man; take and endure, since you are the strongest…” Ojeda awoke the next day to the sounds of music playing its morning concert. When he went up on deck, it was very late. Many were waiting for the midday bell to enter the dining room. Fernando guessed from the looks of some and from the secret of certain conversations that an extraordinary event had occurred on the ship. He saw Maltrana coming toward him with the somber majesty of a man burdened with secrets. The gazes of some passengers stretched out in their chairs followed him with a certain admiration. He seemed to have grown up overnight . It was another man, with a grave look, a heavy forehead, his arms crossed on his chest, and a forefinger resting on his mouth, as if he were adopting the expression of a thinker when surrounded by cameras. “I need to talk to you. ” He said this in a mysterious tone and led his friend to the bow. “Do you happen to have a case of challenge pistols?” Although Ojeda, given his companion’s appearance, was prepared for the most absurd requests, he couldn’t suppress his surprise. Challenge pistols? Is it “by chance” that people traveled with a case of them in their luggage? Maltrana excused himself. He remembered that his companion had had several encounters, and this led him to suppose that he might well have this kind of weapon with him. “I’m sorry you don’t have them, Fernando, and I don’t know how to get out of this situation.” There was a duel pending on board, and the adversaries, as well as the other witnesses, had done me the honor of entrusting themselves to my expertise, entrusting me with the preparations for the fight. A difficult mission. The challenge was to be carried out the following morning on land, with the utmost secrecy, during the few hours the ship would remain anchored, and he had to set the conditions, for which it was necessary, above all, to find the weapons. These were not lacking on the ship. All the passengers had their own, and even some ladies hid the nickel-plated firearm , shiny and graceful like a toy, in their cabins. There were revolvers of all calibers, automatic pistols with various mechanisms. An Argentine had even offered him two repeating carbines, with armor-plated bullets, which he had brought along for his stay. But they were all vulgar, prosaic, last-minute weapons; weapons without tradition, which, for lack of titles, could not be used for two gentlemen to kill each other. He needed antique swords or pistols that were loaded by the muzzle, as the ceremonial of honor dictates, poetic weapons consecrated by theater and novels; and all these people could offer him was modern hardware, lacking in nobility, that worked like clockwork and doled out death with mechanical precision. He hadn’t been able to find even two sabers on board, a hybrid weapon, a mestizo weapon, which was like a transition between the two. Ojeda interrupted these lamentations. He wanted to know the reason for the duel and who the combatants were. Maltrana expressed himself with sad dignity. It had been at the end of the celebration in his honor, when the friends were most content and fraternal . Many had retired to their cabins. It was three in the morning. When the smoking room closed, they had gone up to the deck of the boats to finish the revelry in the Belgian’s cabin, who was to leave the honorable society the next day. They had brought some bottles as a precaution, and when these were empty, they tried to drink some toilet alcohol, cologne or something similar, laughing at the grimaces and nausea the perfumed liquid provoked in some. “Just when we were most content, the fight broke out between the Belgian and that German relative of Nélida’s, the two closest friends, always together since they entered the ship. I believe that deep down they hated each other without knowing it. It’s useless to tell you who the real culprit is… Who could it be?… Nélida. And the funniest thing is that neither of them mentioned her, but both had her in their thoughts. They had been furious for days, ever since the girl noticed you. It was lucky you weren’t around the ship last night. We would have had a disagreement. ” The two rivals blamed each other for the young woman’s departure. Each of them imagined that if he had been alone by her side, he would have been able to keep her. But they had gotten in each other’s way with their mutual presence, eventually tiring Nélida out of rivalry and jealousy. And this silent hatred that the two carried in their thoughts had exploded in the early morning with the swiftness and incoherence of drunken quarrels. A few offensive words, to which the rest of the gang paid no attention, and suddenly, bottles flying in the air, slaps, hand-to-hand fighting. “Something very sad, friend Ojeda.” By the German’s will, the incident would have ended right there. He has one eye swollen and the other has something that looks like a tumor in his cheek. Both the same. Nothing more was needed to make them friends again… But the Belgian sees things differently. He brings up his barony, and I also believe he was a second lieutenant in some national guard or reserve of his country. In short, he’s drawn a saber and is determined to fight his buddy, only to shake his hand calmly afterwards. And the two of them confided in me about this duel. ” Maltrana modestly excused himself. “Don’t be surprised by this predilection.” They’ve learned that I had some challenges back home because they were my breadwinner, and they regard me with as much respect as if I were from the Round Table… In addition, my oratorical triumph last night also had an influence on the new prestige that surrounds me. It’s well known that someone who speaks well is good for everything… even governing nations. And since Fernando couldn’t give him what he needed, he went off in search of weapons. He was going to ask the same question to other distinguished passengers, and if they didn’t “by chance” have a box of pistols, he would arrange the encounter with revolvers, choosing two exactly alike from the many that had been offered to him. As Ojeda strolled around the deck, he saw the adversaries, one on the smoking deck and another on the bow balcony, both of them bearing , without any modesty, the marks of the night’s clash. The gang had divided according to their opinions and affections, one group remaining around the German and another with the baron. The two of them maintained an arrogant attitude, like actors watching their movements, knowing that all eyes were fixed on them. No one remembered Nélida. This clash, which could have tragic consequences, had taken away all interest from the restless girl and her insolent whims. Ojeda saw her coming toward him. She passed the group formed by the Baron and his friends on the terrace of the smoking room. Everyone regarded her with indifference and didn’t even turn their eyes to follow her as she walked away. All their attention was on the hero, who, his cheeks puffed out, was recounting for the fourth time a certain terrible challenge in which he had almost killed his rival. When Nélida joined Fernando, she spoke to him hurriedly. She had been searching for him for an hour all over the ship… What was happening to her because of her brother!… “When you see Papa, tell him you were with me until three in the morning in the dining room and that you found me at one. He will ask you; but even if he doesn’t ask you, tell him that anyway.” She had been imprudent the night before by going in search of him, leaving the key in the door of her cabin. The “fool,” that is, her brother, eager for revenge for the knocks of the afternoon, had closed the door upon noticing her departure, keeping the key for himself. Nélida’s pleas were in vain when, upon returning at dawn, she tried to soften her brother by knocking on his cabin door. He was feigning sleep. And she had spent the rest of the night in a chair in the dining room, in the dark, invisible to the gang, who were swaying back and forth in the turmoil of the recent fight. The servants on duty could attest that she had spent the night in the dining room. It was a simple matter of changing the clocks, ensuring that she had been there long before. All the servants on the ship smiled at the sight and were ready to confirm whatever she asked them… A stormy family scene when the dignified Mr. Kasper and his wife got up, and their son opened the door to the empty cabin. “Nélida spent the night out.” But Nélida came on like a wild beast, and the “fool” had to be snatched from her grasp. That bandit had taken advantage of her brief escape for hygienic reasons to lock the door, leaving her outside the cabin, forced to wander the ship, exposed to danger and gossip… all out of a desire to slander her. She had spent the night sitting in the dining room; she had witnesses: the servants on duty. She could offer an even more important testimony : Dr. Ojeda, who had found her at 1:30, as he was retiring to his cabin, and had accompanied her until 3:00. When would this villain finish tormenting her? The mother sided with her son, looking at her with angry eyes. He was the shame of the family: he was going to kill them with reluctance. “Dad… Dad,” Nélida implored. And Mr. Kasper reflected like a righteous king, stroking his beard. Prudence! Things had to be weighed carefully to be fair. The girl offered evidence, and the fool only knew how to insist on his accusation, without adding any testimony. And he almost sentenced in advance, trying to give the boy a shove. “Malicious and vengeful race! Nothing good could be expected from their blood.” Nélida wasn’t afraid of her parents’ anger, but she needed to convince them of her innocence so they could serve as guarantors before the fearsome brother who awaited her at the end of the voyage. And Fernando still resisted when she spoke to him about running away, as if she were proposing something crazy? No, she wouldn’t go to Buenos Aires: she was determined to escape the next day… But the immediate reality made her insist on her recommendations: “When Dad asks you, you know what to say… And if he doesn’t ask you, talk to him. Do it, my old man; be a good boy. There he is, near the smoking room, talking with Mr. Pérez. He’s very happy to see you: he says you’re the best person on board.” And she gently pushed him, using her seductive gestures and glances to the extreme. Ojeda, with his usual passivity at a woman’s command, followed this impulse, heading off in search of Mr. Kasper. What lies and entanglements with this girl! Fortunately, the day of liberation was approaching; and once on land, he would never see her again. The patriarch smiled at Fernando, without interrupting his conversation with Pérez. They discussed politics, both agreeing on a great love for strong governments and the need to shoot all enemies of authority. Mr. Kasper hated republics, governments of rabble-rousing wretches in frock coats, of hungry chatterboxes. Nations should be ruled by men on horseback, in dazzling uniforms. And, pleased that this fate had befallen him by being born in Germany, he overwhelmed the most famous of republics with irony and sarcasm. He had never wanted to live in Paris. A nation governed by lawyers and journalists! A people without morality and almost without families! Everyone knew this… Eager to keep Fernando, he let Pérez go in search of his third aperitif of the morning, and when they were alone, it was the patriarch who began the explanation Nélida had longed for. He already knew that Mr. Ojeda had accompanied the girl for much of the evening in the dining room. He thanked him for his kindness. He could not have found a better companion than him, a distinguished and serious gentleman. These were quarrels between boys; a stroke of genius from his youngest son, which caused him much grief. The blood of his Creole grandparents was awakening in his veins… His eldest son was more balanced; but as for character, there was the other one. Interesting and formidable people! Nélida and he were calmer, more German, always with the same temperament. He praised his favorite daughter, completely forgetting the incident of the previous night, without asking for further clarification, freeing Ojeda from the need to lie, telling everything himself, as if he knew better than anyone, based solely on Nélida’s testimony. And he accompanied his words with such smiles that Fernando ended up feeling disconcerted. “This gentleman is stupid,” he thought, “as stupid as his youngest son.” But then he seemed to hesitate. “Or maybe he’s a jerk. The biggest scoundrel I’ve ever met.” Meanwhile, Mr. Kasper smoothly transitioned from his daughter’s praise to the American business, a topic he pursued until the midday bell, which broke up the groups, pushing them into the dining room. After lunch, many passengers, instead of lounging on the seats in the conservatory like people without work, quickly drank their coffee and left as if in search of something important. The desks in the lounges and the smoking room were occupied by men and women writing and writing, with a pile of sealed, addressed letters before them . Rapacious hands passed over their heads, seizing envelopes and sheets in abundance. The servants ran around, not knowing how to respond to such diverse summons. They all asked for the same thing: paper and pens. The passengers called out to each other, begging for the loan of a fountain pen. Improvised desks were set up among the coffee cups, as well as on the deck tables and on the pianos. Everyone had suddenly felt the need to write. The next day, the Goethe arrived in port, and the people awoke from their blue reverie that had lasted ten days. They remembered that the world existed, that they were not alone on the planet, and that there was a life beyond the oceanic expanse, with which they were about to make contact again. The men withdrew from the ladies, whom they had courted until then. Frowning and preoccupied, they sought a corner and bit the end of their toothpicks in front of the blank sheet, not knowing how to resume their thoughts. The women seemed more serious and silent, possessed by a sudden asceticism. They avoided conversation, as if it were dangerous to their virtue. They wished to be alone, and in this isolation they moved their pens slowly, hesitating between lines, as if they were afraid of saying too little or too much. Isidro, who was not going to write to anyone–for he only thought of sending his son, a postcard with groups of black people upon landing, ironically contemplated this graphomanic fever. What lies on paper! Stories concocted at the last minute to fill pages, without the truth showing through! What oaths of eternal remembrance, when the poor memories of land had not yet left the luggage and remained shrunken in them, like unused garments, while oblivion and the desire for pleasure without consequences had taken over the ship! Maltrana thought that if this whole avalanche of lies were suddenly to solidify, poor Goethe would sink to the bottom, unable to bear such an enormous weight. Among those writing was Ojeda. Leaning over a table in the winter garden, he was filling pages, just as on the eve of his arrival in Tenerife. But alas! his letter was now a literary and reflective work. Memories came to interrupt his writing, just as before; But these memories evoked not sweet melancholy, but shame and remorse. Barely eleven days had passed between the two letters. What events! What betrayals and vile deeds! He felt doubts about his personality: he believed that during this time a prodigious doubling had taken place in him. He was no longer the same man who wholeheartedly uttered the passionate oaths of the Wagnerian couple on paper. “Away from each other, who will separate us? ” These words brought to mind, as testimony to his infidelity, various female figures: Maud, Mina, that Nélida who hovered near him, who peered her insolent face out of the nearby window and beckoned him with her eyes and her lips to leave as soon as possible. Fortunately, the proximity of the land would dispel this voluptuous intoxication of the Ocean that had kept him in amiable unconsciousness. The memory of Teri, dormant during the trip, resurfaced more vigorously, with greater clarity, swollen by the exaggerated light of remorse. And this remorse seemed to add a new incentive to his love. It was something similar to sacrilege or kinship, which season certain passions with the acrid and attractive scent of the forbidden and the monstrous. Feeling uneasy about his conscience, he adored Teri much more than when he could look at her without fear face to face. “I love her,” he thought, “as I’ve never loved her before. Betrayal and the need to be forgiven give love a new interest. They are like hot sauces that renew the flavor of a familiar dish…” Ah, poor deceived Teri, who perhaps would never find out about these infidelities! He was going to atone for his crimes by adoring her even more vehemently; He was going to live out an ideal honeymoon in his imagination , surrounding it with all the splendors of a cult, like a sinner who prostrates himself in gratitude before a forgiving image that looks upon him with merciful eyes. Strengthened by such resolutions, he continued writing with greater ease and ingenuity, as if he were the same man he had been ten days before and this letter was the same as the one he had sent from Tenerife. But he wasn’t the same; he was forced to admit it. His sins bound him to that ship, and as long as he didn’t leave it, his efforts to return to the past would be useless. Every time his eyes fled from the paper, they found a shadow in the window. It was Nélida, approaching with her audacious smile, unafraid of the public’s curiosity. She coughed to indicate her impatience; she moved her lips, and within them one could discern the silent words of admiring passion: “My master… old man… my black man!” These appeals were useless. He continued his letter, his mind preoccupied with the memory of Teri, but this didn’t prevent him, out of habit or “professional honesty,” from responding with smiles and nods to Nélida’s silent caresses. Tired of Ojeda’s immobility, she finally moved away from the window and headed toward the front of the promenade, where Isidro and Dr. Zurita were. They gazed at the horizon as if expecting to see land. America! Soon! They would see America!… The doctor spoke of this with some emotion. The ship had been sailing along the coast of his beloved continent for days, but from a very distant distance. Now it was approaching it, but land wouldn’t be seen until late at night… And the next morning, the Bay of Rio de Janeiro. Nélida, who had approached the two men, greeting them with a slight nod of her head, looked at the doctor. What a nice old man! To her, all men were nice. He must have been a handsome man in his youth. His eldest son was too. It was a great pity that he liked the chorus girls in the operetta so much and only knew how to talk about Paris, as if women didn’t exist in the rest of the world. Zurita greeted the young woman with the gesture of an old suitor and paid no more attention to her. What an interesting girl!… But he had his family on board, his daughters and sisters-in-law, and he wanted to avoid any of them forming friendships that could be dangerous. The doctor continued speaking under the vague gaze of Nélida, who didn’t understand much of the two men’s conversation. “I can imagine, _che_, what those Spaniards must have felt when they spotted the first island… The joy with which Rodrigo de Triana, Columbus’s sailor, must have let out the cry of “Land!” Maltrana spoke with a certain pride at being able to show off his knowledge in front of Nélida. Furthermore, his oratorical triumph had developed in him a vehement desire to make everyone feel the authority and weight of his words. “There’s a mistake in what you say, doctor, and it’s what almost everyone says anyway. Neither was the one who first discovered the land of America called Rodrigo de Triana, nor was he a sailor of Columbus. No crew member by that name appeared on the first voyage.” The one who shouted the discovery was a certain Rodríguez Bermejo, a native of Seville, and undoubtedly the Admiral, when speaking of him, changed Rodríguez to Rodrigo, and added Triana because he had lived in that neighborhood. Among seafarers, it was very common to distort names by nicknames and place of birth. Furthermore, Juan Rodríguez Bermejo was not a sailor on the ship Santa María, which the Admiral sailed, but on the caravel Pinta, commanded by Pinzón, who always led the squadron because it was the fastest. It was the Pinta that sighted the island of Guanahaní at two in the morning, and Rodríguez Bermejo was the one who shouted “Land!…” But Columbus, upon returning to Spain, said that it was he himself who, at ten o’clock at night, or four hours earlier, had seen a light “like a small candle rising and falling,” and that this light came from the island. It must be taken into account that the Admiral was then about fourteen leagues from the island, and the island is completely low, without a single hill. It was impossible to see it at an hour when the Pinta, which was sailing far ahead, had not yet been able to make out land. The light was undoubtedly that of the binnacle of Pinzón’s caravel, which was advancing between the Admiral’s ship and the still distant island. Isidro was silent for a moment, enjoying the curiosity of the doctor, who was listening very attentively. “The result of all this,” he continued, “was a great injustice. The monarchs had promised a prize of ten thousand maravedís to the first person to discover land, and Columbus, who spared no profit, claimed this sum for himself, basing it on the story of “La Candelica.” Pinzón, who could attest to the truth, had just died; And poor Rodríguez Bermejo, seeing himself unjustly robbed by the great man, with no one heeding his complaints, felt such despair that he went to Africa and renounced the Christian faith, becoming a Moor. This was the end of the first man who ever laid eyes on the American soil. Dr. Zurita was thoughtful. “So, _che_,” he murmured, “that civilized life in our hemisphere begins with an injustice, with an act of favoritism, with the abuse of a boss.” Maltrana nodded: that was it. And the doctor smiled maliciously, as if after knowing this he better understood the history of the New World. Chapter 11. As the ocean liner drew to a halt after so many days of travel, a feeling of strangeness seemed to circulate throughout her, from the keel to the top of the masts. It was shortly after sunrise, and all the passengers, even the least early risers, awoke almost at the same time, with the same start as someone experiencing a sudden difficulty in their respiratory organs. Accustomed to the gentle rocking of the bed, the pendulum-like movement of the hanging clothes, the alternating unevenness of the floor, the slipping of objects on tables and chairs, as a natural part of this oceanic existence, they all felt a certain anguish at seeing everything around them enter into rigid immobility. The ear, accustomed to the incessant rubbing of the foam against the ship’s sides, to the shudder of the atmosphere cut by the momentum of the march, to the distant hum of the engines extending its vibration through the walls and partitions of the gigantic steel vessel, now welcomed with surprise this sudden, absolute, overwhelming silence, as if the ship were floating in nothingness. The presence, beyond the skylights of the cabins, of something extraordinary could be guessed. The air was less pure, without salty emanations, with whiffs of still water that smelled of rotting shellfish, and along with this a distant scent of wild jungle. People rushed to the decks almost half-dressed, and their eyes, accustomed to the infinite blue, rudely encountered the vision of the surrounding lands: black coasts covered to the crest with lustrous forests, a tender green, as if freshly washed by the rain. On both sides of the ship rose the mountains that guarded the entrance to Rio de Janeiro Bay. Astern, the open sea was almost hidden behind rocky islands with lighthouses on their summits. Facing the bow, the vast bay was masked by the advance of small capes that seemed to block the way. The people gazed at the landscape with the eagerness of a discoverer who, after a long voyage, reaches an unknown land, admiring the lushness of the tropical forests, the original shape of the mountains, all of them with bizarre contours. They looked like sketches of monstrous statuary scattered along the ocean, remnants of the playfulness of gigantic hands that had amused themselves with kneading earth and rock. Some heights were conical, of regular slenderness; others evoked the image of a colossal nose, a forehead with eyelashes, a willful chin. These profiles lent themselves to various imaginative combinations, like the clouds at sunset. Some passengers familiar with the bay pointed out to the others “the sleeping man”: a succession of peaks and plateaus that together resemble the outline of a giant lost in sleep, his face uplifted. Resembling in their shape the hesitant attempts of a Nature in a state of infancy or the first artistic endeavors of a primitive mind, these mountains were made of a blackish basalt, reminiscent of the rough bark of a fig tree or the tough hide of an elephant. Between the blocks, where a little humus had accumulated, rose the triumphant tropical forest, a compact mass of intense vegetation—striped white by the tree trunks—that invaded all the slopes, from the banks, whose rocks the sea combed its foam, to the summits, crowned by watchtowers and fortified bastions. The coconut and palm trees gave the landscape an exotic tone for the European eye. Accustomed to the parasol pine of the Mediterranean bays and the fir trees of the northern ports, they enthusiastically greeted this lush vegetation, which evoked in their memories old travel books, adventurers’ exploits, bamboo huts, wild beasts jumping, black dances. It was America just as they had dreamed: at last they were going to set foot on the new continent… And the graceful plane tree, crowned by the wide spray of its varnished leaves, It spread across the entire landscape, forming groups around the white buildings on the beach, climbing the roads in double file, stretching out on the plateaus in dense forests, festooning the peaks with the slenderness of its stem, which made it stand out against the sky like the burst of a green rocket. The steamer remained motionless for some time, awaiting the arrival of the pilot. No one could see the city, hidden behind the folds of the terrain. A red mist floating at the water’s edge obscured the far side of the enormous bay, comparable to an inland sea squeezed between mountains. Those who had witnessed the sunrise shortly before remembered the spectacle with admiration. It was a star of monstrous proportions, so distinct from that of the other hemisphere, burning white-hot and setting everything ablaze with its presence: water, land, and sky. The apparition had been swift, lightning-fast, without the heralding of rosy clouds or gradations of light, without its sphere gradually emerging, as in the dawns of the old world. The horizon had been shattered in flames, as in an explosion, the star rising from the sky above, like a burning projectile, never to stop until its reflection traced a wide band of splendor over the waters of the bay. And from this band, which undulated like the gallop of a luminous flock, fragments of gold escaped to meet the ship, skittered down its flanks , and fled among the spray of the propellers, set in motion once more. The basalt rocks shone, like blocks of metal; the roofs and windows of the beach houses sparkled, like electric searchlights ; the woods gave off light: every leaf was a mirror. The tops of the towers and the masts of the ships anchored in the bay snaked like fiery swords above the fog. The Goethe advanced with majestic slowness, parting the fiery waters , gliding past the wooded slopes, whose greenery was interrupted in places by ancient fortifications of theatrical uselessness. The modern batteries, hidden in the ground, were barely visible by the humps of their movable domes. The interior magnificence of the bay unfolded before the crowd thronged around the sides of the ocean liner. Between the basalt headlands crowned with vegetation, vast beaches appeared with pink villages and white church towers, topped by tiled domes. These buildings, whose forms recalled original Portuguese architecture, took on a Creole appearance with the adornment of coconut palms, banana trees, and other tropical plants forming forests around them. A floating city seemed to rise from the depths of the bay as the _Goethe_ advanced , raising the dark lines of its funnels, masts, and hulls above the immense blue canopy . They were monstrous constructions bristling with cannons, greenish battleships, light warning ships, merchant ships of all colors. Through the streets and crossroads of this floating city resting on its anchors, tiny and moving like aquatic insects, boats and launches of various colors passed and repassed, with plumes of smoke, sails hoisted, or moving alone, without a visible propulsion system. Fragments of the great city began to be seen. The main town was hidden by hills, but behind them, like white tentacles, emerged the boulevards that border the sea, the long neighborhoods that connect it to the surrounding towns. Facing Rio Janeiro, on the opposite shore of the bay, rose another white city, Nictheroy. The two, above the vast blue expanse, projected the sparkle of their roofs and windows, transformed by the sun into sheets of fire. Steamers resembling floating houses traveled from one shore to the other, establishing communication between the two populations. As the ocean liner advanced, they seemed to detach themselves from the coasts. Entire gardens with ornate buildings; hills that supported barracks and forts; pieces of smooth rock on whose elephant-like backs the domes of a battery were rounded. They were islands separated from the mainland by narrow channels. In other places, the sea intruded inland, forming beautiful inlets with leafy promenades and white palaces on their edges. From the ship, one could see the swift passage of automobiles along these shores. Passengers familiar with the city pointed out on the steepest mountains strings of ants crawling among the dark vegetation; funicular trams, with an almost vertical slope; hanging cars that climbed the peaks of bizarre shapes, pointed like needles, curved like a gigantic hump, erect and slender like a minaret or a spear. The Goethe was approaching the city. It appeared behind two islands crowned with palm trees, its first houses advancing between small hills shaped like sugar loaves. The buildings’ Venetian red or yellow facades stood out against the dark mass of the gardens. The ocean liner sailed through waters filled with reflections. The ships and buildings were reproduced inverted in its depths. The masts and groves undulated in this mirror, like multicolored serpents. As the _Goethe_ advanced, it shattered this fantastic world into a thousand pieces, and the fragments of ships and houses receded into the folds of the trembling waters, over which seagulls flapped. The ocean liner’s music began to play a warlike trumpet march. The passengers in the central castle admired the splendors of the bay. The emigrant crowd, crowded at the bow and stern, shouted without knowing why, wanting to express their joy, greeting the motionless ships behind the Goethe with an explosion of cheers, bellows, and whistles. And on the decks of these ships, the crew members, their sleeves rolled up, interrupted their cleaning tasks to respond to the popular greeting with an identical shout. Around the ocean liner, a swarm of steamers and motorboats began to evolve, with people eager to climb onto her deck. Shouts of greeting and the waving of handkerchiefs passed between them and those above . Fellow passengers bid each other farewell with generous offers, even though both were certain they would never see each other again. Cards were exchanged profusely. The Brazilian gentlemen kissed the ladies’ hands, bowing one last time with solemn courtesy. They offered their homes in remote inland locations, and those continuing the voyage smiled gratefully, as if planning to pay them a visit soon. Everyone had dressed in street clothes, both those staying in Rio de Janeiro and those continuing onward. The latter were the most impatient to get ashore. They had only a few hours to visit the city, and the ship’s delay in approaching the dock was greeted by some women with impatient stamping of feet, as if they feared they wouldn’t disembark in time and that the magical city of tropical beauty would suddenly vanish. As the ocean liner moved inland, ever more slowly, a humid, suffocating heat began to be felt. The free ocean breeze, intensified by the speed of the voyage, no longer blew . The ship, almost motionless, was warmed by the temperature of that stretch of sea enclosed between mountains. And everyone thought about what this heat would be like when they stepped ashore. Their starched, shiny collars were beginning to soften; their gloved hands were suffering the torment of confinement. Many were beginning to regret their eagerness to spruce up, which had made them replace their white shipboard suits with more elegant but hot ones. Ojeda found Nélida coming in search of him; but an almost unknown Nélida, with a large hat laden with flowers and a showy dress. She was It was the first time he’d seen her like this. He liked the other woman better, the one with her head uncovered, her white blouse or loose kimono. Now he found in her the clumsy air of a bourgeois girl in her Sunday best. But the young woman, unaware of these thoughts, took advantage of the disorder on deck to repeat her seduction once more. If Fernando wanted, there was still time. She kept her money, her jewelry, and everything of value that could be used for their escape in a purse hanging from her right hand. He only had to order their luggage to be thrown ashore: Nélida would gladly abandon hers. It was easy for them to slip away in the confusion of disembarkation. Ojeda, instead of answering affirmatively, seemed to pity her, with the same commiseration as if she were sick. Ah, crazy head! He had said enough to her the night before to make her understand the absurdity of his proposition. Then she had left, head bowed, without inviting him to follow her to her cabin and showing no desire to go to hers, in a visible bad mood, but apparently convinced. And now, after a night of reflection, she returned with the same propositions, as if her shifting thoughts could not break through to the advice of others. “If you don’t want to,” she insisted sulkily, “if you refuse to accompany me, I’ll run away alone. I don’t need you: I’m beginning to know you. A selfish man… like all of them.” Inflamed with her own words, she looked at him hostilely and brought her face close to his, as if she had difficulty uttering her suddenly hoarse voice . “You don’t love me. You’ve never loved me. You’ve made fun of me… And I thought you were different from the others!… Ah, if only we were alone!… If only we were alone!” She convulsively gripped the handle of the parasol that served as a support, while a flash of aggressiveness passed through her eyes. The politeness of her early years resurfaced in her. She was the girl from the ranch, accustomed to witnessing the farmhands’ fights and her brother’s cruel deeds . But she soon regretted her anger. It was a sign of sadness and spite at the man’s refusal. She preferred to laugh, a forced, insolent, contemptuous laugh. “Goodbye. Don’t talk to me again; as if we’d never met… It’s my fault, for having listened to you.” Spite made her forget who had first desired her approach. She could only imagine the men marching supplicantly behind her, saying the initial word. She moved away from Ojeda with a thoughtful gesture, searching for an insult she had known for many years, perhaps since she learned to speak, but which she couldn’t remember. Suddenly, she smiled with a childish expression of revenge. “Galician!” And she turned her back on him, proud of this farewell greeting. Fernando shrugged his shoulders, satisfied and annoyed at the same time. The long-awaited end of his oceanic life was at hand. All it took was the ship’s approach to land for all the relationships established during the voyage to break down of their own accord. Nélida fled; poor Mina hid, as if she felt more shame than he; Maud was barely a vague memory… The American woman passed by him several times, without noticing him , and even pushed him during one of these movements. She walked trembling from one side of the ship to the other, upright in an elegant traveling dress, a long veil flowing over her back and waving a handkerchief in her right hand. She smiled at a motorboat circling the ocean liner. On the stern of that ship sat a handsome young man wearing white flannel trousers, a straw hat, and a flower in the lapel of his blue jacket. Ojeda recognized him, recalling the photograph he had seen once: it was Mr. Power. The ship had just stopped, lowering its ladder to receive the port employees in charge of checking its papers. Several mulatto or white sailors appeared on the decks, but all alike. Dark-skinned and extremely lean, they were the escort for the port officials. They greeted the ship’s officers with sweeping sweeps of their straw hats and then entered the mess hall, where the documents were spread out among bottles of Hamburger beer. Many of those waiting in the boats boarded with these Brazilians. Ojeda saw Maud rush toward the saloon stairs. Mr. Power entered the deck at the same time, with all the vigor of his athletic beauty, to receive, moved and blushing, the violent embrace of the lady, who almost threw herself at him. Kisses rained down on his trimmed mustache, noisy kisses that seemed to Fernando to be directed at him with malicious intent. She pretended not to see him; her back was to him, but she did not ignore his presence. “This woman!” Ojeda exclaimed mentally. “What wrong have I done to her ?” Why this desire to make me angry, as if he wanted revenge for something?…» He caught a quick glance from her, but he could see no more. Mrs. Power was pulling at her husband. Ah, her big man, her adored big man! The things she had to tell him!… And they disappeared in a tight group, heading for the cabin, as if she didn’t have time to share her news with the handsome man who followed her with admiring and submissive eyes. Another one who was leaving hating him, but without complaints or claims. Goodbye forever!… May he be very happy! Maltrana’s voice sounded behind him, answering his thought. “You won’t deny that it was a very tender scene. What a way that lady gives kisses!… And the pleasant mister was calm and happy, without it occurring to him that on one of these ships, in the middle of the ocean, many things can happen. He saw a look of displeasure begin to spread across his friend’s face at the imprudence of such words, and he quickly changed the subject, focusing on “the gloomy man,” who was standing a few feet away, gazing out at the city. “Look at him… so calm, like someone who fears nothing. But all his calm must be pure comedy; inside, I’d like to see him. He must be afraid they’ll catch him at any moment. That Customs boat with sailors and soldiers is surely coming for him… I’m very sorry I won’t be able to witness the scene; the opening of the mysterious cabin will be interesting … But duty is duty, and as soon as we touch down on the dock , I’ll jump ashore with my people.” He was looking at himself from shoulder to toe, pleased with his appearance, dressed in a black wool suit that made him sweat, his hands hidden in dark gloves, one of them holding a small travel bag. This team wasn’t the most comfortable for landing in the hot city of Rio de Janeiro; but honor, just as it imposes its demands, also has its uniforms, and the supreme judge of a match was obliged to present himself with the ceremonial proper of his grave office. In his satchel, he carried the two weapons he had been able to gather for the fight, after lengthy searches and comparisons of the passengers’ revolvers. The other sponsors, who were involved in a duel for the first time, were of no help, pleading their ignorance. At the last minute, Isidro doubted his work. Perhaps the match would turn out to be somewhat at odds with the rules; but time was pressing; they only had a few hours, and he had done everything he thought necessary. Finding a place for the fight was what worried him most in this unknown land. Some Argentine youths, remembering their walks through Rio de Janeiro on their way to Europe, offered to guide him in exchange for witnessing the duel. Some passengers, noticing Maltrana and his mournful appearance, asked him for news. But were they really going to go through with this madness? The proximity of land seemed to restore the people’s sanity . Others, who had admired these Preparations for death, they were now laughing at them. Most people didn’t remember the event. All their attention was focused on the desire to set foot in that marvelous land as soon as possible, to buy flowers, eat fresh fruit, and sit in a café on Avenida Central, seeing new faces. One of the witnesses, a German merchant, suddenly felt influenced by the opinion of the majority and appealed to the good sense of that gentleman who spoke in public with such success. “Mr. Maltrana: wasn’t it absurd that two good men like them would lend themselves to this dangerous childishness?… Weren’t they in time for their adversaries to hear a good word?…” His compatriot, the representative of an honorable house, who couldn’t compromise its prestige and its displays on madness unbecoming of serious business, would obey him . Let the orator, with his powerful gift of the gab, take charge of convincing the bellicose baron. They were supposed to go down together, but only for lunch at a good hotel, the two rivals explaining themselves over dessert; and he, out of love for good friendship and harmony, would go so far as to sacrifice himself, paying for the champagne for the entire company… But Mr. Maltrana turned a deaf ear to such attempts at seduction. Furthermore, the Belgian never wavered in his warlike tenacity. A young Argentine had been following Maltrana since the day before, participating with a certain admiration in his preparations, helping him find weapons, consulting with comrades familiar with the surroundings of Rio de Janeiro to choose the location of the fight. He had never witnessed a duel, and he showed great interest in seeing one up close. Born in an inland province, with a somewhat coppery complexion, angled eyebrows , and thick, coarse hair, “friend Gómez,” as Isidro called him with his brotherly exuberance, displayed a concentrated enthusiasm when talking about weapons and fights. Although he dressed in the latest fashion, with meticulous correctness, repeating the gestures and phrases learned during a year of high European life, this sallow-skinned gentleman would turn brick red, and his eyes would sparkle whenever the conversation turned to acts of valor and scenes of death, as if the aggressiveness of his Spanish and indigenous ancestors, mingled in long centuries of fighting, were resurrected in his blood. He had heard many shots and seen some corpses fall. Due to family tradition, he mixed in political affairs back in his province. Every election was a battle. The peasants would go to vote in groups behind him, revolvers or knives at their belts. They would insult those in government; the police would intervene in their favor; a general volley of shots would be fired from one side and the other; dead men collapsing on the ballot box , gunshot wounds secretly treated in a remote ranch, without the intervention of doctors or judges… and until the next one!… He knew the gestures with which men die; but he had never seen a challenge such as appears in comedies and novels, and he felt an impatient desire to witness this mortal ceremony, respecting it in advance as something mysterious, of imposing liturgy, worthy of awe like all the extraordinary things he had admired in Europe. For this reason, he was grateful for Maltrana’s protective gestures, his promise to take him with him so that he could witness the meeting in a prominent place, without missing a single detail. The Goethe had just stopped next to a wide dock filled with people. Among the families waiting for the passengers, all dressed in light colors and wearing straw hats, stood out some groups of black porters, who were an object of admiration for the children and maids on board. The pier was closed by a fence, behind which rows of rental cars were waiting for those disembarking. Central Avenue opened up its wide perspective in the distance, with buildings of various styles topped by pointed towers, and sidewalks of black and white flint forming a mosaic. The travelers jostled near the landing stage, which was already resting on the dock. Everyone wanted to leave at once, as if danger was developing behind them, and as soon as they set foot on land they called to one another, forming groups. They walked slowly, as if they missed solid ground, immediately accepting the offers of the guides and car drivers. They felt a yearning for something new, to see everything at once, like explorers who had just set foot in an unknown land. They had little time. Beside the ladder, the steward and the waiters were repeating to the fugitives that the ship would depart at twelve o’clock sharp: not a minute late. Ojeda found himself alone on the dock. Almost all the passengers were already on the Avenue. Isidro had left among the first, with the gravity of a notary, dressed in black, still holding his bag, turning his head to recount his people: his adversaries, his godfathers, “friend Gómez” as his protégé, and two young Argentinians added to the party as spectators. They had occupied three cars, leaving in a single file at full speed, piloted by Gómez, who was pointing the way from the driver’s seat of the first vehicle. “Let’s die, gentlemen!” Fernando accepted the offers of a mulatto chauffeur, and, trusting his whim, set off on an excursion through Rio de Janeiro. Almost lying in the car, he contemplated the parade of streets and alleys, which now returned to his memory like vague images of previous trips, but with major renovations. He drove along the Avenue, which was sparsely populated at that early morning hour. His European preoccupations made him feel strange when he saw, alongside the poorly dressed black men and the puffy black women with monstrous faces and a handkerchief wrapped around their curly heads, others of the same race elegantly dressed, petulantly waving their canes and wearing a flower in their lapels. Ladies of identical color flaunted the latest Parisian fashions, proudly swinging their hips and their enormous size, their lips thrusting disdainfully from beneath the brim of a flowered hat. Then he passed along the avenues of Bota Fuogo and Beira Mar, seeing on one side the smooth blue of the coves and on the other modern palaces and hotels with their gardens of tropical vegetation, where the broad, fanning leaves predominated. Occasionally, narrow streets lined with double rows of palm trees opened up from these masses of recent buildings. They extended their plumage to a height three or four times greater than the buildings themselves, straight as the shafts of a colonnade, aligned like a troop of old soldiers, and offering in the background the glimpse of a small mansion of milky whiteness. Other times, it was a church that appeared equally white, of a dawn intensity comparable only to that of foam, with a hood of green and blue tiles, and around it graceful palm trees and gigantic rosebushes. Facing these vestiges of the time of the Empire, Fernando conjured up in his imagination the typical gentleman of traditional Brazil, just as he had seen him in books and engravings: gallant in his manner, sentimental and poetic like a Lusitanian, his face gaunt and pale, with a wide goatee, sweating beneath his black frock coat and the shiny cylinder of his top hat, a parasol under his arm, and white linen trousers as all concessions to the climate of his splendid country. The car took him to a beach through gorges and tunnels pierced in the basalt, beyond which the village reappeared. He followed roads cut into the cornice between the luminous bay and almost vertical slopes covered with metallic-green forests. He crossed suburbs populated by people of African race, where the sound of the trumpet made enormous, busty black women , bent over by the volume of their hanging bellies, appear at the doors, and made countless small naked devils run behind the wheels, with their heads like a ball of oily tow, and displaying in the middle of their abdomens their navels, raised like a button. Ojeda spent a long time in the Botanical Garden, admiring the gigantic Palm trees. Cracked by a long life, resonating under the impact like hollow columns, the dry branches and bark splintered like flakes of old age , their noise magnified by the height of the collapse. The proximity of a mountain, blocking all breeze, made the heat more intense. He fled this greenhouse, sweating, and the car drove him back to the Avenida as if he’d had enough of the city’s attractions. The chauffeur spoke of the beautiful surroundings, offering to take him to Tijuca, praising the marvelous lushness of its forests. On the terrace of a café, an umbrella waved in greeting. Then, two people left a table, running toward the car, which stopped instantly. It was Nélida and her brother. She smiled at Fernando, as if nothing had happened between them, caressing him with her eyes. The brother took a quick liking to Ojeda upon seeing him in the car, and smiled back, praising the vehicle’s good looks. He restrained himself from jumping onto the box and taking the seat next to the driver. Nélida lamented her parents’ heaviness. It was impossible to see anything with these old people. They had taken a quick stroll through the city, and there they were, on the café terrace, exhausted by the heat, talking about returning to the ship, with no strength left for another excursion. And she and her brother were protesting, eager to see everything. “Take us with you,” she murmured in Fernando’s ear. And without waiting for his approval, she took a few steps toward the café to speak to her parents, but without approaching them. “Dad, Mom: we’re going with Dr. Ojeda.” She didn’t bother listening to their response either. She gave her brother a push. “Come on, silly boy; climb into the car next to the driver.” And while the “sim” obeyed her, she sat next to her lover. The vehicle sped off, without any of them being able to hear the recommendations their mother was making, sitting up in her seat. Ojeda didn’t know where to go, and consulted Nélida. “Somewhere nice,” she repeated several times. And the chauffeur, as if after such words a mistake were impossible, set off for Tijuca. She took one of her lover’s hands in hers, and as she leaned back in the seat, she almost rested her head on his shoulder. She seemed remorseful for her scene on the ship a few hours earlier. Fernando knew her character; he had to forgive her. And with this desire for forgiveness, she was close to kissing him right in the street. Other open-top cars carrying passengers from the Goethe were passing by . Their number seemed to have multiplied prodigiously as they split into groups. Almost all the vehicles rolling through the city at that hour were occupied by them. They could also be seen on the streetcars or parked outside shops and cafes. They greeted each other with spontaneous joy, waving their hands and shouting as if they were fellow countrymen bumping into each other after a long absence. Alarmed by these encounters, Fernando recommended a certain prudence in her attitude. They could see them: later, they would be talked about on the ship. Furthermore, she pointed to her brother, sitting two steps away from them, showing them her back, while trying to amaze the chauffeur with her vast erudition on automobile brands. But Nélida shrugged . What did she care about that fool! If only God would arrange things so that he would fall off his seat and the wheels would turn him into mush! Then she squeezed Fernando’s hand more tightly, looking into his eyes. “My old man, say you forgive me… Oh, if only you would! If only you would! ” Once again, the desire to escape was awakened in her. She spoke of this without restraint, as if her brother couldn’t hear her. That wretch didn’t exist for her: she despised him. And yet, due to a contradiction in her character, she felt at the same time great fear thinking about what he might say when he arrived in Buenos Aires. There was still time. She implored Fernando’s consent by putting pleading eyes. They would abandon their brother under any pretext, and he would return to the ship with his parents, tired of waiting. But Ojeda greeted such proposals with a compassionate smile. She was a madwoman: all efforts to dissuade her were useless. She then appealed to tears, a woman’s last resort; and Fernando, to distract her, began to extol the beauty of the landscape. He interrupted her desperate reflections with appeals to her to fix her eyes on the dense grove of trees and the marvelous view of the bay. The remedy was effective. “You don’t love me, you’ve deceived me!” Nélida moaned. “You’re letting me go to meet my brother. You’ll be responsible for what happens.” And when she seemed most distressed, the sight of a brook among the rocks, of an enormous tree, or of the distant sea peeking through the colonnade of trunks, would make her sit up in her seat with enthusiasm and smile with pleasure, while a few lingering tears trickled from her eyelids, reddening her nose. The car had left the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro behind. It climbed a winding road through the woods toward the town of Boa Vista, and with each turn the panorama grew wider and the wind grew fresher. On one side of the slope, the mountain extended its rapid decline of dark rocks, of a pachydermic roughness. The fertile humus, the tropical temperature, the humidity that flowed everywhere, had covered these slopes with prodigious vegetation. It emerged from the piled earth between the black blocks, from the cracks and hollows of the stone, as if it held a power of fertility in that marvelous landscape. These trees, a dark green, had glossy leaves, without the slightest dusty veil, as if they had been freshly washed. Their trunks did not reach a large diameter; rather, they seemed graceful and weak due to their straight slenderness and enormous height. The humidity that continually refreshed their roots made them grow tightly like the stems of grass. The desire to receive the sun’s caress drove them upwards in a helter-skelter rush, striving to surpass one another. They were like strands of an immense green hair. The life force of each tree expanded in a straight line, finding no space to expand in such a crowd. The slender, towering trunks had a small canopy at their tops, but their enormous number formed a compact green mass, a vault that kept the ground in perpetual shadow. As the sun’s rays filtered through the shell of leaves, they reached the damp earth like gold rods slanting through the shadows of the underground. In this semi-darkness, brightly winged insects moved; colorful beetles scurried; threads of water oozing through the stone meandered, joining in rills that rumbled down the sides of the road. Palm trees raised their tufted minarets above the uniform mass of the forest . Some leafless trunks were covered with hanging fiber canopies, resembling garments that fell in tatters. Across the road, between the palisade of trunks and the tops of the trees growing on the slope, the city and the bay were revealed with every twist. The masses of red and brown roofs were evenly spaced out in the distance. Avenues and streets formed a regular crisscrossing of white ribbons. Human movement was noticeable in them like a faint swarm. In places, it was interrupted by the rapid glide of a few bright points: automobiles and streetcars. Many towers rose above this hamlet: some white or pink, with hoods of colored tiles; others, with iron and pointed caps and cement walls. And serving as a background to the panorama was the enormous, tranquil crown of the bay, with its smooth blue speckled with ships, fringed by white villages and enclosed between black mountains with almost human profiles. The chauffeur was showing off with patriotic pride the new beauties that The landscape offered itself with every turn of the wheel. She gave names to the clusters of hamlets and the humped peaks of the summits. She spoke of the beauties of Tijuca, which were yet to be seen: the Cascatinha, a waterfall beyond the Alto de Boa Vista; the Cascada Grande; the Mesa do Imperador; the Agaziz Caves; the “Pablo and Virginia Cave.” Nélida clapped her hands with enthusiasm at the last name. She wanted to see this place as soon as possible. She vaguely remembered a book she had read with the same title. It was a love story, and this was enough to excite her curiosity. “Let’s go see Pablo and Virginia’s place right away,” she demanded with the impetus of a capricious child. “It must be very beautiful…” I didn’t know you were from this country. The car arrived at Alto de Boa Vista, a large square bordered by the forest and some low houses, with gardens in the center and a concert hall. The vehicle plunged back into the darkness of the grove along a narrow, sloping road. The vegetation was denser, wilder, crowding the slopes of ravines and precipices. The road crossed from one height to another over single-arched bridges. The noise of the car made strange rodents basking in the sun along the road scurry dizzily on all fours . In the undergrowth, a mysterious stir of hidden animals could be discerned, fleeing in terror, snapping dry branches and causing leaves to rain down. Near Cascatinha, as they passed a bend in the lonely road, they saw three stopped cars, and nearby, men coming and going. Ojeda immediately sensed who they were, at the same time that Nélida’s brother thought he recognized them, calling them by name. They had stumbled upon Maltrana and his troops. They were about to fall in the middle of the fight. Fernando stood up, shouting imperiously to the driver to back up. He had to impose his will on his two companions, who seemed excited by the encounter. He grabbed their arms to keep them from jumping to the ground while the driver struggled down the narrow road. The brother wanted to join his friends, as if in this solitude they could give him some gift. Nélida watched anxiously, her nostrils twitching with excitement. “How interesting! To see the men fighting! And maybe one of them would get hurt!” She spoke of this as a beautiful spectacle she was going to lose because of Ojeda. It didn’t occur to her for a moment that she might be the original cause of this event. She tried to confront Fernando. She protested his impositions and spoke to him formally, to make her protests even more forceful. “I want to see all of Tijuca; I want to go where Pablo and Virginia lived. Remember your promise: a man must keep his word.” He replied that the ship was leaving at twelve, and a visit to the entire forest would require many hours. As for Pablo and Virginia, they weren’t from Brazil, nor did the cave have anything to do with them other than their names. “I want to see them,” Nélida repeated. “You’re just saying that to deceive me. I don’t feel like going back to the city.” But Ojeda opportunely remembered the Rio de Janeiro market, where all kinds of tropical animals were for sale : monkeys of various colors, talking parrots, colorful parrots. He offered her
a gift to subdue her: she could choose from these marvels of Brazilian fauna. And that promise was enough for her, forgetting those she was leaving behind, to return to the loving familiarity. “Really, old man? Are you going to give me a little monkey… like this… like this?” And closing the distance between her hands, she imagined an impossibly small ape. Don’t you think a talking parrot is better ?… Are you saying you’ll give me both?… Ah, my rich old man… my black man! And since they were in the middle of the woods, she went for Ojeda, kissing him behind her brother’s back. The rapid appearance of the car near the Cascatinha had caused some alarm in Maltrana and his companions. The peacemaker, who had so begged Isidro to prevent the incident, felt great fear and no less joy when he noticed the arrival of the automobile. Without a doubt, it was the police, who, warned by someone on the ship, were coming to surprise them. And the others thought the same. Therefore, when the automobile turned around, moving away, they all wanted to end the act as quickly as possible, avoiding a surprise they considered imminent. They had been wandering around the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro for two hours. The young Argentinians guiding the procession had indicated several suitable places for the meeting. They arrived at them and always met annoying passersby, or saw nearby houses that seemed to be vomiting children and dogs attracted by the presence of the automobiles. A driver, without guessing the travelers’ purpose, had suggested an excursion to Tijuca. And after passing the Alto de Boa Vista, while filming in the heart of the forest, they had been seduced by the beautiful panorama of the Cascatinha. “Here,” Isidro ordered with his indisputable authority. ” A challenge has never been undertaken with such a beautiful backdrop. What a shame a cinematographer isn’t coming with us! What a waste of film the world is!…” The hillside near the road receded, forming a narrow valley. The rock appeared vertically cut between the trees, and from the top of it, a mass of water plummeted, colliding with the protruding points of the basalt. This water boiled in several falls with white foaming streams. The fine dust raised by its bubbles took on the reflections of irises in the sunlight. The stones, blackened and sweaty with humidity, shone like metallic blocks. The tropical vegetation moved the broad hands of its dripping leaves. The waterfall plunged into a small lagoon, then flowed, foaming and murmuring, through the steep channels between the rocks. The tangled vegetation and loose rocks left only a small area of uneven ground uncovered and accessible. Maltrana considered the difficulties this terrain presented for combat, but he was seduced by its beauty and wanted to go no further. Where could he find a more interesting setting for a possible death? He had to raise his voice, for the crash of the waters dominated all other sounds. It was like the orchestral tremolos that in the theater give a moving enhancement to words and gestures. Isidro felt larger than life in this humid and sonorous environment. The motionless forest seemed to contemplate him with its thousand green eyes, half in amazement and half in curiosity. He began to give orders to the other godfathers, who followed him like neophytes follow the high priest of a new cult. “Have the cars withdraw a little beyond the waterfall! It was not advisable for the drivers to witness the act.” And Maltrana was obeyed. The chauffeurs backed up their carriages; but then, with their hands behind their backs, feigning distraction, they slyly returned to the same spot, eager to know how this mystery would turn out. With the same success, he got rid of another importunate witness: a dark-skinned boy, bare-legged and wearing a large straw hat, who, upon seeing the procession arrive, hurried out from under a reed awning, cleaning a glass in a stream and then offering it to the crowd, filled to the brim with water . He was the guardian spirit of the waterfall. Under his shade, on a small table, he had several glass jars with sugar cubes and other sweets, blackened and cardboardy with time. He spent hours in absolute solitude, contemplating the fluttering of the colorful birds in the nearby foliage, extracting melodies from the monotonous murmur of the waters, perhaps speaking in his mind to the naiads of the Cascatinha, who showed him in their graceful swirling, their rumps of white foam and velvety irises. “Here, boy,” he said, “and get out of here.” Maltrana got one of the witnesses to give him some coins to help him leave, and he also called him “menino”—the only Portuguese he knew— with which he thought he was flattering him. But the “menino” pocketed the coins, and instead of leaving, he clung to him, as if sensing his importance. And he couldn’t move without finding the mulatto in front of him, his hat pushed back, raising his eyes to his, absorbing his words and gestures with his gaze, as if he were in the presence of a magician and didn’t want to miss a single detail. Isidro resigned himself to these disobediences, common stumbles of reality… But he had to proceed quickly. Onward! With long strides, he measured a space of twenty meters, which was the agreed-upon distance on a piece of paper he carried in his hand. The distance marked by his steps was slightly greater . But he was the one who had proposed the twenty meters, and by the same right he could measure thirty or forty if he wished… A minor detail. “Onward too!” After marking the position of each opponent with a branch, he stood back, surveying the terrain like an artist surveying his work as a whole. It was somewhat uneven. One of the two would be very high up, his belly almost at the level of his opponent’s head. But he had to accept the imperfections of the terrain: the circumstances didn’t allow for great meticulousness in the preparations. An equally minor detail. “Onward again!” Only then did he turn his head, focusing on his companions. To one side were the godfathers, who followed their operations with respectful silence, not daring to contribute their disturbing ignorance to them. Further away, discreetly separated, were the two enemies, their backs turned to each other, very busy following the fall of the water or the fluttering of birds above the treetops. Friend Gómez, with his eager curiosity for tragic events, had followed him in these preparations. Behind him came the mulatto, his eyes widening in astonishment as he understood nothing of such witchcraft. The two young Argentinians attached to the expedition had climbed to the top of a rock and sat there with their legs dangling. From below, they could see everything just as well, but they considered themselves mere spectators and had chosen to occupy a privileged position, a box, instead of remaining mingled with the performers. Maltrana, tossing a coin in the air, drew lots for each of the combatants’ places. Then he escorted them to their respective places with a funereal gravity. He appreciated them very much, “My dear friends!” but in such situations, affection disappears, and only duty speaks, terrible duty. Having each one in his position, he would feel him up thoroughly, removing from his clothing his wallet, purse, keys, papers, anything that might be an obstacle to a fatal bullet. Then he would button up his jacket, turn up his collar so that the white of his shirt wouldn’t serve as a target, and fondle both of them affectionately, the way a mother fondles her children before sending them out for a walk. But his kindness didn’t extend beyond touch. On the other hand, that authoritarian and cruel look! That voice, like a funeral bell as he formulated his terrifying recommendations! The implacable director would place the weapons in their hands in a few moments, but before that, he dictated to each of them the details of the fight, so that no mistakes would be made. When both were ready, he would give the command “Fire!” adding: “One… two… three!” They were to fire within the space between these three numbers. Anyone who fired a shot, sooner or later, “would be disqualified… he would be a felon, a wretch… and the contempt of everyone who has honor would fall upon him, haunting him for the rest of his life. Terrible Maltrana!” He rolled his eyes with a stunned expression when speaking of felonies and betrayals, as if he had at his disposal horrible punishments for the guilty. His voice took on a terrifying tone, and from that moment on, the two contenders no longer thought about aiming well or the possibility of being wounded. Their only concern was not to incur the wrath of that man who could brand them with an eternal stigma in the world of honor; to follow his lessons like obedient disciples; to fire—no matter where the bullet went—within the designated time limit. “Fire: one, two, three. After this, Maltrana decided to open the carry-on bag that contained his arsenal. He extracted two identical revolvers from the ship and, with slow solemnity, opened them so that all the sponsors could examine their interior. Friend Gómez, as a weapons expert, witnessed the ceremony. “There’s only one cartridge!” he exclaimed, scandalized, as if he had just discovered an irregularity. Maltrana looked at him sternly. Young man: the conditions of the combat had been established in advance by the serious people present. They would only need two bullets to be changed. “But there’s only one in each revolver,” the mestizo gentleman protested. “Young man,” Maltrana repeated with protective condescension, ” changing two bullets means each combatant only fires one.” And as he suspected a hint of mockery in Gómez’s coppery face and narrow eyes, he added: “No more is needed to kill a man. All those I’ve seen die had enough with one bullet. Don’t forget that, young man. ” The young man fell silent, regretting his audacity, feeling respect for that extraordinary man who had witnessed so many battles and deaths.
To erase the negative effect of his objections, he offered to carry the suitcase of weapons to the place where the adversaries were. The three godfathers, considering their preparatory work, which could not have been more passive, finished, instinctively took a few steps back. The gunpowder was about to speak. Maltrana, extracting a revolver from its hiding place, locked it, and placed it in the Baron’s hand, then walked away toward the other combatant. Gómez gave some quick advice to the Belgian, who remained on guard with his weapon raised. “Comrade, aim for the feet. I know revolvers; they always send the bullet above. Believe me: at the feet… always at the feet, and you’ll surely hit someone. ” Then, from the opposite side, he gave the same advice in a low voice, his eyes shining with enthusiasm. “At the feet, comrade. Shoot at his feet, and you’ll put the bullet in his stomach. I know something about this…” Both thanked him for his kind advice with a slight nod. But they looked worried; they were thinking of other things; they strained their ears to avoid suffering the consequences of a fatal delay: they repeated the same thing mentally: “One, two, three…” Maltrana went to position himself on the edge of the firing line, between the two combatants, a little closer to the German, who was occupying the high position. He suspected for a moment that he was too close and could be hit by a bullet on its deflection. But he was the director; he had organized everything, and everyone owed him obedience. The weapons were loaded by him, and it was neither acceptable nor correct for a projectile to allow itself the insolence of going after them. Gómez also hesitated for a moment whether to retreat, but when he saw the maestro motionless, he pressed close to him. Where one man was, another might as well be. Besides, he thought he would lose something of this new spectacle, from which he expected great excitement, if he retreated a few steps. Maltrana prepared to begin the duel, but before doing so, like an actor preparing the decisive line and looking at the audience, he turned his eyes around him. A moment of emotion. The other godfathers had moved even further away; The three drivers, finally informed of the purpose of their adventure, gathered at the foot of a rock, their brown heads thrust forward, their eyes wide open, but without any sign of emotion. The two Argentinians remained on top of the rock, Their legs dangling, silent and attentive like spectators watching the curtain rise. The boy from the waterfall had fled at the sight of the revolvers, trotting like a restless dog, taking refuge under the curtain. From there, as if fearing for the safety of those jars of sweets, which were the family’s fortune, he held them in his arms, his face moving forward, looking at everything with the eyes of a frightened antelope. The landscape seemed to reflect the general emotion. The parrots in the nearby thickets were no longer croaking; the monkeys had stopped jumping among the branches; a long time passed without the sound of a leaf or a piece of tree bark falling. Even the waterfall seemed to sing softly, as if the white divinities hidden in its lymph were stammering and frightened . Maltrana suddenly remembered that he was the first speaker aboard the Goethe, and he thought it appropriate to bring his eloquence to bear. He would never find a better setting for a speech. And the first to be moved by the pathos of his words and the trembling in his voice was himself. He recalled the close friendship that had united the two adversaries, their journey “braving the perils of the sea.” A moment of forgetfulness or error had led to a regrettable incident; but good knights, when they reached where they had reached, without fear or reproach, could still give themselves a fair explanation, avoiding the incident. One godfather approved; another twisted his face, possessed by a sudden bellicosity. They hadn’t come all the way to hear sermons. They should fire their weapons quickly, and escape, before they could be surprised. The two Argentinians looked at each other from the top of the rock. “Wow! And how well the Galician speaks!” Friend Gómez murmured, as if beginning to lose faith in the master: “What a ceremony it is for two men to kill each other!… What a blunder!” Isidro was truly moved, with an emotion somewhat resembling fear. These hastily arranged challenges, just to get out of the way, often proved the most tragic. A terrifying premonition warned him that the missiles were not going to miss. Someone was going to be hit. And since the adversaries remained silent and the impatience of the others was evident, Maltrana considered his eloquence a failure. “Whatever fate may desire…” He took off his hat with theatrical solemnity; he bowed his head as if fate were passing before him . “I salute two gentlemen who are about to die.” He said this with genuine emotion, as if the death of both were an inevitable event for him; and, firming his throat with a long, drawn-out cough, he let out the commands. “Ready?… Fire!” One… two… He couldn’t finish. Almost simultaneously, two noises resembling the clang of tablets sounded, two cracks of a whip with two puffs of smoke. Both contenders were still standing; they looked at each other as if surprised that nothing had happened. Suddenly, the baron began to run toward his enemy, who advanced to meet him, and their chests collided, while their arms crossed spontaneously in a loving squeeze. The Argentines stirred in their height with voices of surprise and protest. They weren’t shooting anymore? And that was all?… Their money had been stolen. “Tongo… tongo!” they shouted simultaneously. One of them, picking up a loose piece of rock, wanted to throw it as a congratulatory gesture at the reconciled adversaries. The other went to imitate him; but both stopped, surprised, then slid down the rock… There was a wounded man. Maltrana was bent over with one foot between his hands. Gomez tried to hold him; the sponsors were running toward him. After the shots, he felt a shock in his right foot, a violent shock, much more painful than a stamp, and which shook every part of his body with shudders of agony. He was wounded, and his anxiety increased when he looked at his foot and saw no sign of perforation or dripping blood. blood. Gómez was indignant at the clumsiness of one of the two shooters. “You son of a bitch!… If it had hit me!” His eyes shone alarmingly just at the thought that that stray bullet could have hit him. He instinctively put a hand to his waist. His friend Gómez had responded to the challenge by carrying his revolver, just in case. They all surrounded Isidro, groping him, searching in vain for the wound that was drawing deep sighs from him. No trace of the bullet. Only a slight depression of the leather shoe on the same spot numbed by pain. Gómez, meanwhile, searched with his head down, examining the ground. His instinct as a countryman, accustomed to studying the smallest features of the immense Argentine plain, and his acquaintance with the marvelous “trackers,” diviners of the Pampas, led him to find the explanation for this mystery. He pointed a few steps away to a tiny hole in the ground. The bullet was buried there. Then he showed a recently broken pebble, judging by the whiteness of its interior fragments. This was the cause of everything. The projectile, before sinking into the ground, had struck a stone near Maltrana’s feet, and it was the fragments of it that had struck him. Isidro, upon learning that he wasn’t hurt, felt less pain. “It’s nothing, gentlemen. Thank you very much.” Friend Gómez, disappointed by the peaceful end of the event, and at the same time furious at the possibility that a bullet had hit him while he was standing next to the teacher, muttered tenaciously: “Wow! These gringos are so unlucky! They’re such bad shooters!” And his two compatriots, despite the distraction caused by the incident with Maltrana, continued shouting with mocking expressions: “Scam… scam!” Isidro felt annoyed by the gossip of these “dear friends” who had attended the meeting out of his benevolence. He didn’t know what the word “tongo” might mean; but in case it was equivalent to farce or deception, he quickly said with all his authority: “This has been a beautiful meeting, do you hear me, young people?… I say so, having witnessed many similar events… And since there’s nothing left to do, let’s go and have a drink. ” The adversaries, in the joy of their reconciliation, had barely noticed each other. They shook hands, smiled at each other like lovers. Everyone experienced the joy of living that comes after danger; everyone suddenly suffered the hunger that inevitably follows emotion. The car engines roared again, the boy from the waterfall abandoned his refuge with the illusory hope that they would notice him and give him something to say goodbye , and once again Maltrana and his entourage were seen speeding through the lush vegetation of Tijuca. But now they weren’t silent and preoccupied; the sun was brighter, the trees greener. Everyone was taking in the beauty of the birds, their colorful plumage vibrating in the air. The speed of the vehicles left behind their trail of dust and smoke a tremor of shaken trees, of falling leaves, of clashing branches, with the cries and leaps of the restless apes sheltered in their canopy. Upon reaching Boa Vista, they stopped in front of a grocery store that was also a tavern and café: the only establishment they found open. Their entry was a swarm, like a starving invasion. Preparations for the duel had forced them to leave the ship without lunch. The shop owner, a scheming Spaniard, didn’t know how to handle so many different requests. They wanted food; they indicated dishes they liked, and the shopkeeper answered them all affirmatively, but postponed fulfilling his promises for an hour or two, the time needed to travel to and from Rio de Janeiro. They then pounced on the food items in plain sight: Pastries and sweets from various eras, artfully speckled with fly droppings despite their enclosure between glass panes. The owner, behind the counter, tended to the remedy for this general hunger by opening cans of sardines and cutting slices of soft sausage. Everything passed in an extravagant mixture through their eager esophagus: the sausage mixed with soda, the pastries bathed in sardine oil. And when their starving nervousness began to calm, they began to talk about the challenge as if it were a distant event, a historical fact wrapped in the marvelous mists of distance, which magnifies everything. The scoffers who had shouted “Fixed!” changed their opinions when they saw themselves far from the scene of the battle. A bullet could have brought down either of the two adversaries with the same ease that it had almost left Maltrana lame. And now that they felt a pleasant heaviness in their stomachs, the matter seemed very worthy of respect. Gómez, too, was beginning to feel a certain pride for having witnessed the duel. An interesting spectacle he could tell his friends about. And, possessed by a sudden respect for the combatants, he wanted to dazzle the German with a tale of the political battles back in his province, tenacious encounters with revolvers in hand, with no witnesses other than the peons, who also fired; gaucho challenges, never ending without bloodshed. The Belgian had cornered Maltrana. They were going to part ways in Rio de Janeiro, but he couldn’t remain like that, with nothing more than pleasantries, without a document attesting to his chivalrous conduct. He needed the record of the encounter to add to the many others in his archives of honor. Once again, the Spaniard from the store was pressed by the calls of those gentlemen, who were asking for all kinds of stationery, as if they were in an office. He could only offer them a bottle of light-colored ink and a blunt pen. As for paper, Isidro, who wanted sheets of parchment with gilt edges for this document destined for a long life, had to be content with a block of commercial paper bearing the establishment’s letterhead in one corner: “Frutos López. Productos do paiz e estrangeiros.” But honor ennobles everything it touches, and he applied himself to drafting a document, with passages of dramatic emotion, assisted by the Baron, who relieved him of his doubts about French syntax. Because the deed was in French, for greater solemnity; the Belgian did not consider it acceptable in any other language. The rest of the party began to grow impatient with this laborious task. Nothing remained in the shop worth devouring. Gómez and his compatriots amused themselves by jumping on the benches in the plaza. The godparents thought nostalgically about the ship’s dining room. It was eleven o’clock on the shop clock, and the Goethe was sailing at twelve. They were afraid of being stranded because of this document, and so they sighed with satisfaction as they hurriedly signed it, then rushed to their cars. Around noon, the ocean liner roared its warning. The passengers who had been in the cafes along the Avenue responded to this first call, bored with the wait and the heat, not knowing what to do in the city, and eager to be out on the open ocean as soon as possible under the free sea breeze. They returned to their cabins to regain their fresh travel clothes, shedding their sweaty garments. They strolled the decks with the same satisfaction of someone savoring the gift of their own home after a difficult voyage. They entered the ship with a feeling of gratitude, as if returning to their hometown. They experienced the well-being of an owner who regains the comforts of their home upon finding all their personal belongings, which reminded them of a ten-day ocean life, equivalent to ten years, hung and in order. The chimney roared for the second time and everyone leaned on the railings to witness the arrival of the other companions. Cars sped onto the dock, coming to a stop in front of the ship, on the other side of the fence. Along with the passengers, large bouquets of flowers, baskets of tropical fruit, monkeys, and parrots jumped onto the shoulders of their new owners, struggling to free themselves from the bonds that held them. The third roar sounded, and the passengers looked at each other, consulting to see how many remained on land. Very few were missing. People crowded around the railings, greeting those arriving late with shouts and ironic applause. At the bow and stern, the emigrants formed two dark masses, above which the small white circles of their heads bobbed . They gazed from afar at that city they had been unable to disembark, as prisoners on a cruise ship gaze at landscapes and seasons through the openings of a police cruiser. The only thing they knew of this land was the fruit that black market vendors threw at them from the dock. Many of them, tired of admiring the palm trees and whitewashed houses, ended up turning their backs, taking refuge in the cooler , shadier spots. They only felt real interest in the country of their destination, the land of hope, where, according to their reports, fortune impatiently awaited them. They were going to Buenos Aires. An explosion of shouts and applause greeted the car in which Nélida arrived with her brother and Ojeda. The parents, who had been among the first to return to the ship, waited impatiently. But Mr. Kasper cut short the bellicosity of his husband, irritated by this delay, with a warm welcome. Together they admired the small red and green bird that Nélida held in one hand. She frequently brought it to her cheeks, kissing its curved beak. The desire for novelty made him later claim a monkey that his brother was carrying on his shoulder, a restless little beast with crazed eyes and a tail twice as long as its body. The boy tried to resist: a sweet rapport had been established between him and the monkey from the first moment. But Nélida snatched it away, running her cool lips over the ape’s trembling head. The Kaspers were moved to learn that the two animals were a gift from Dr. Ojeda. They looked around to thank him for his attention to the girl, but he had retired to his cabin some time ago, wishing to escape Nélida’s company as soon as possible. They had arrived at the ship in open hostility. Until the last moment, she spoke of the advisability of eloping. She suggested new walks through the interior of Rio de Janeiro, lingering in cafes and shops, with the obvious intention of waiting for time to pass and for the ocean liner to sail without them. In the end, Ojeda had become irritated, authoritarianly imposing the immediate return of the _Goethe_. And Nélida, offended, had only had tender words and caresses for the two animals since then. As for him, she detested him. The steamer began to set sail. The ropes that tied it to land were released; the bow moved away from the dock. Music roared the departure march. Some passengers grew restless, reminding those in the retinue of the challenge. They were going to be left on land. Undoubtedly, a misfortune had occurred. And when everyone, with contagious pessimism, assumed the catastrophe was certain, there was a general movement toward the railing that faced the dock. They were arriving! The three automobiles left the Avenue at full speed, and once next to the railing, the passengers jumped out of their seats, running at full speed toward the ship. At that moment, its side slowly lifted away from the dock. They had to lower the ladder again. One more minute, and they would have had to catch up with the Goethe in a boat in the middle of the bay. Maltrana boarded first with his carry-on bag, refusing to answer the questions of the curious. He was in a hurry to get to his cabin to change his clothes. The people, seeing that only the German was returning with his sponsors and companions, assumed the catastrophe was certain, with the fans that the masses display for tragic endings. The Belgian baron was wounded: perhaps he had died at that hour. The news spread around the promenade, awakening a chorus of lamentations from the ladies: ” Such a fine young man! What a disgrace!” The German’s friends, seeing him healthy and triumphant, took him to the smoking room with hugs and pats on the back. The champagne corks popped as a prologue to the description of the battle. Some passengers turned their backs in indignation so as not to witness this apology for homicide. Looking at the increasingly distant dock, with their suddenly diminished figures, they noticed a man waving his hat and opening his arms in wild farewell movements. “But he’s there!… It’s the Belgian, saying goodbye to us!” The news made the passengers run en masse to one side of the steamer. Yes; it was him: everyone recognized him. And despite the distance, most of them shouted, sending him a greeting across the blue water, amid the fluttering of seagulls and the palm trees of an island that seemed to advance little by little, masking the pier. In the center of the city, the Belgian had said goodbye to the party to stay at his hotel. But then he changed his mind. His duty was to go and say goodbye to his other traveling companions. Who knows what lies those good friends would tell when recounting the challenge! It had to be made clear that he was as unharmed as the other… He ran to the port, shaking with despair as he saw the ship moving away without anyone noticing him. And when the roar of greeting finally reached his ears, he believed himself rewarded for all his troubles and hardships as a man of honor. “Goodbye, Goethe! Goodbye, Nélida!” Perhaps her voice had joined in this farewell acclamation. The enthusiasm of the crowd cooled upon learning that the two adversaries were safe and sound. Those who had not long before seemed indignant in the name of civilization and the gentleness of morals, lamenting the death of the Belgian, now twisted their faces as if they were the victims of a joke in bad taste. “Pretenders!… Alarming respectable people with a cheap challenge!” A new hero was rising from the ruins of the two adversaries, suddenly fallen from glory. Gómez and his friends, eager to prove that they had witnessed it all, spoke of Maltrana, of his eloquent words, of the serenity with which he had exposed himself to death, of the bullet wound in the foot. The eagerness of every storyteller to amplify and exaggerate events in order to keep their listeners in suspense, led them, in good faith, to launch into the most absurd exaggerations, praising the merits of the combat’s director. “What a courageous Maltrana! What a tiger!” And while Isidro’s reputation as a hero was rapidly forming and consolidating on the decks , he calmly took a bath and dressed in white, after removing the wool suit that had tormented him with its weight like armor. As he left the cabin, he bumped into “the funereal man.” “And I imagined him in jail by now!” he thought. ” If it wasn’t here, it’ll be in Buenos Aires. The police there must know better.” He was somewhat surprised to see “the funereal man” begin to smile and salute. “Ah, scoundrel!” Now he was looking at him as if he wanted to befriend him. It was undoubtedly prompted by the fear he had just endured… And receiving this silent kindness with disdainful haughtiness, he continued onward without responding to the salute. Glory came out to meet him. People on deck surrounded him, showing great interest in his health. Even the least communicative ladies asked him for news. Now he could truly call them all “my dear friends.” Some ladies smiled, with the sweet feminine reproach that simultaneously mourns and celebrates the temerities of valor, and affectionately threatened him, waving a hand with the index finger in their direction. Stop. “Ah, you idiot!… A wicked person!” Dr. Zurita, informed by his children of what had happened, approached Maltrana with the irresistible sympathy that acts of courage inspire in all those of his country. “Ah, you devilish Galician!… They’ve already told me everything. Very well… Here’s a leaf cigar.” And he gave him his best cigar as a tribute of admiration. Everyone looked at his feet, noticing his white canvas shoes. He would surely keep the others downstairs as a souvenir. Many wanted to examine them to appreciate the damage caused by the projectile. The women, suddenly restless, forced him to sit next to them. “Don’t do anything crazy, Maltranita; be careful. Foot wounds, however insignificant they may seem, sometimes bring bad results.” And some of them began to recall injuries suffered by members of their family, accidents of life in the Pampas, with the recounting of which they were gradually forgetting the hero. “Don’t wander, sir; Walk as little as possible. It’s a piece of advice from experience. A timid, respectful voice told him this in French; and when he raised his eyes, Maltrana saw the “gloomy man.” He too joined in the general admiration!… A man who was under threat of imprisonment would forget his own fate to inquire after his own health!… What courage! The last to approach was Ojeda, when the groups of admirers had already dispersed . To Fernando’s questioning look, who seemed astonished, he answered with a malicious wink and a slight shrug of his shoulders. There was no reason to be afraid. “It’s all a lie,” he murmured in a faint voice; “a pure parade,” as the Creoles say. But let your enthusiasm swell. This doesn’t hurt anyone… Let’s go to lunch. The ship had left the bay. It glided between islets of dense vegetation and reefs that emerged with their black heads and green shags. The human-shaped mountains seemed to recede inland. The city had hidden, leaving in everyone’s memory a vision of white buildings, tall palm trees, blue coves bordered by gardens, faces flushed by the heat, and damp and sweaty clothes. The free sea breeze spread its invigorating breath throughout the ship. With the preparations for departure, lunch had been delayed, and this delay, along with the variety of flowers on the tables and the provisions purchased on land, gave new charm to the general meal. Everyone ate heartily, celebrating the freshness of the dining room after the heaviness of the city. Some tables were free, and the passengers strained their memory to recall those who had stayed behind in Rio de Janeiro. At others, the newly embarked Brazilians gathered . They were going to Montevideo, and there they would transfer to the river steamers that, following the Paraná and Paraguay, would arrive, after twenty-five days of travel, at the heart of their country. Maltrana had enhanced his triumph by maintaining a serene modesty, pretending not to notice the curious and admiring glances. Mr. Munster spoke to him now with respectful gravity, not daring to indulge in any more jokes with a man who was shooting and then quietly ate lunch without thinking of the danger. Dr. Rubau regarded him with melancholy pity. “Ah, youth, crazy youth!… Life is so precious!” He affirmed this, always dressed in black, refractory to the company of people, with a marked tendency to withdraw and cry. After lunch, Ojeda found himself alone in the winter garden. His famous friend was monopolizing everyone’s attention and didn’t come to sit by his side as he had on other occasions. He moved from table to table; The young men surrounded him , and eventually led him to the smoking room. There were noticeable gaps in the crowd. The people didn’t seem the same as before. The joyful unconsciousness of ocean life had disappeared . Everyone, upon stepping onto the dock, had felt like they belonged on solid ground, suddenly remembering the worries of their existence. The land regained its rights over them, and when they returned to the ship, they were different. They no longer lived the life of the present, forgetting the rest of the world, as if humanity had died, the continents had sunk, and there were no people left on the planet other than this handful of beings floating on a steel ark, without having to worry about food, which they always found ready, without fear of the social commitments of a distant world, with their appetites free and their consciences sleepy. Business resurfaced in everyone’s memory with greater urgency, as if during this period of forgetfulness, their interest had increased. Each one thought about the cause that had brought them to this hemisphere. Those living in America felt the first assaults of anxiety. What
bad news would greet them? How would they find business after their absence? Those who went to new lands for the first time suffered the anguish of uncertainty, the doubt of one about to face a decisive test. And everyone, obsessed by their thoughts, withdrew and isolated themselves to reflect better. Social distances, which seemed to have been erased in the middle of the voyage, were reestablished. Faces no longer smiled. Everyone, with a worried expression, avoided familiarity. They seemed afraid that the friendly relations on board would continue on land. An attempt at rapprochement and confidence translated into the threat of immediate demands. Those less fortunate, who until then had spent lavishly, with the ease provided by credit, began to restrict their extraordinary needs in the dining room and the smoking room. They suddenly remembered the numerous vouchers they had signed: the time was coming to settle accounts with the steward. An atmosphere of sadness and unease spread through the ship, clouding voices and making conversations languish. The empty seats inspired the melancholic memory of those who were absent. The winter lounge offered the appearance of a family reunion after a disaster. Ojeda was also sad. The solitude favored the development of his remorse. He thought with shame about his adventures, and at the same time, through a bizarre contradiction, he also thought about Nélida, missing her absence. He expected to see her appear at any moment at the next window, just as on previous afternoons. They had parted angrily upon arriving back on the ship; but these tantrums were always short-lived, and hours later she would approach, announcing with malicious winks her intention to go down to the cabin… But today time passed without Nélida appearing. Tired of this neglect, Fernando went out onto the deck, and as he headed toward the bow, the first thing he saw in “the kissing corner” was Nélida lying on a long chair, her eyes half-closed, exposing a good part of her legs, covering her face with one hand as if trying to hide her blush, while her malicious eyes shone through her fingers. And sitting next to her was Maltrana, the heroic Maltrana, expressing himself with vehement gestures, thrusting his chest forward, as if the girl were pulling him with magnetic force. Seeing his friend, Isidro showed a certain embarrassment, his verbosity was cut short, as if she had just caught him in something shameful. She, on the other hand, looked at Ojeda with a challenging expression, adding in a loud voice: “Go on, Isidro. What you’re saying is very nice, very interesting.” And she accompanied her words with an exaggerated gesture of voluptuousness and abandon, indicating the great pleasure the hero’s words caused her . Fernando continued on, more astonished than spiteful at this revelation… Maltrana too! It had only taken the people to celebrate for an hour for that girl to go in search of him, driven by her insatiable and fickle desire. The speech of the festival and the The adventures of shooting made him an interesting man, a desirable hero, and there was Nélida beside him, with moist eyes, an adoring smile, and her tongue eagerly wandering over the pink of her lips. Isidro was going to be everyone’s heir. To avoid her gaze and her vengeful smile, he didn’t want to pass by this corner of the deck again. Below, on the bow esplanade, pastoral music was playing, and through the gaps in the awning, the heads of several people could be seen jumping to the rhythm of the dance. Isidro had spoken to him a few times about the dances of the Arabs installed in this part of the ship, and not knowing where to go, he wanted to attend them, going down to the esplanade. The crowd was gathering, leaving little space for the dancers. The arrival in America after being isolated in the middle of the sea had spread great joy among the flock eager for hope. They were approaching the end of the voyage. Buenos Aires!… They were almost there. Four ranches and four dreams separated them from the city of illusion. They were going to arrive sooner than they had hoped: when they had already become familiar with the life of the Ocean and their haste was less pressing. A Syrian, standing on a coil of cables, played a triple flute made of reeds, and to the sound of the bucolic lilt his compatriots moved . They were dark-skinned men with long mustaches: some corpulent, swollen with fat, with the yellowish, soft obesity of orientals; others lean, angular, elongated, and loose-limbed, like racehorses. In memory of their distant homeland, they had tied turban-like scarves around their purple caps, and others, more ornate, like sashes around their loins. They danced in a line, with great swaying of hips and bellies. Their women stood apart, like daughters of a people where women live isolated, without participation in public rejoicing. At the head of the line, directing the dance and accompanying it with kicks and shouts, stood a very tall, gaunt young man with an aquiline nose, a fine mustache, and burning eyes. He wore a magnificent, dirty caftan of red silk embroidered with gold. This embroidery had taken on a greenish tinge over the years. The silk, frayed in the places of greatest friction, was showing the cotton strands of its padding. But despite this ruin and the European worker’s trousers and boots that were visible beneath his oriental garments, the Syrian Arab presented a handsome appearance. Ojeda recognized him: it was the Emir. Several times, when Isidro spoke to him about the dances of the Arabs, he had mentioned this young man, praising his desert knightly posture, which brought to mind the heroes of the Orientales sung by Romanticism. The imaginative Maltrana had not hesitated to give him a name and a dignity. He was, according to him, an emir in disgrace. Since he included him among his “dear friends,” he was well aware that he was leaving for Buenos Aires for the second time, where he was engaged in small-scale business. But Isidro dismissed this vulgar reality as inconsistent with the desires of his imagination, and the young Arab was an emir, according to him, and all his companions, with their wives and children, faithful subjects who followed their prince into exile. At the head of the line formed by his vassals, the Emir swayed on his hips, lifted a foot, and neighed under the protective gaze of Señá Eufrasia, who, perched on a caramanchel, presided over the celebration with all the majesty of her corpulent bust. When the good woman noticed Ojeda, she dared to smile at him. She knew he was Spanish, having seen him a few times with Don Isidro. “Have you seen, sir, what graceful little Moors they are? And right there , with those ugly faces, they are wretches: as good as bread. The best of all.” Her husband, the man with the big hat and the bulging sash, approached upon hearing these words. It was obvious what he was going to say, as if custom, eager for feigned authority: “Shut up, Ufrasia, and don’t bother this gentleman. Women don’t know a thing.” But she couldn’t say it. The flute player played a few false notes and then fell silent, as if something had caught in his throat. The dancers remained motionless, holding each other’s waists, one leg raised, looking toward the central castle with suddenly red-faced eyes. Fernando also looked, influenced by this silence, and saw Maltrana , who had just descended a small iron ladder. Halfway down the stairs was Nélida, looking down at the crowd spread out at her feet, proud of the emotion her presence aroused. Her short, tight skirt had ridden up immodestly with the movement of her descent, revealing a long, gracefully curved calf encased in a gray silk stocking with openwork stripes. At the top, between the stocking and the trousers, a circular piece of bare flesh was visible, white and slightly pinkish like damp mother-of-pearl. She guessed the cause of this collective disturbance, this sudden silence, but she tried to prolong the situation with cruel coquetry, smiling at the popular homage. Ojeda thought he mentally heard a general outcry, an immense neigh that rose to heaven; and it wasn’t uttered by suddenly dry mouths: it came from wandering eyes , from shuddering clothes, from throbbing nostrils. They looked at her the same way primitive peoples must have looked at the first celestial revelation. Maltrana, at the foot of the stairs, twisted his face and made signs, with the anger of a future owner who sees his possessions squandered. She finally decided to focus on her limbs, and without any emotion she arranged the disarray of her skirt, the divine apparition fading like the moon among clouds. Only then did the flute begin its pastoral warbles again, and the dancers resumed their movements. A piece of news immediately spread throughout the esplanade , with the collective readiness of the crowd to invent and accept lies. It was Don Isidro with his fiancée: a millionaire fiancée. They were to be married as soon as they arrived in Buenos Aires. Señá Eufrasia approached them with an admiring gesture: “Ah, Don Isidro! And how well you have chosen! Men of talent have a magnificent eye for these things. May it be for the best! May it last for many years!” And the other women, Arabs, Italians, Spanish, gathered around Nélida, admiring her beauty, inhaling the air as if they wanted to capture some of her perfume, pushing against each other to feel the touch of her limbs, still moved, despite their gender identity, by what they had seen appear in the middle of the staircase. They felt a certain pride in being close to one of those young ladies they had only seen from afar, leaning out from the balconies of the central castle. The young people Maltrana had sometimes encountered by the gate that blocked the passage to the cabins, spying on the comings and goings of chambermaids and maids, kept a certain distance, gazing at Nélida with an almost murderous admiration. They devoured her with their eyes. It seemed as if at any moment they would fall upon her, tearing her to pieces. They suddenly hated Don Isidro, admiring him more than before. He had never seemed so magnificent to them. Ah, the rich! They had the money, they had the comforts, and they also got the best girls. Impulsed by envy, they made comparisons, shifting their gaze from the fresh-faced Nélida to the poor, filthy, sun-tanned women. They were all filthy. Ah, misery!… The Emir had broken away from his companions to perform a solo dance. Accompanied by a flute and waving a red handkerchief in both hands, he danced in front of Nélida, as if dedicating all his gestures and contortions to her. He moved his hips with a feminine sway, just like the almeinas, provoking great laughter with his lascivious shudders. The noble features of the disgraced desert prince were were erased beneath the trembling of simian gestures. His black pupils seemed to burn with a blue fire, while his corneas were streaked with blood. He stared at Nélida with a disconcerting fixity; but she, instead of showing any disturbance, thrust forward her face and opened her fresh mouth, laughing with all the splendor of her teeth, as if mocking the poor Emir’s anguish. But her impartiality, that of a girl expert in the appreciation and discovery of manly merits, however hidden , did the Arab justice. “How handsome!” she said, turning to Maltrana, while the other continued dancing. “What a handsome hunk of a man!… It’s a shame he’s here.” Ojeda, who remained near them, thought it fortunate for his friend that the ship’s regulations did not allow the Emir to take a step outside the bow. If she could abandon the mass of emigrants to hide in the recesses of the central castle, Maltrana’s misfortune was certain. When the Arab stopped dancing, panting and sweating, she advanced across the esplanade with the air of a princess visiting her subjects. Isidro’s popularity was reflected in her person, and he, through his art, went to extremes with his smiles, his affectionate pats, and his words of false affection, like a good king who wishes to show himself closely united with his people. Nélida glanced at Fernando several times, delighted that he was witnessing her triumph. At his side, she had never received such homage. She only held back contradictions and denials for herself. He was more handsome than Maltrana: compliant; but he was no hero. Since the dance was over, Fernando returned to the central castle. He wanted to leave Nélida basking in her glory, serenely welcoming, like an idol, the curiosity of the women and the ardent desire of many men, who followed her with the steps of tigers. They had the same expression as the ancient Barbary corsairs circling the deck of the galley around a newly conquered beauty. If they were alone, they would have all pulled the girl at once, dismembering her to make her theirs. Maltrana, separated from Nélida for a few moments, was talking with Juan Castillo and Don Carmelo. The latter had just returned from the infirmary after seeing Pachín Muiños, the emigrant who constantly asked when the ship was arriving in Buenos Aires. “A lost man,” said the policeman. “The doctor has given him up for dead; but he remains between life and death, and when he speaks, it’s always to ask the same thing: “Buenos Aires!… When do we arrive in Buenos Aires?” That morning, in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, the nurses had had to make an effort to keep him in bed. He tried to flee as soon as he noticed the ship was motionless. They had already arrived in Buenos Aires! They were deceiving him; They wanted to keep him in that confinement under the pretext of his health. And the view of the neighboring city glimpsed through a skylight as he sat up in bed had served to increase his despair. It had been even greater when the ship set sail. He believed he was returning to his homeland, after having been near the city of Hope, where health and wealth awaited him. “The poor fellow is in complete delirium,” Don Carmelo continued. “In vain they tell him we’re going to Buenos Aires and that we’ll arrive soon. He believes we’re returning to his country; and if he finally doubts it, he asks them to summon you, Señor Maltrana. ‘Let Don Isidro come. He knows everything: he’ll tell me the truth…’ You could see him. His presence would be a consolation. But Maltrana made an evasive gesture. Perhaps he would visit him later. Now he had much to do: he couldn’t leave this young lady alone. Don Carmelo, remembering the obligations of his job, lamented Muiños’s presence on the ship. He had made several voyages without a single death on board. They examined people before admitting them, but this man had deceived them with his appearance of health upon boarding… Death is sad everywhere , but even more so at sea… What he had seen! He recalled a voyage he had made to Buenos Aires on another ship, carrying a large group of emigrants from Northern Europe. Within a few days, an epidemic broke out among the third-class passengers. “Every night we threw two or three overboard. Our concern was to keep the first-class passengers from finding out. I’ve never seen a voyage with so many parties. Almost every day there was an extraordinary banquet; at night, musical soirees and dances. And while the music played on high and the people danced, we put the dead in coffins, threw them overboard, and kept the families in the hold so they wouldn’t cause a scandal with their screams. When we arrived at the end of the voyage, most of the first-class passengers were unaware of what had happened and protested when they saw them being quarantined. Thirty-eight corpses in the water while they were dancing… What a thing the sea is, gentlemen! What secrets it has!” Resigned in advance to all kinds of emotions, he spoke calmly of the impending end of this compatriot. He could have died the night before, and they would have buried him in Rio de Janeiro. He could have died three days later, and they would have buried him in Montevideo or Buenos Aires. But he would undoubtedly die during the voyage, perhaps that same night, and they would throw him overboard. These burdens had to be disposed of quickly , as they only serve to sadden others. Only the corpses of the rich can be tolerated on ships, because they are properly embalmed and their heirs pay well. The ship’s carpenter was at that moment making the coffin for Pachín Muiños. Don Carmelo himself had just communicated the order to him. Isidro listened no more. Nélida signaled him to leave. In the midst of her enthusiasm for the popular reception, the young woman experienced a feeling of contempt and disgust toward those people. She suddenly saw them as if some rosy veils interposed between them and her eyes had just been torn away . The men seemed filthy and threateningly eager . The women, with a bestial humility or downright envious, were inferior to the domestics who served her. She thought she perceived insolent brushes below her back, touches of daring curiosity, hidden by the crush. She even imagined feeling in the most hidden recesses of her body a tingling of bloodthirsty invaders, eager to gorge themselves on fresh, rich flesh, who had perhaps just abandoned the skin of those gossips. “Let’s go,” she said with anguish and fear. And she climbed the ladder, this time oblivious to the delight she provided to a large portion of the public with the divine spectacle of her gathered skirts. In the middle of the afternoon, the movement of the ship began to intensify. The gentle pitching from bow to stern, to which everyone had grown accustomed and which went unnoticed, like a movement necessary for life like breathing , grew more violent by the moment. The setting sun was veiled by a barrier of vapor; the light was grayish, like that of a winter afternoon; the sea, a dark blue, folded into long ripples. A fresh, violent breeze, which seemed to herald a storm, made the cabin boys run to take in the awnings and raise the thick glass panes of the bow balcony, sheltering this part of the promenade. The waves, steep, silent, dormant, uniform, without the slightest white plume, were not very high, yet the ocean liner leaped upon meeting them, two jets of foam rising on either side of its bow. From the middle of the promenade, one could see how the stern rose as if about to fly, then sank with a rapidity that distressed many, producing a feeling of emptiness in their diaphragms. People ran to the balcony to witness the assaults of the raging sea behind the glass , an extraordinary spectacle after so many days of calm. Maltrana, invisible until then, appeared for a few moments next to Ojeda’s. “We’re going to have a storm,” he said, rubbing his hands with a pleased expression. “This couldn’t continue; so much calm would bore anyone. A voyage without a storm is dishonorable. Then, when we went ashore , we would have had nothing to say. It’s as if an author had written a maritime novel, forgetting to include the obligatory description of a storm.” But Ojeda shook his head. There had been no storm: a bit of movement while passing through the Gulf of Santa Catalina; a simple incident of the voyage. Despite the promises of safety and the smiles of the ship’s officers, many passengers looked at the ocean with indignant expressions , as if complaining about the infidelity of a friend. When everyone had been oblivious to the sea, it made itself present with unusual fury. And the pained looks, the gestures of displeasure, seemed to say with a silent protest: “This isn’t what was agreed upon.” Children crowded onto the balcony, perched on chairs and benches, to watch the waves roll in. The triangular surface of the fore-deck rose and fell as it collided with the immense blue wrinkles that met it. It descended as if swallowed by the abyss, then shot upwards like a rearing animal, its flanks trembling with the shock of hidden forces. Two mountains of foam topped by delicate crests assaulted the bow, scattering a cloud of liquid dust. The foam, as it fell onto the deck, turned into water, running in undulating sheets down the slopes of the planking and then trickling down the gutters. This incessant spray reached the balcony, fogging the windows with the dripping of its tears. The wood of the waist and fore-deck shone like metal under the constant flooding. The emigrants were hidden in the fore-decks. From
time to time, a sailor in a yellow raincoat and waxed helmet would cross the bow due to some duty requirement, impassively receiving the ocean’s heavy spray, sinking his high boots into the salty river that each wave rolled from one side of the ship to the other. Mingling with the people witnessing this spectacle, Ojeda focused more on the explosions of children’s joy than on the assaults of the sea. The children thrashed about with excitement at the arrival of the waves. “Another! Another!” they cried with tremulous joy as they saw a new blue hill unfold before the bow. They remained in suspense, holding their breath, their eyes suddenly widening. The blow came, the bow reared up, the two phantoms of foam rose into space to collapse in cascades, and an “ah!” of satisfaction relieved their chests. Sometimes, if the collision was greater, the tip of the Goethe, in gallant rebellion, rose above the waves, without them ever invading her. The little ones then stamped their feet with enthusiasm, burst into cheers, and greeted the ship’s bravery with a round of applause. Some older people watched this rejoicing with pitiful eyes. “Blind innocence, unaware of the danger… As long as that swell didn’t increase!” Many passengers didn’t dare move from their seats and remained with their foreheads in one hand, pale, their eyes closed, as if they had suddenly fallen asleep. Moving from one window to another to better see the arrival of the waves, Ojeda found himself next to Mina. Karl’s blond head, which shook with loud laughter with every blow of the swell, made him notice the woman behind him, holding him in her arms. As if warned by the magnetism of a gaze fixed on her back, the mother turned her head, paling as she recognized Fernando. It was the first time they had met together since crossing the line. In her nervous restlessness, one could sense a desire to escape, to reestablish the indifference that had kept them apart. Ojeda tried to speak. He ran a caressing hand over Karl’s silky head , but he barely turned to look at him, preoccupied as he was with contemplating the sea. His words to Mina suffered the same fate. She only answered with slight nods, with forced monosyllables, while her pallor took on a slight tinge of blush. She didn’t hide her vehement desire to flee. She seemed afraid, not of Fernando, but of herself. And promising her son that he would have a better view of the waves from another place, she placed him on the ground and took his hand, then walked away. “Good afternoon, madam.” He was disconcerted by this escape and at the same time felt a certain satisfaction. She hadn’t looked at him with hatred when she left. Her eyes were rather sad. She was afraid of memory. Upon seeing him, she had felt nostalgia for the past, the melancholy of old illusions. Ojeda savored the bitterness of the powerful in disgrace, who proudly measure the full grandeur of their fall. Days before, he could consider three women his own on that floating world. They had followed one another beside him, providing him with the sweet, more or less true, illusion that accompanies love. Now he found himself alone, completely alone on this ship, which also seemed to age as it reached the final leg of its voyage, rearing up in dark and violent seas after having glided over blue and luminous expanses drenched in sunshine… Ojeda’s transatlantic novel was coming to an end. He had to say goodbye to his illusions and take refuge in the fidelity of his memories, unfortunately forgotten during the voyage. This resolution of renunciation gladdened his conscience, but at the same time troubled his pride as a man, establishing a violent dualism within him . The indifference of women was deeply painful to him after having had them at his mercy, submissive and adoring. And it pained him equally, despite his friendly affection, that a Maltrana was the heir to his good fortune, the one who was going to write with the gestures of a hero the epilogue to one of his vivid novels. His vanity rebelled against this ending. It would have been a good thing if he had broken up with Nélida after a dramatic scene. But things had happened in such a confusing and illogical way that Fernando wasn’t sure if it was he who had repelled the young woman or she who had abandoned him, driven by a new desire. He spent the rest of the afternoon talking with some Brazilians who were going to transfer in Montevideo, continuing upriver to the interior of his country. He found himself distracted like an adventure book by the conversation with those gaunt, bony men, with a sickly pallor, whose gaze seemed to have flashes of fever. They were engineers and senior employees of railroads under construction. These bold lines pierced the centuries-old silence of immense forests that had remained unexplored since the first push of discovery. They had to struggle with the tangle of vegetation, the immensity of the swamp, the poison of insects and reptiles, and the evil of mankind. With a revolver at their belts, they presided over the work of hundreds of laborers of all races and nationalities. They had to live constantly on guard against the snares of the white man, the most malignant of bipeds, a terrible remnant of all the adventures and despairs of Europe. The fight against the microbe was also a great danger in this war for the civilization of the virgin land. This was clearly indicated by the appearance of those men, decrepit in their youth, forever wounded by the frigid blow of fever. And they, unaware of their own ailments, spoke with horror of the ailments that assailed the men in the shadows of the jungle when they disturbed the age-old humus and dormant vegetation: great abscesses of the skin that ended by swarming like an anthill, the flesh swarming into maggots; poisoning of the blood that quickly killed a herculean giant; rapid consumption, devouring fat and muscle, that They only spared the skeleton, leaving it floating inside the skin, as if it were a suit too big. Dozens of men perished along the rails. The conquest of a lagoon or a forest by means of steel rails was as deadly as the capture of an artillery redoubt. At nightfall, Ojeda saw Don Carmelo pass by, looking in all directions . He was going around the ship in search of Maltrana, but he couldn’t find him. “That poor fellow is dying,” he said in a low voice. “He’s on his last legs. Maybe he doesn’t even exist right now. And the poor wretch is calling Don Isidro; he wants to see him to find out if we’re really going to Buenos Aires. A dying man’s obsession… I thought it would cost him nothing to give him this satisfaction, and I’ve been looking for Maltrana for half an hour. It’s strange that I can’t find him. Do you know where he is?” Ojeda shook his head. And yet, if he had wanted to, he could have found him in two minutes. Nélida and Isidro had disappeared since mid-afternoon. At dusk, just as the bell to prepare for dinner had sounded, he met Don Carmelo again. “It’s over. The poor fellow is dead. I’m going to see the carpenter to have everything ready. Tonight… off we go!… Poor Galician!” Maltrana appeared in the dining room as the waiters were serving the second course. He sat down next to his friend with a certain timidity, despite the satisfaction and self-content that permeated his person. Fernando noticed something extraordinary about his appearance. He wore a flower in the lapel of his tuxedo. A strong perfume rose from his head. It was obvious he had spent extraordinarily at the barber’s. A manifest desire to beautify himself, to make people forget the Maltrana of before, emanated from his entire person. He looked away from his friend’s, fearing to see a reproachful expression in them. “The sick man you told me about so many times died a little while ago. ” “Ah!” Isidro’s exclamation revealed indifference. What was he going to do to ease his grief? He had more important things to think about. “He died calling for you,” Ojeda continued. “The poor man needed comfort and wanted to see you. But Don Carmelo has searched for you in vain all over the ship. ” Maltrana uttered the same colorless exclamation again. And, averting his eyes, he made an evasive gesture. He had much to do: he had been in his cabin talking with Martorell about the future Bank… And he said nothing more, as if he feared Fernando would accuse him of lying for having seen the Catalan somewhere else during the afternoon. The two finished eating silently. In vain Maltrana tried to liven up the conversation with his words; his friend remained impassive. He too was worried, glancing constantly toward the table where Mr. Kasper sat with his family. The waves had subsided after dark. Long, irregular waves rocked the ship from time to time, but the bow cleared them easily. The crowd in the dining room was less numerous. Many had eaten their meal on deck, fearing seasickness in the confinement below. After lunch, the calm of the sea calmed spirits and digestion, restoring a certain cheerfulness to the winter garden. Some female passengers from Rio tapped the piano in the lounge and searched for ballads in the piles of sheet music, eager to show off their skills to the people arriving from Europe. Some young men talked about improvising a concert, a private party. The sky had cleared; the stars shone through the rags of fleeing clouds; the roughness of the ocean was becoming less and less noticeable. Everyone felt a desire to express the joy of the calm. Ojeda drank his coffee black. Isidro, who had just sat down next to him, fled when he saw a smiling head appear at the next window. Just like him! Life on this ship was like the turns of a wheel. When he stepped onto the deck, he stopped at the spot he had once called “the kissing corner.” Through the glass From the balcony, he looked at the prow, which swayed over the dark sea. Between it and the central bow, the electric lights were reflected in the deck of the bow, still gleaming from the spray of the waves. At that hour, it was deserted: the emigrant crowd was gathering on the stalls. Fernando saw, in the red square of a door of the bowstool, several silhouettes stirring, furiously flailing about; he thought he heard mournful voices far away, the sound of arguing. Curiosity and the desire to amuse himself with something drove him to descend to the bowstool. There he heard the wailing again : the hysterical wails of a weeping woman, the shrieks of children, similar to the howling of abandoned puppies. Pachín’s family was shouting in front of the infirmary door, defended by an impassive sailor. Fernando saw the woman with her eyes red with tears and her hair in disarray; She saw the children screaming, but with dry eyes, echoing their mother. They knew nothing, but instinct had suddenly warned them of the proximity of misfortune; the same simple and mysterious instinct that makes domestic animals howl, as if they smelled the presence of death. They wanted to enter the infirmary to see Pachín and calm down. They received with incredulity the words of a Spanish waiter who, obeying the order, swore on his health that the patient was better. They clashed unsuccessfully with the blond sailor who blocked the door with his rock-like rudeness. The doctor had forbidden entry, and it was useless to insist. A new character mingled with this violent scene. It was Señor Antonio el Morenito, pitying the laments of those people and furious at the harshness of the Germans. “By God! This is worse than the Inquisition… And the one who fixes this is a servant, even if the ship goes down.” With the magnanimity of a knight-errant, protector of a widow and orphan, he took this weeping woman and her howling little ones under his arm . “What do you want? To see the sick man? Well, you’ll see him, even if I have to spill my guts to that boastful blond man at the door. ” He burst into insults and threats against the sailor, who couldn’t understand him. He spoke with vague allusions to the dreaded knife, whose hiding place no one could find. It was going to come out at any moment . “And if I pull it out, it’s all over… all over!” He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned his head. It was Don Carmelo from the police station: the man who inspired the most respect in his mind on the ship; a true gentleman, and a countryman to boot. “You, Morenito, have finished making a scene, because I say so, right now!” You’re going downstairs to sleep now, or I’ll have you kicked out of the house. The brave man shrank back. Only his father and that gentleman could bear to be treated like this. But Don Carmelo was an angel; he behaved well with the poor, and he knew how to distinguish good people, obeying them. Despite this submission, he still muttered protests. “Damn it! But what I’m saying: this is worse than the Inquisition! This poor woman wants to see her husband!” Don Carmelo tried to dissuade the family. The next day they would see the sick man… if he was better. For the moment it was impossible. He instilled in them tranquility and confidence, accustomed as he was to the company of the emigrant crowd. And Morenito, passing by his side with a sudden change of mood, repeated all his words, supporting them with the authority of his courage. Whatever that gentleman, a fellow countryman of his, said was the truth. No more crying or fussing; The patient was feeling better, as Don Carmelo confirmed. They had to go downstairs to sleep. As everyone disappeared down the steps of the cellar, the policeman spoke to Ojeda in a low voice. An hour later, when the emigrants were locked up, the carpenter would come to put the body in the coffin. They wouldn’t have to wait the required hours, as they had on other occasions. The sooner they got out of this, the better. “The poor fellow is as black as coal. It’s pitiful to see him!… At eleven o’clock, into the water! If you want to see that thing…” As they returned together to the main castle, Don Carmelo paused for a moment, as if an idea had occurred to him. Why didn’t they call Don José, that Spanish priest? On other voyages, when a dead man had to be thrown into the water, the commander or the first officer would fill in for the lack of a priest. He would recite a prayer in German, cap in hand, before the heavy coffin, and then the customary command, “Give him a Christian burial.” And the coffin would fall into the sea. But on this voyage they could have a priest, and the dead man was Catholic. Ojeda had to say something to Don José to get him to attend the funeral ceremony. And he agreed, going in search of the priest. He was already in his cabin preparing for bed, but when he learned what they wanted of him, he put on his cassock again. He was a laborer of the Church, always ready for work. He dealt with sermons, little; with theological problems, even less so; but to hear confessions for eight hours straight and help a Christian die well, there he was, impervious to fatigue, unafraid of contagion, accustomed to human agony with professional courage. He wanted to go straight to the infirmary to recite beside the corpse all the prayers for the case he had in his books. Why hadn’t they called him before, when the poor man was still alive? Fernando had to restrain his zeal. They shouldn’t disembark until the last moment. Those on board wanted to keep the event secret. It wasn’t advisable to attract the emigrants’ attention. The two of them sat on the promenade, next to the saloon windows. The impromptu party had begun there. The piano played incessantly. At the beginning of the voyage, no one knew how to play: fear of ridicule and lack of contact made everyone feign absolute musical ignorance. Now everyone was eager to show off their skills, and as soon as a few hands left the keyboard, others fell upon it, invigorated by the rest. Female voices intoned sentimental romances in Italian, picaresque ditties in French, and jotas from a Spanish zarzuela. The good Don José felt something like a philosophical embryo awaken in his thoughts, due to the power of the contrast. “What a life, Mr. Ojeda,” he murmured gravely. “These people singing and laughing, and we, four steps away from them, waiting for the moment to throw a man into the water. A world of deception! A world of deception!” He smoked incessantly, taking advantage of Ojeda’s generosity, who offered him cigar after cigar. His head began to bob. His eyes narrowed, then suddenly opened with a start of surprise, closing again shortly afterward. Finally, he fell asleep, and his breathing was almost a loud snore. He had a habit of going to bed early. In addition, the music exerted a lethargic influence on him. Maltrana passed by them. Nélida was in the saloon, and he was wandering around the deck. Upon learning that they were waiting to attend the funeral ceremony, a look of annoyance escaped him. He made several excuses to justify his absence, but since the ceremony was at eleven at night, he offered to go with them. This hour did not upset his plans. Don Carmelo and the first officer appeared with a certain haste, as if they wished to finish their gloomy duty as soon as possible and go to sleep. “Whenever you wish, gentlemen,” said the policeman. Don José awoke with a nervous start, and everyone went down to the bow esplanade. Four sailors were carrying a recently planed white wooden crate from the infirmary. Their bare arms held it with visible effort. Poor Pachín, small in life and weakened by illness, weighed heavily in death. Added to the crate’s bulk were several iron ingots placed by the carpenter beside his body. The coffin remained on a large plank leaning against the gunwale. The ship had slowed down. From high on the bridge, someone hidden in the darkness followed the ceremony. “It’s your turn, Father,” said Don Carmelo. Don José removed his cap, and everyone remained uncovered . The lights on the bowsprit had been turned off to prevent any curious onlookers from seeing the ceremony from the decks of the main deck. They stood in the darkness, silent, huddled together, as if preparing a crime. They were black ghosts surrounding a white coffin tilted toward the sea. They feared no light but that of the stars. The clouds, solid as walls at dusk, had puffed up until they became loose piles of transparent down, through whose interstices the stars peeped out. The sea pounded the sides of the ship with its final shudders. It grew drowsy as the night wore on. The priest began to murmur his prayers among those excited men, their heads bowed, their feet perched on a floating steel vessel beneath which lay a depth of several vertical kilometers, a world of mystery that was about to swallow the human remains like an insignificant molecule. The priest prayed, and in the distance the hall windows seemed to answer him, mouths of light that cast forth piano arpeggios and ballad trills. The funeral orations spoke of the earth, original matter, of the dust to which we return, of the worm, miserable companion of our last dream. Ojeda imagined the poor village cemetery where the wretched Pachín could have rested eternally, beneath tears of frost in the winter, among flowers and the fluttering of insects when summer arrived. Here he would not return to the motherland. The oceanic adventure had disrupted the end of this existence. The crustaceans were going to cover his final confinement with a stony layer; The sharks, wolves of the deep, would strike the wooden casing with their snouts and fins , sniffing at the hidden flesh; the seaweed would entwine around their green, waving hair until the funereal shell rotted, confusing its contents with the liquid immensity. Don José fell silent, as if he no longer remembered any more prayers. He blessed the coffin, and then the first officer advanced with a military air, like a commander ordering a volley of rifle fire at a soldier’s funeral. “Give him a Christian burial,” he said in German. The sailors holding the plank against the side lifted it like a lever, and the coffin began to slide until it abruptly fell into the ocean. It was a noise similar to one of those waves that dully came to crash against the ship. “Goodbye, Pachín!” Ojeda thought he heard a distant lament, an imaginary voice in this splashing of the waters opened by the heavy coffin and which closed again under its vortex of projectiles: “Buenos Aires!… When will we reach Buenos Aires?…” The ship moved forward with greater speed, resuming its normal course. Maltrana had disappeared. Ojeda and the priest returned to the promenade deck. Don José lamented the fate of that man he had not met and over whose invisible corpse he had cast his blessing. Unhappy man! Buried at sea!… But Fernando did not share his lamentations. May they all die like that. Life is desire, illusion, the certainty that the next tomorrow will bring us happiness: a tomorrow that never arrives. “Buenos Aires!… When will we reach Buenos Aires?…” And the unfortunate man had died without arriving. It was better this way: better than perishing on the desired land a short time later, with no other vision than the harsh reality. Happy are those who die embracing the chimera… Blessed are those whose wishes are never fulfilled and whose lives are deceived, the joy of our existence. And as they climbed an iron ladder, they received the musical breath of the reddened windows of the hall on their faces . A woman’s voice was singing Love, the only truth and the greatest lie of our lives… Poor life, which cannot march on its own strength and needs the support of illusion! Chapter 12. Two days before arriving in Buenos Aires, the _Goethe_ began to be refurbished. The crew worked from dawn to dusk under the scrutinizing eyes of the officers. It was a commotion similar to that of a warship on the eve of battle. The top deck was shrinking. The whaleboats hanging over the sea were withdrawn inside, resting fixed on their wedges. The strollers were forced to move between these vessels, which only left narrow passages accessible. A meticulous and patient cleaning touched up the exterior of the ship from the waterline to the masthead, leaving her as good as new. Everywhere were sailors with their sleeves rolled up and their breasts unbuttoned, with a bucket of paint in one hand and a brush in the other. They balanced themselves precariously on masts and railings. Seated on scaffolding , with the sea at their feet, they painted the sides of the ship as it bobbed over the abyss. All the insults that the waves, the salt air , and the friction at the harbor entrances had inflicted on the liner quickly disappeared. The paint spread freely, like on the dressing table of an old coquette. The Goethe wanted to arrive at the end of her voyage looking beautiful, and a milky white refreshed the deck walls and interior pipes; a soft buttery yellow polished the masts, the funnel, and the crane arms; a deep black hid the flaking of the enormous hull, giving it a virginal appearance, as if it had just slid down a shipyard slipway. The police station employees were even busier than the navigation officers. The doctor sent from Buenos Aires to examine the emigrants had boarded at the last port , and this official, accompanied by the former, was inquiring about the health of the human herd corralled at the ends of the ship. A disinfection stove was in operation on the aft esplanade, and the emigrants’ clothing , which in the employees’ judgment was still capable of some use, was passed through it. The ragged pieces, the fur coats that could not be worn down, the torn shoes were thrown into the sea, and a string of wretched objects floated in the ship’s wake. The people were subjected to a rough cleaning. The shaggy manes and patriarchal beards suddenly disappeared . Round skulls with the bluish tinge of close-cropped hair, protruding jaws still bearing the abrasions of a quick shave, were displayed in the same place previously occupied by bearded figures of tragic appearance. Likewise, the tall boots redolent of tallow, the red shirts tied at the waist with a drawstring, the fur caps, and the priestly hopalandas all disappeared . Everyone was united by the bowler hat and the wool suit purchased with foresight in a European store. Women and children were almost forcibly forced into the obligatory bath with a harsh scrubbing of soap. Both ends of the ship released the liquid filth of the populace through their spouts. The jet of water laden with ash and coal dust spewed into the sea by the boiler drainpipes was joined by two streams of blackish soapy liquid expelled from the bow and stern. Those at the police station watched with selfish interest over the health and cleanliness of the human flock. They feared the immigration offices in Buenos Aires, which were quick to reject sick or contagiously unclean people , forcing the ship to repatriate them free of charge. The same transformations took place in the prow of the “Latinos.” The gossips of Naples and Castile opened their chests to extract skirts and bodices. Señá Eufrasia thundered majestically with a shawl of bright flowers, admired by all, and which seemed to enhance her authority. The Arabs, on the other hand, lost their interesting appearance. No red caps or colored scarves posed as turbans and sashes. The Emir had removed his silk caftan and was dressed like the others, in a checked suit and a Tyrolean hat. Goodbye, poetry! The prince with the burning eyes, who had disturbed the sensitive Nélida for a few hours, was a street vendor in Buenos Aires. His business consisted of a long tray filled with cheap goods, which he paraded with a fellow countryman, together stirring up the city’s suburbs with the cry of their trade: “Twenty cents! Everything for twenty!” The promenade deck had also been transformed. The space seemed larger. With the decrease in the number of passengers, armchairs were fewer, and the strollers could walk unhindered. In addition, people went into hiding to make preparations for disembarkation. The ladies remained in their cabins most of the day arranging their luggage. Only after meals did social gatherings form in the winter garden; friendly gatherings, without rivalries over suits or jewelry, each dressed according to his or her taste, like people preoccupied with an extraordinary task and lacking time to think about their own adornment. There were only a few hours left of the journey: that day and part of the next. At dusk they would land in Montevideo, and before dawn they would leave for Buenos Aires. The people were proving uncommunicative, with a growing tendency toward isolation, increasingly burdened by the worries that their proximity to land seemed to suggest. The fraternal partners of illusory ventures cherished during the voyage were distancing themselves with a certain melancholy. More immediate and mediocre matters, inescapable realities, would assail them as soon as they disembarked the terminal dock. “We’ll talk about that business,” they said to each other with a false smile, “in Buenos Aires. We still have time… We’ll have to think it over carefully, because it has its difficulties.” These difficulties, hitherto unsuspected, suddenly arose, like reefs when the fog parts near a coast. An atmosphere of doubt, timidity, and silence spread through the ship as it moved forward. The emigrants in the stern, shorn, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes, remained silent, with visible indecision. They resembled catechumens who, after ablutions and donning new tunics, didn’t know what other ceremony awaited them beyond the closed door. They looked anxiously at the land that bordered the ship, a yellow, undulating barrier of low peaks. What would they find in that America? The accordion no longer played; the Russians had forgotten their gymnastic dance. The boisterous “Latinos” in the bow were also silent and worried, like navigators who sight a new land. Only the Emir and some Spaniards arriving in Argentina for the second time seemed happy. The pastoral bagpipe sounded the same as on other afternoons in the silence of the sea, but its bucolic sweetness had a certain trembling of a smile. The player was one of those returning to the American continent, greeting it with his simple music. At the dock, he was going to find his friends from his hometown, his family, all the attractions of a new, freely chosen homeland. Morenito remained silent, as if he suddenly recognized himself without the authority and power to instruct those young men tired of admiring him. What they were admiring now was the yellow strip of coastline, which was developing its inlets and outcrops before the ship. Lighthouses could be seen, from whose glass the sun drew a red arrow; white brushstrokes that were towns, and dark, long, uniform masses that were groves. The brave man began to hesitate, immersed in silence. A dark instinct warned him of the chimerical nature of heroic plans conceived in the solitude of the ocean. The surrounding land seemed to repel his courageous ideas. He perceived around him an atmosphere of restriction and order more imperious than that which he had left behind him. embark. He had less faith in the possibility of a get-rich-quick getaway and in all the dreamed-of massacres of brave Indians at so much apiece . Now more than before, he needed Don Isidro’s presence and advice to instill his wisdom and courage. But where was Don Isidro? Many in the central castle might have asked themselves the same question if they hadn’t been preoccupied with the preparations for the landing. Maltrana, since leaving Rio de Janeiro, had been seen very little, and rather seemed to be fleeing from the popularity his heroism had brought him. This escape was accompanied by an extraordinary grooming of his persona. He became more beautiful by the minute, driven by a firm desire to appear better. “Youth is nothing more than a will,” Ojeda thought. “Every hour that passes, he seems younger. It’s easy to know he’s in love. Nothing rejuvenates a man like love.” The fugitive Maltrana also avoided meeting his friend. The day before, Fernando had only seen him twice: at mealtimes. Irritated by this withdrawal, he ended up speaking to him with hostility. This was a different Maltrana than he had been the previous few days. Nélida had influenced him, shared his hatred, and perhaps for this reason he fled from him as if he were an enemy. Ojeda aggressively congratulated him on his good fortune, and Maltrana, with the blindness of a beloved man, naively accepted these poisonous congratulations… Yes; he was happy with life. One day it would be his turn. “I know very well that I’m not much,” he said with false modesty; but even so , someone has noticed me. Sometimes ugliness succeeds. Besides, they find me to have a strong character; I’m clean-shaven, and some people like that more than a mustache. All affection had disappeared for the two friends. Nélida was between them, fostering an irresistible feeling of rivalry. Fernando believed he should break with his companion forever. It was a move he regretted a few moments later, when his words were beyond repair. “Follow your good fortune, Maltrana. And since being my friend can bring you harm and trouble, let each of us take different sides… and as if we didn’t know each other.” They had spent the afternoon and evening of the previous day without speaking to each other. During the meal, Isidro sought Fernando’s gaze with his eyes, like a humble dog trying to regain its owner’s good graces. But a feeling of dignity and the selfish desire not to lose his good relationship with Nélida kept him silent. The other, for his part, appeared sullen, avoiding Isidro’s gaze, but feeling sorry for him inwardly. Poor boy! The only one to blame was that crazy woman, who had decided to make them enemies. The following morning, Maltrana could no longer bear this separation and accosted his friend on the deck. He seemed desperate. That men like them, who made the journey like brothers, should end up fighting at the end!… “No woman is worth as much as a good friendship… It’s silly to argue over that crazy girl, who doesn’t really know what she wants… Give me that hand, Ojeda. And if you don’t want to shake my hand, kick me twice: it’s the same thing. The important thing is that we return to what we were before.” And she joined him as at the beginning of the voyage, staying by his side longer than she had with Nélida. She hovered close behind them, and only by winking and gesturing did she manage to drag Isidro away for a few moments. It was in vain that she rebuked him, seeing him with the other. He remained firm in his friendship, and was ready to follow Ojeda and leave Nélida if she persisted in her hatred. Leaning on the railing, the two friends contemplated the color of the water. His tone had changed. It no longer had the grayish blue of European seas , the golden blue of the tropics, or the deep, luminous blue of the Brazilian coast. Its color was now green, a light green with yellowish hues. And as the ship moved forward, the yellow overtook the green, until the waters took on an earthy color similar to that of overflowing rivers, as if the ocean were receiving the avalanche of an enormous flood. Dr. Zurita joined them. It was afternoon, after lunch. “Can you see the water?” he asked. “That water is now ours; it’s more fresh than salt; it comes from the heart of America. It’s the Río de la Plata, which, when it flows out to sea, extends leagues and leagues out to sea.” The doctor rejoiced in contemplating the color of the waters, as if something from his homeland had come to him with it. They were still very far from the mouth of the river, and yet it sent its current there, modifying the flavor and color of the ocean. “Our river is enormous, isn’t it? What do you think, _che_?” he asked with patriotic pride, rejoicing in Maltrana’s astonishment. The two friends discussed the falsehood of its name. Gaboto had named it the River of Silver after several small flats from Upper Peru that the tribes had traded for it, but never had a single nugget of that metal been found on its banks. Its first name, “Sweet Sea,” was more accurate: it better expressed its aquatic immensity, with no visible shores. The tragedy of its discovery revived in the memories of the two Spaniards . A few years after Columbus’s death, Spanish ships were already sailing in these latitudes in search of a strait to pass to the other ocean, the so-called South Sea, discovered by Balboa. They hoped to reach the shores of Castilla del Oro, which was the name given at that time to the well-known part of Central America. Díaz de Solís, the chief pilot of Castile, who commanded these ships, sighted the enormous mouth of the mouth, and dove into it, believing he had found the longed-for strait, but the sweetness of the waters made him abandon his hopes. That sea of rough, continuous waves, with no visible shores, was simply a river. What wonders the mysterious West Indies held for the sailors of the Old World! Thus, the “Sweet Sea of Solís” was discovered, but the discoverer paid for his feat with his life. A great sailor, but a mediocre fighter , accustomed to the calm handling of navigational charts, the examination of pilots at the “Casa de Contratación” in Seville, and inexperienced in the tricks of Indian warfare, he had come ashore believing in the signs of peace from the natives, and they had murdered him in full view of his people on the banks of the same river he had just discovered, then roasted his body to devour it in a sacred banquet. And the small expedition, which had only been exploring, without having made any preparations for war, fled downriver in terror at this tragedy. The harsh Oviedo, historian and man of war, barely pitied Solís’s misfortune when writing his account. Such catastrophes seemed natural to him whenever seamen were sent to discover new lands. The sailors were only to man the ships that would lead the true conquerors. And these should be armored men, horsemen, incapable of trust and softness. “Do you know,” Maltrana asked, “what reward Solís asked the king for before embarking to make this discovery?” He remembered what he had read years before in the documents in the Simancas archive, when he was taking notes for a commissioned work. The monarchy was short of money in those times, and its servants, considering monetary demands futile, requested concessions and positions as rewards. Solís, who was a scientific authority of his time, the first official scholar on maritime matters, exploited his prestige from Seville, taking advantage of every favorable opportunity to formulate a request. Don Fernando the Catholic, upon his request, granted him the property of a neighbor who had committed suicide. In those centuries, the fortune of a suicide passed to the crown. Then, When it was time to embark on his final expedition, the master pilot requested a rarer and more extraordinary prize as a reward for his future services. “The noble city of Segovia had no brothel,” Maltrana continued. ” Judging from a report from Solís to the king, the women of the party distributed their favors in some cattle pens on the outskirts, and he requested for himself and his descendants the privilege of establishing an official brothel within the city walls. This was what the Catholic King promised him; but the great pilot ended his days in these lands, unable to establish his Segovia industry. ” Ojeda intervened upon seeing Dr. Zurita’s scandalized expression. “Every era has its morals and its concerns. During the Middle Ages, in Spain as in other countries, the monopoly on brothels was one of the best sources of income for many noble houses. This favor was only granted by kings in payment for great services.” Famous monasteries enjoyed such a concession, allowing them to use their products for religious needs. Sometimes it was women’s convents that enjoyed this privilege, and their aristocratic abbesses unscrupulously received money from the sinners of the “golden belt.” Zurita nodded. He had read some of this, and the prize sought didn’t cause him any scandal. What caught his attention was that, in the entire discovery of America, the only one who had thought of requesting such a favor was the first explorer of the river on whose banks the city of Buenos Aires would be born years later. He remembered the ignoble industries established in abundance in the great immigrant city by profit-hungry foreigners; the trafficking of women, which extended its recruitment from there to various European countries. The ancient “mother” of the classic brothel had been replaced by businessmen who traded in human flesh. “What a coincidence!” Zurita continued. One would say that Solís could guess the future… The attention of the three was drawn to the many ships sailing in the opposite direction to the _Goethe_. Until then, the ocean had displayed a majestic solitude. Only after several days did the faint cloud of a steamer or the gray brushstroke of a sailboat appear in the distance. Now its yellowish expanse was populated with vessels of all kinds: pitching frigates sinking their prows into the foam with the impulse of their billowing rags; black steamers returning to Europe after discharging their cargo of coal; tiny schooners leaning over the waves with an instability that drew cries of fear from the women gathered on the sides of the _Goethe_. This traffic of ships was similar to that of vehicles and pedestrians that, in the middle of the countryside, announces the proximity of an enormous, still-hidden city. The ocean liner was entering the great shipping current that makes the River Plate one of the busiest avenues of world trade. People began to notice an island that had long since appeared before the bow. The ship was passing between it and the distant coast. “The sea lions! The sea lions!” they shouted from one end of the promenade to the other. And the children ran, feeling the excitement of wonderful tales that inspire fear, and behind them the maids, the mothers, all the women, with a curiosity equal to that of the little ones. They passed their glasses to see the sea lions resting in rows along the island and around a lighthouse. Some of these animals looked like figures recumbent on a rock pedestal. The afternoon sun reflected on their damp wrappings, giving them a golden gleam. They were like oilskins topped by the head of a flat-nosed dog. They remained motionless, flaccid, clumsy, beneath the pale caress of the sun’s rays, oozing fat from their pores. Many seemed to be asleep. Some younger ones, as if sensing danger as they approached the ship, dragged themselves along on their short legs, They threw themselves into the water with the resounding splash of an inflated wineskin. Then they reappeared, their heads like a black, whiskered ball sticking out of the water. This island was the end of their advance from the glacial Southern Seas. They had come there, coming from the ice banks, to explore the wide mouth of the Plata estuary. The sun disappeared behind a barrier of clouds. The coast faded into a reddish mist. The water suddenly took on the somber hue of a winter sea. Many shivered with cold in their summer clothes. Maltrana thought the distant Pole was sending its breath before they managed to enter the shelter of the estuary. “As long as we don’t have any fog!” said the doctor. “The fog on the river is the most difficult thing. We have to stop at every moment, to send out signals, to avoid a collision… A tiresome thing!” Then he invited the two friends to accompany him on his visit to the ship’s engine room. He didn’t want to disembark without getting to know the soul of this floating hotel where he had lived for fifteen days. He wanted to share his emotions with the ladies of the family, but they all refused: “The engines! Oh no! How filthy!” And the good doctor, as if he couldn’t make the visit without a companion to receive his impressions, insisted until he got the two friends to accompany him through the winding corridors of the lower deck. The steward turned a small door, and they found themselves in a kind of interior courtyard similar to those that open in the middle of large buildings to provide air and light. Its height was the same as the ship’s height, from the keel to the top deck, and its four smooth white walls had no other connection with the rest of the ocean liner than the small entrance door. Several iron galleries marked the various floors of this department, which occupied the entire central part of the vessel. A steel grating divided the large, square, white shaft into two sections. The pistons of the engines passed through it, rising and falling incessantly in their vertical cylinders. Below this platform were the engines, and the three visitors reached them by descending several steel ladders. They carried pieces of oakum in their hands to protect themselves from the grease that seemed to ooze from the metal of the railings and walls. A sticky heat oppressed their chests, while at the same time pricking their noses with the smells of coal and mineral oil. Upon reaching the end of this wide shaft, next to the keel, where the engines and their attendants were located, the heat was less dense. A whip of icy air was felt as they passed by the mouths of the large ventilators. It was a panorama of metallic trunks animated by restless nervousness; a steel vegetation that moved its branches, rose, fell, and clashed, forcing its various tentacles to penetrate one another. The shining metal cast a white, viscous glow as it moved. This entire restless, vibrating organism, which seemed made of silver and grease, never slept. It had begun its movement in the North Sea and continued across half the planet, indifferent to fatigue, day and night, at the hour when men live, at the hour when men dream, under the sun and under the stars, as if time and distance were immaterial before its superhuman vigor. The brief immobility in ports meant no inertia or rest for it. Its iron limbs remained briefly in repose, but the life-giving fire continued to burn in its depths. The white blood of the steam continued to circulate through the arterial system of its valves and pipes. Preceded by a blond, phlegmatic man with silver braid on his sleeves and cap, the three visitors made their way among the engines embedded in the depths of this quadrangular space. The walls rose smooth, even, without a window, without the slightest gap, connected by the various galleries and the platform. But these unique obstacles were Almost transparent, with the subtlety of metal gratings, through which the gaze passes. At the very top, fourteen meters high, glass covers were raised above the deck of the boats, revealing two fragments of sky. Dr. Zurita learned in detail the functions of the various machines. The two largest, which occupied most of the space with their majestic dimensions, were the generators of the ship’s movement, the propellers. On one side , a smaller machine produced light; on the other, the cold machine, for the food stores and the necessities of life on board, a powerful and triumphant organism that, in that warm atmosphere, near the burning furnaces, maintained its pipes and cylinders under the tear-filled lining of a thick crust of ice. They advanced on a floor of metal plates. In some places, their feet felt the freshness of the humidity; in others, they crushed the diamond-like coal dust like crunchy sand. Suddenly, they felt an unexpected, icy whirlwind in their heads, tickling their noses with the sting of a sneeze and seeming to want to snatch their caps away. Looking up, they found themselves staring at the mouth of an enormous tube that rose and rose, polished and circular like the inside of a telescope, with much of its rounded intestine plunged into darkness and a faint glow from a skylight high above, next to the curved, invisible mouth. It was a ventilator, one of those that raised its yellow trombones above the various decks. And these ventilation tubes, like other vertical tunnels opened from the engines to the top of the ship, had steel abutments on their walls that served as steps; slight ladders that the engine room crew could climb in moments of danger. The guide with the silver braid opened a steel door as small as a window and as thick as a wall. Its closure, instantaneous, hermetic, absolute, was similar to that of artillery pieces. I was going to show them one of the two tunnels through which the propeller shafts passed . They entered, ducking their heads, into a narrow gallery more than thirty meters long, occupied only by a steel bar that rotated and rotated, stretched out in its fittings, shining like a mercury spiral. A string of electric bulbs illuminated day and night the continuous rotation in the silence and solitude of this metallic soul, absolute master of the underwater tunnel. The inner side of the gallery was vertical; the outer side opened at an angle upward, marking the beginning of the ship’s belly. A fine, lubricating rain fell on the shaft to facilitate and cool the friction of its incessant rotation. Zurita wanted to know how deep they were at that spot. They were seven meters below the surface of the ocean. “What’s swimming right now above our heads!” said Maltrana. “The esteemed neighbors who may be tailing on the other side of this wall!” And he rapped his knuckles against the steel wall, dull, extremely hard, like an immense block, beyond which it was difficult to imagine the slightest hollow. The tip of the tree, which in its incessant twists and turns disappeared at the end of the tunnel, inspired no less admiration. Not a noise, not the slightest touch. And yet, the silver spiral, piercing the stern of the ship, emerged into the ocean to raise a foamy whirlwind with the vertiginous revolutions of its twisted claws. The thought that they were seven meters underwater, and that the smallest crack in the tunnel would be enough to kill them instantly, isolated by the immovable door , produced a certain anguish in Maltrana. “This has been seen before. What if we were to visit something more interesting?” Their visit to the boilers was brief; the rows of burners expelled an infernal heat. They looked into a black apartment, in which several half-naked men were moving around, with a white cap on their heads. head. They were blond-haired, thin, as if the excessive heat had melted their fat, but with thick tendons and sturdy joints that stood out vigorously at the slightest effort. When they opened the door of a furnace to throw shovelfuls of coal into it, its glow illuminated everything with the reflections of fire, and the white, blue-eyed men appeared grotesque and terrible beneath the soot that blackened their faces and limbs. When the door was closed, the compartment was plunged again into a gloom saturated with coal dust. Their feet moved as if on a crisp beach on crumbled coal. A taste of smoke and grease descended their throats. They returned to the engines and, beside them, listened to the guide’s explanations. At all difficult times when entering and leaving ports , the first engineer took his place on a high gallery, just as the ship’s commander took his place on the bridge. The two rulers of this interoceanic world oversaw their respective functions: one the direction; the other the movement. And the internal signal telegraph linked the two intelligences with rapid communications. Next to the first engineer stood the second, in charge of receiving messages from the bridge and transmitting them below to the engines. Two engineers—who, with the Germanic fondness for titles and hierarchies, were called third engineers—each separately looked after the two large engines that powered the ship. Another third engineer oversaw the auxiliary engines that produced light and cold. At the end of the round trip, when the ocean liner returned to Hamburg, its engines were meticulously repaired. For fifteen days, it received the same care as a racehorse preparing for another run. The three visitors admired the silence and submission with which these enormous organisms carried out their functions, as if they had a soul and voluntarily submitted to a discipline. Not even the slightest noise disturbed the silence of the metal moving, enveloped in the muffled silence of grease. All the organisms functioned with the discreet smoothness of lubricant. The steel, coiled into tubes, extended into plates, elongated into pistons, rounded into discs, remained silent and impassive, not transpiring the noisy mystery of the powers churning within its core. Its rigidity prevented one from sensing, through material palpitations , the scorching water, the suffocating steam, the overwhelming fire, for whom the slightest escape was enough to attract catastrophe and death. The blind and cruel forces were tamed, channeled, submissive, ductile, and transformed in silence; they carried out their transmutations of life with religious stillness. Only the thick, sticky, humid heat, with its spicy coal scent, revealed the presence of the great mystery of modern times: the generation of movement within the metal. Isidro marveled at the simplicity with which these gigantic machines performed their function. “Who would have thought we were on a ship!” he exclaimed. “You, Fernando, who are a poet, or another professional writer, if you were to describe this part of the _Goethe_, what beautiful things you would say… and so false! Surely the place where we are would be the temple of fire and the machines the altars. The old god Baal would come up, and also a host of interesting images about the struggle of the ship, which carries a bonfire in its entrails, with the impetus of the cold waves: the conflict between fire and water… Perhaps this part of the ocean liner offered dramatic interest on stormy nights, when the men fed the restless engines, exposed to burning while the waves crashed above the deck, and the whole ship trembled and lurched under the fierce blows.” But now!… –It is difficult to imagine–continued Maltrana–that we are in the Ocean and these machines serve to stir the waters by marching on them. There’s no hint of the proximity of the sea. They could just as easily be the machines in a shoe or textile factory. Only the noise of the workshops is missing to complete the illusion. They then climbed the ladders, breathing with delight as they reached the deck. The afternoon was growing darker, as if night were about to fall in the middle of it. The coast was nowhere to be seen. A gray wall rose between it and the ship, and it seemed to advance slowly, devouring the dusty green of the waters. “Wow! The fog!” exclaimed Zurita. “We’ll be here for a while. Who knows when we’ll reach Montevideo.” The three separated, as if they felt the need to talk to other people after so much time together. The doctor went in search of his family members, to tell them what he had seen. Ojeda continued along the deck, silently strolling. Maltrana left him as he passed “the corner of the coconut trees.” She was attracted by the sight of almost all of them in their armchairs together, crowded around Madame Berta, the veteran wanderer, whose advice they listened religiously on matters related to the Americas. The proximity of the voyage’s end made them seek each other out and huddle together with professional solidarity, as if they sensed imminent dangers they would have to face together. Those making their first voyage were regarded by the others with pity and envy. If only they had their hopes! They remembered the rosy hopes, the golden lies that had accompanied them upon their arrival at the River Plate. And then, they had seen so much! Berta fell silent when she noticed a man had approached the group. But it was Maltrana, a trusted friend, and she continued speaking to young Ernestina, the one with the beautiful hair, whom they all surrounded with a certain predilection, as if she were a younger sister, innocent and spoiled. Her decadent and artificial charms seemed to be enlivened by the contact of this unconscious and splendid youth. “When I arrived here, fifteen years ago,” Berta said, “what thoughts I had in my head! I was about to set foot in the land of gold; I was afraid of arriving late, of others getting ahead of me and snatching up the best… I thought the ship wasn’t moving fast enough down the river; I counted the numbers painted on some buoys that mark the channel for large steamers. Sixty-four… sixty-three; there were only sixty-three kilometers left to reach Buenos Aires. Beast that I am! You always arrive too soon. For what you find at the end!” And a weary smile revealed her gold-set teeth. Ernestina expressed her hopes, accompanying them with a gesture of humility. She was an artist and longed for glory. Her future lay in the theater. She was going to live a happy and prosperous life in this America, about which she had been told wonderful things, but for a short time and with modest aspirations. She only hoped to scrape together fifty thousand francs. With this sum and her not-so-bad looks, she planned to make her way in Paris. She would force a theater director to hire her, showing interest in his venture with a few thousand francs; she would pay off the critics. The important thing was to make her debut, and then… then!… In her eyes shone the glow of hope and delusion that inflames all visionaries of glory. Fifty thousand francs! Wouldn’t a young woman like her, amiable and young… and an artist, find them in that rich country ? And her faith in the future rested especially on this last quality. Her listeners listened to her with contradictory expressions. Some believed her dream was achievable. Others, fatalistic and melancholic, twisted their faces. They knew what could be achieved in that land. Just to live … and thanks. At first, a quick fame, and then, misery: a misery worse than that of Europe. “Fifty thousand francs!” said Bertha. “It’s not much. It all depends on luck: on the first friend you find. Maybe you’ll make them in two months, maybe it will take years; maybe you’ll never get them together.” And she gave him advice inspired by her long experience. The danger was the American man, the charming, dark-skinned young man, sometimes arrogant, like a domineering macho man, sometimes sweet, with a buttery smoothness, a great dancer who won women over by swaying them in his arms to the beat of the tango, generous and wasteful to the point of dazzling in the first weeks of initiation, then skilled at recovering his own and taking something more if possible, under the pretext of gambling losses . Berta outlined the remedies authoritatively, like a sergeant reading the articles of the Ordinance to recruits. “The first thing you should do is leave your heart on the ship and go ashore without it. We don’t come here to fall in love: we come to make money. That ‘s it… Then, when you collect money, don’t keep it with you, because they’ll take it from you . No, don’t move your head: they’ll take it from you. You don’t know what kind of people there are in Buenos Aires; the best of each country.” I am me, and yet I have been deceived many times. Women are beasts when we find ourselves alone in a foreign country and feel the need for a true friend… Every Saturday you will go to the French Bank to deposit your savings. Or better yet, wire them directly to France. That way you won’t run the risk of your friend finding out and making you withdraw them from the bank, convincing you with kisses or slaps… Always take money; don’t accept shares or papers of any kind. The veteran insisted on this last point, as if some painful memory were still latent in her mind. Gentlemen who passed themselves off as millionaires would allow themselves to be adored for months and months without giving more than insignificant gifts, until finally the poor woman believed the moment had arrived to fulfill her hopes by formulating a request. “My beautiful gringa: I can’t give you money because business is bad. Besides, you would spend the money immediately. I’m going to give you something better that will ensure your future; I’m going to get rid of a magnificent piece of paper.” And he handed her a pile of shares corresponding to one of the many illusory ventures that were launched daily in the country. The woman kept the papers, believing she possessed a fortune. The business wasn’t yet profitable, but more to come! Her faith was strengthened by the example of companies that sprang up from nowhere in this land of miracles, which had gone on to make the most fabulous profits. “And the poor thing,” Berta continued, “continues to adore the man who made her rich, and when she tries to realize her ream of securities, she finds they ‘re only good enough to paper her bedroom. ” The veteran pitied the fate of many who had come to Buenos Aires with the intention of making money in a few months, returning immediately to Paris, and had spent years and years chained by poverty, with no hope of returning. The prudent Marcela, the one who asked everyone about the harvest, nodded affirmatively. “Her hope,” she said, “is the same as that of men, who always expect a good deal the next day.” And so the years pass; and since they’re alone, to cheer themselves up a bit, they turn to morphine, cocaine, opium, and ether. The police ignored such vices. Since the country’s people didn’t like them, they didn’t constitute a national danger. That was all it was for the gringas. Comforting poisons were sold profusely in the big city, and the desperate, without the strength to return and without hope for the future, gave themselves over to them, contracting horrible illnesses. The most experienced of the group agreed with their assessments. Buenos Aires was a good business center for those who knew how to keep their exits clear. A deadly trap for those who stayed inside. “We are ‘swallows,'” said Marcela, “just like those Italian reapers who arrive every year at harvest time , collect their wages, and return to their country. It’s for the best.” Maltrana smiled as he looked at this flock of swallows that They would take flight annually from Paris if the harvest news was good. During their stay in the city of hope, they pitied their companions who had remained inside the siege with broken wings, without the strength to jump, drunk on the poison that falsely rekindled the hopes of their first and only voyage. A general movement of the people occupying the deck interrupted this conversation, making the French women abandon their chairs. They all ran to the starboard side to see in the hazy afternoon the black bulk of a ship just like the _Goethe_ advancing toward it as if about to ram it. Some began to feel uneasy at this approach; but as the two vessels drew close, the distance between their hulls widened. It was an ocean liner from the same Navigation Company, which had just left Montevideo bound for Europe. It came from the ports of the Pacific, negotiating the great swells of the Southern Seas and the winding channels of the Strait of Magellan, lined with mountains of ice. Both ships greeted each other with the roar of their funnels and passed very close, allowing the passengers of both to see each other. The gunwales were occupied by doll-like figures, their arms automatically waving, each with a white dot at the end: a handkerchief or a cap. The flag had been hoisted on both sterns, and the Germans greeted it with shouting enthusiasm: “Hoch!… hoch!” The music of the Goethe rose to the boat decks, and in the interludes of the roar of the funnel, the beats of the bass drum and the harmonious bellow of brass instruments could be heard. On the opposite ship, the glitter of the brass instruments and the figures of the musicians, arranged in a circle on the farthest deck, were also striking . Four very long trumpets , four tubes similar to those that guided the march of Roman legionaries, opened their golden mouths above their little heads, and in the intervals of silence their distant roar reached the _Goethe_ . The Chileans were excited to see this ship coming from their homeland. Some had rushed to the telegraph office to learn the names of their compatriots going to Europe on the other ocean liner, and they repeated them among themselves. Basque and Andalusian surnames of archaic euphony resonated in their conversation: surnames of which only a traditional memory survived on the Peninsula in chronicles and comedies of other centuries. They welcomed the news of those who were leaving for the old world with the interest of a great event . They were all friends, all somewhat related in that Republic of closed classes, where government and wealth remained in the possession of the old colonial families, increasingly united by marriages within the same caste. “Long live Chile!” they shouted energetically, greeting the distant figures. They looked at that ship as if it were their own because it was coming from their country; they acclaimed the small people lined up on its sides, thinking they recognized them; they welcomed these cheers in response to the muffled roar that reached them across the sea. Some, with the excitement of their enthusiasm, gave the extravagant and heroic cheer of great battles, the kind that accompanies the armed and patriotic populace of the “broken” in their heroic undertakings, the acclamation revealing a stubborn character, capable of forging ahead over all obstacles. “Long live Chile, m…!” The ship sailed away with its trumpets blazing overhead and the Lilliputian crowd lined up on the various floors. A pale ray of sunlight lit its stern for a few moments with reflections of ancient gold. Then, as if the Ocean had awakened solely to witness this encounter, shadow was reestablished, and something denser than shadow assailed the _Goethe_ a few minutes later. A gray wall advanced upon it, devouring the blue of the sky and the yellowish green of the sea. Fog enveloped the ship as it entered The mouth of the estuary. It began to sail slowly. Sometimes it seemed to stop, as if wavering undecided, unsure which direction to follow, and soon afterward it would resume its course. The “siren” tore minute by minute with a mournful howl through this white night that had fallen in the middle of the afternoon. A short distance from the gunwales, the mist blocked out all visibility. Those who looked down could see only a few feet of water. Beyond, the murky, dense smoke devoured everything. The foremast and the bow were faint shadows, blurred silhouettes, pale drawings on a gray background. Many passengers, especially the women, were showing signs of restlessness. Their nerves were excited by the roaring from the funnel, which seemed like calls for help. It irritated them not to be able to see, to be marching blindly through places they frequently sailed. They thought about the possibility of a collision in this forbidding and treacherous atmosphere. They would have preferred the thunderous life of a storm. The roars of the ocean liner were answered, muffled by the distance and the fog, by those of other ships. Perhaps they were close by. The fog attenuates the sounds. To make up for the intermittent roaring of the funnel, the steamer’s bell tinkled incessantly, worked by a cabin boy. This ringing, similar to the tolling of church bells, further excited the ladies’ nervousness. Many criticized the captain for continuing onward, exposing them to a collision with another ship or running aground in the shallows of the river. Suddenly, there was a hiss on the bridge, a clatter in the bow of loose winches and slipping chains. The ship remained motionless; it had just anchored, waiting for the atmosphere to clear. And then, due to one of those inconsistencies typical of crowds, the protest was echoed by those who had complained upon seeing the ship moving. Those slow-moving, cautious Germans! A captain from another country would have gone ahead. The women stamped their feet. When would they enter Montevideo? Perhaps they would spend the night on the river; perhaps they wouldn’t reach Buenos Aires at all the following day. Dr. Zurita spoke of fogs that had lasted three days. “And we’ll stay here, just as if we were on an island… What a drag!” The passengers soon grew tired of contemplating the curtain of fog. Many thought they saw on its dense surface black shapes that suddenly appeared and grew larger, silhouettes of ships bearing down on them at full steam. They ended up resigning themselves, displaying fatalistic courage; whatever was about to happen was inevitable. Moreover, the ship continued to let out a roar every half minute indicating its presence. And they walked around the deck with a certain clumsiness, with a feeling of strangeness in their feet, already accustomed to the motion of the floor. All the lights inside the ship had been turned on; the piano in the saloon was playing, and couples of dancers passed by the windows, eager to take advantage of the inertia of waiting. The smoking room didn’t have a free seat. Many felt the need to drink, to get rid of the unpleasant taste the fog left in their throats. The operetta artists appeared in their best clothes. They had dressed in mid-afternoon to go ashore, believing they would be in Montevideo within the hour. The immobility of the ship placed them in a somewhat ridiculous situation: the women squeezed into their brand-new dresses, wearing large hats, not daring to sit down for fear of wrinkling their skirts; the men with canes in hand, suffering the torment of high collars among the other people who still had on their comfortable travel clothes. Who knows when they’ll be able to disembark!… Everyone was lamenting this last-minute setback with theatrical gestures. Ojeda sat down at a table on the terrace of the smoking room with his compatriot Conchita. “Countrywoman, we’re almost there,” he had said upon seeing her. “Let me buy you a drink. Let’s celebrate a safe trip.” Now that he found himself without any female friends, he enjoyed chatting with the A gracious woman from Madrid, to whom he had barely paid attention in the previous days. And she, sensing that this sudden approach was only due to a selfish desire not to be alone, mocked his adventures on the ship. “You, countryman, are only interested in foreign things. You don’t have a single eye for things at home… Of course! We from the land are not very distinguished, we have no “chic,” as those ladies who talk to Isidro say.” Fernando looked at her with growing interest. Conchita was free from the virtuous presence of Doña Zobeida, who was down below arranging luggage. Her little black eyes had a malicious and promising expression. He didn’t mind the woman from Madrid… But on the eve of their arrival in Buenos Aires! To burden a man like him with a new commitment , who was going on a whim!… Their conversation soon turned to money and the new life that awaited them there. What was Concha planning to do when they disembarked? Did she have any friends in that land?… But the girl laughed with courageous recklessness. No one was waiting for her, nor did she need any support. She would enter Buenos Aires as if she were at home; just as if she had been born there. “And money, you know, countryman? Not a peseta, not a penny. I have the pleasure of disembarking with a clean pocket. I want it on record , so that when I go by car, I’ll have pearl necklaces and the newspapers publish my biography with a portrait.” I had a little money left—very little!—when I got off in Rio with Doña Zobeida. The poor lady invited me, and I invited her; then she gave me another gift, and I, not to be outdone, returned the gift. In short, all my money was spent on cars, soft drinks, local fruit, and so on. At the end of the day, I had ten pesetas left, and I spent them on stamps and postcards, sending greetings to my friends in Spain. I don’t have a single speck left. Completely clean ! That’s how you walk, lighter. She laughed with a certain aggressiveness, as if challenging the future. When she arrived in Buenos Aires, she would get into a carriage, the first one she came across , ordering the driver to take her to a Spanish hotel. At the hotel they would pay the fare. And then, to live, to wait… She had been in worse situations. A woman like her could travel the world without a penny. Not all men were going to be as dour and absent-minded as one she knew—here Ojeda greeted her ironically, not knowing how to reply. She had old friends in Argentina: gentlemen she had met during her stay in Madrid; some, Americans; others, Spaniards established in Buenos Aires. She didn’t know their addresses, but she would find out. “I’m capable of discovering where the devil sleeps. Besides, I count on luck, with what one doesn’t expect. My heart tells me something good will turn up. ” Fernando told her about the French women who were on the ship. Maybe she’d have more luck than them. Who knows what she’d achieve in Buenos Aires! But the Spanish woman grimaced. She didn’t covet jewels, nor did she seek to attract attention for her elegance. She wanted to live well, and nothing more. “Isidro says I’m a woman for people… classic. I don’t know what that means. I like serious men; no noise. Living with someone like a family.” Ojeda tried to tempt her feminine ambition by talking about the diamonds that traveling courtesans were winning in Argentina and Brazil. But Conchita grimaced again, protesting. “No; I don’t want diamonds. For the way many people win them!… I’m classic, as Isidro says, and I don’t lend myself to certain things. I like it the way God commands, you understand?… the way God commands.” And he couldn’t give any clearer explanations about what God commands, because Doña Zobeida appeared, having finished her chores, and was going along the deck in search of “the good young lady.” The people ran to the bow balcony, as if attracted by some great novelty. The ship was moving again; it was advancing slowly. The mist persisted, but it was Less dense. The eyes could see further through its white smoke. This march restored good humor to those preparing to disembark in Montevideo. It was a timid but continuous advance through the mist, which appeared in dense waves, as if the atmosphere were solidifying in places. This curtain slid downriver, and the _Goethe_ re-emerged into a less dense fog, which made the distant profiles transparent like fluid silhouettes. Soon, a new blinding avalanche passed over the ship, and thus it advanced, with rapid transitions, from absolute darkness to a vaporous, milky gloom. The wan light that had been able to filter through these gloomy curtains during the day had finally been extinguished with the arrival of night. The ship appeared illuminated from the lower decks to the mastheads. Its sides were pierced like black honeycombs by the fiery eyes of the skylights. The reflections on the decks gave the encroaching fog an iridescent tremor. At certain moments, the ocean liner seemed motionless, and only by moving their heads over the side were the passengers convinced that it was moving, hearing the invisible splashing of its sides. Ojeda saw Mina pass by him, a very different Mina from the one he had known until then, always dressed in white and with her head uncovered. A dark overcoat wrapped her from neck to toe. Her face was half hidden by a wide hat and a thick veil. She, who in the previous days had avoided any contact with Fernando, passed by him repeatedly. He even thought he could guess through the veil that her eyes were intently looking at him. As they moved near a ladder on the boat deck, Mina turned her head with a silent invitation and quickly climbed inside. Fernando, after a prudent wait, followed in her footsteps. They found themselves above in a milky twilight pierced by the red arrow of solitary lights. No one but them. They felt a certain embarrassment upon seeing each other face to face, as if they regretted this interview. Within a few moments, dampness trickled down their clothes. Their hands felt damp, and instinctively they put them in their pockets. Their whole life was concentrated in their eyes. She was the first to break the silence. She couldn’t resign herself to leaving the ship without speaking to him for the last time, without saying goodbye. And Fernando, moved by the tone of humility in which this woman spoke, took his hands out of his pockets, searching for hers. “Mina!”… Beloved Brunilda!… Of his existence in the middle of the ocean, she was going to be the only memory that would remain. The German woman spoke timidly at first, in the third person, avoiding the familiar form of address of passion; But then, with sudden familiarity, he spoke freely, just as he had when they had walked on deck late at night. “You have hurt me so much. What I have suffered!… I wanted to hate you, and I could not… Seeing you with another woman, I fled, I fled, detesting your companion; but not you. And now I have not been able to leave without saying goodbye. Alas! If he had not felt the fatal curiosity… If he had limited himself to loving her as she wished… what happiness for both of us!… “I cannot blame you. You are a man and you need possession; and I am a poor sick woman, with no other charms than those of the soul, those which cannot be seen… And now, goodbye; perhaps forever, perhaps only for a while. The world is so small!… The company was going to disembark in Montevideo. It would work for three weeks in this city, while a theater in Buenos Aires became free. “Soon I will go to where you will be… but who knows!” Even if we live in the same place, we will not see each other. We are from different worlds; you will not remember me. Who am I?… Not even a good memory: a disappointment, a painful memory. He protested with all the vehemence of his character, passionate and eloquent when in contact with a woman. He would remember her as long as she lived. The others had left in her memory only a feeling of painful satiety. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You will be the best memory of my existence… You have made me suffer so much. Your escape made me see a decadence and a misery I had forgotten. But even so, thank you, thank you so much! I owe you the only happiness I have ever known.” She lived brutalized by discouragement, resigned to never knowing love again, the charm of existence. And he would arrive, to notice her withered beauty, unnoticed by others, and mercifully awaken her, taking her in his arms, raising her to his mouth. This happiness had lasted little. A small ray of sunshine, a golden laugh in the limbo of her existence: a flash of joyful light, and then night again, the despair of recognizing her decline. But despite this, she repeated her words of gratitude. “Thank you, thank you so much!” She took with her something that wouldn’t be taken away from her: the sweet melancholy of memory, which can embellish the gloom of a resigned existence. She would think of him, as if in a mild autumn, when she felt the chill of loneliness. “Even if you don’t give me more, you’ve done enough… Perhaps it’s better if we don’t meet again. I’ll see you in my memory, growing ever larger, ever more attractive… And now, goodbye. Let’s part ways. I have to go downstairs.” Fernando, who hours before had barely remembered her, felt sad to leave her. He experienced the melancholy of an actor who is beginning to “get into character” and suddenly finds the role taken away from him. He had jumped back in thought, suppressing a few days, and contemplated himself in the silence of the equinoctial night, strolling through “the corner of kisses,” holding the romantic German woman in one arm, close to fainting from sentimentality. The words of those days returned to his lips: “My sweetheart!… My Valkyrie!” That woman was the only one on the ship who had loved him selflessly. And she wanted to part from him like that, coldly, without adding anything to her words? They were holding hands, their fingers intertwined. He tugged without resistance, and she, submissive, divining his desires, let her head fall onto Fernando’s shoulder. Mina didn’t speak, but he thought he heard her childish, fearful voice, just as it had sounded below nights before: “Mouth, yes… Cabin, no…” Their kiss was sad, difficult. Their faces, when they met, were damp and dripping from the fog. She kissed him as on the first night, from bottom to top, squinting her eyes, the sides of her nose throbbing, pursing her lips, like a flower closing its petals. But Fernando only found in this caress a distant sensation, similar to that of a faded perfume, or of blurred music. In addition, the brim of the hat dug into his forehead, the swirling veil scraped one of his cheeks, and the point of a long pin, which seemed animated by malignant life, treacherously sought one of his eyes. She pulled away with a harsh tug. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” And when she was at the side of the ladder, she turned her face toward Ojeda again to say goodbye in a tremulous voice: “My sweetheart!… my poet! Remember this sometime.” As Fernando descended to the promenade deck, he saw Mina speaking in German with others of the company. He passed by her, and when he met her eyes, they looked at him indifferently, without the slightest emotion, as if he were a stranger. Through the increasingly clear fog, several points of light began to appear: some fixed, others unmoving. others, intermittent, blinking like the eyes of a Cyclops. A reddish cloud stretched out in front of the bow over the black profile of the coast. It must have been the reflection of an illuminated city… Montevideo! And once again the fickleness of the crowd was revealed in their praise of the captain for having advanced without losing his way despite the fog. Large gaps opened up in the sky as the mist parted. They were long pendants of intense blue in which swarms of stars floated. A short while later, a fresh breeze swept away the last shreds, which piled up beyond the stern, downriver, forming a white barrier. The surface of the estuary and the black coast with its gleaming lighthouses and towns were completely exposed, as clean as a freshly washed painting . The waves broke and mingled the reflections of the stars, making these heatless lights dance like will-o’-the-wisps. The Goethe began to bellow again into the serene night, maintaining its slow pace, as if it didn’t dare advance alone. After lunch, the passengers crowded around the gunwales, attracted by something new. A light was coming toward the ship at the water’s edge; a light that was constantly rolling wildly, frequently disappearing when a wave came between it and the ship. Some passengers recognized this light. It was the pilot’s little steamer from Montevideo. From the top of the Goethe, motionless as an island, the undulations crashing against its sides seemed insignificant; but as they looked at the light that was approaching hesitantly, some women cried out in anguish. The little steamer, wide and deep, with a sturdy funnel, sailed, nevertheless, like a piece of cork at the mercy of the waves, tossed, twisted, buffeted by conflicting forces. Sometimes its light disappeared, as if swallowed by the waters, and after a long eclipse it reappeared farther away, where no one expected to see it. “What a River Plate!” Dr. Zurita said proudly to Isidro. “And what you see is nothing… You’d have to endure a stormy day… Some people who don’t get seasick going to Europe would pour their hearts out on a river steamer. ” The pilot’s ship entered the illuminated area of the Goethe. Below, the passengers saw a wide deck wet from the waves, a few men in raincoats, the mouth of a funnel that had stopped spewing smoke, and the lights of several lanterns. A rope ladder fell from the liner, and a man scrambled down its beams. A few minutes later, the engine room signal bells sounded from above the ship . The little steamer detached itself, moving away with a violent and grotesque pitching, similar to the stumble of a drunk. The Goethe, with the pilot on the bridge, accelerated its course, heading straight for Montevideo. Strings of lights began to emerge among the shadowy masses of the coast. Some were red and dull; others, white and bristling with brilliance: a procession that grew longer and more numerous as the ship advanced. High in the sky, a powerful star flickered intermittently, piercing the darkness. The Uruguayans greeted this flickering band of light with patriotic enthusiasm. It was the Cerro lighthouse; the mountain that, when seen by the first Spanish navigators , according to tradition, gave the city its name. The lights were spreading profusely. They lined up in double rows, indicating the layout of the exterior boulevards; other, fainter ones dotted the black mass of buildings with overlapping rows. Beside the water, the electric spotlights of the pier and the multicolored lanterns of the ships shone. The band of the Goethe began to play the triumphal march that greeted the entry into the ports. On one side of the ship, a wall with foam at its base emerged. It was the breakwater. Docks with bridges crowded around their edges could be seen; tall buildings; street entrances that disappeared into the distance between a double row of trees and lanterns; and the moving lights of streetcars and automobiles. Some passengers were moving from one side of the deck to the other, as if they were running out of time to disembark. “Here we are! We’ve arrived!” The Goethe passed between ships as enormous as itself, ocean liners bound for Europe or the ports of the Pacific, anchoring for only a few hours near the mouth of the harbor before leaving immediately. Their red, green, and white lights were reflected in a violent meandering motion in the The waters were stirred by the continuous passage of launches and tugboats. Just when the crew on the Goethe thought the ship was going to continue moving forward, until it was close to a dock, it stopped in the middle of the basin, just like the other ocean liners, and the resounding sound of the anchor chains sounded from its bow. “Bottom!” The ship remained motionless, and immediately the small steamers moving around it surrounded it. The crowd gathered on its decks, waving handkerchiefs and shouting to attract the attention of the ocean liner passengers lined up on the gunwales. And many of these, as they craned their necks to get a better look at the crowd filling the small ships, recognized friendly faces, greeting them with shouts of joy and questions about those missing. Some were from Buenos Aires and had come down the river to welcome the families returning from Europe; Others were waiting for the moment to board the ocean liner, either out of curiosity or because their jobs demanded it. The Goethe had lit powerful green spotlights on its sides , giving the faces a livid hue, making the lanterns of the nearby vessels pale. After a long wait , the ship’s ladders were opened, and the crowd rushed down them as if on the attack. The first to enter were the newspaper vendors, hawking the latest newspapers and magazines from Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The travelers snatched up the printed paper, eager to learn the news from their country, as if they feared that the most extraordinary events had occurred during their isolation at sea. Then came brokers from Buenos Aires hotels and agents from shipping companies, offering their services. Everyone spoke of the great city located at the end of the estuary, as if it alone existed and the other one in sight were a simple river port. Those who had arrived from Buenos Aires scattered throughout the ocean liner to greet their friends. Shouts, calls, acknowledgments, hugs, questions about relatives waiting there. Passengers bound for Montevideo filed down a special staircase to a small, wide-decked steamer. All the ladies of the operetta descended these wooden steps with the majestic gesture of a theater queen descending a cardboard staircase. The “stars” of the company advanced, hindered by the large bouquets the impresario had sent them as a greeting. Even the chorus girls seemed different as they stepped ashore. They responded to Maltrana’s greetings with the discretion of grand ladies abandoning their incognito. They were finally in America. Fortune, undoubtedly, had pleasant surprises in store for them. They had to assert themselves, forgetting the promiscuous nature of the ship. Fernando saw Mina disembarking last, carrying the child in front of her and holding several clothes and packages in her arms. He passed by him as if he didn’t want to see him, responding to his farewell glance with a slight nod. “Goodbye, Karl!” Ojeda’s hand had caressed the boy, and he shook his head, considering him for a moment with the expression of someone suddenly remembering a forgotten person. Then he walked away from him without a greeting, without a smile, with the sulkiness of his precocious seriousness. Isidro looked at the city, praising its beautiful appearance. “We’re in our America now, Ojeda. Believe me , I’d be happy to go down there, but I’m not happy to see a city at night, and the ship will leave before dawn. ” Ojeda had been to Montevideo years before, and he had fond memories . “Someday we’ll see it,” he said. “We’re going to be neighbors there. Just a one-night trip… Who knows how many times we’ll have to come back here!” A burst of applause, accompanied by vibrant cheers, sounded on the upper deck. The curious Maltrana ran up the stairs, and Fernando followed him. A crowd filled the winter garden and the hall. Tricolor flags were unfurled over uncovered heads . “The gringos! Let’s go see the gringos!” the children on the promenade were saying, curiously flocking around, attracted by the applause. Several commissions from Italian societies in Montevideo had come to greet their compatriot, the illustrious lecturer, on his way to Buenos Aires. They all lamented that he wasn’t landing in their city immediately; they asked him to return to Montevideo as soon as possible. Isidro noticed the diverse appearances of the commissioners: some were well-dressed, revealing in their appearance the satisfaction of a newly acquired fortune; others were more humble, with the appearance of workers in their Sunday best; but all were brimming with patriotic pride for this visit, which reminded them of their distant land and seemed to increase their own importance in their adopted country. The lecturer, who had gone almost unnoticed during the voyage, now suddenly became a giant with this popular homage. Many ladies who had barely noticed him smiled and found him “a very distinguished figure.” A young Italian man, representative of a working-class society, greeted the professor with a memorized speech. He recited it in good faith, convinced that he was working for the glory of his country. He celebrated the arrival of the great man like the appearance of the day, with emphatic language: “Egregio professore: Voi siete come la stella del mattino…” And while his compatriots applauded, “the morning star ” stroked his beard and adjusted his glasses, pondering his reply. “And the abbot?” Maltrana asked. “Where could the other lecturer be?” The two friends had returned to the promenade, fleeing the sweaty heat and the jostling of the crowd. Near the café, they saw the abbot surrounded by three young men who had come from Buenos Aires to welcome him . “Little success,” said Isidro. “The Italian crushes him with his masses. Just look: three young men, three children from good families, who undoubtedly came sent by their mothers. ” Ojeda shook his head. The receptions were different, certainly; but the final outcome, the positive result of the conferences, remained to be seen. “They both come to make money, and that’s what really matters to them. You’ll see how the other, despite all the cheers, music, and flags, doesn’t take what the abbot takes.” As they continued circulating on the deck, they saw new people who had joined the groups of travelers. All the Argentine families surrounded someone who had made the trip to Montevideo to greet them. And the newcomer talked and talked, to satisfy his eager curiosity for news. On the terrace of the smoking room, they found all the Kaspers seated at a table gravely, as if holding a family council. Facing Nélida stood a tall, sun-tanned young man with a hard gaze. Maltrana passed quickly, looking away, as if he wanted to avoid greetings and introductions. “Have you noticed?” he said to Ojeda a few steps further on. “It’s her brother, the centaur of the Pampas, who has come to await them; the avenger who threatens to disfigure his sister’s face… The poor thing has been terribly scared since this afternoon. A radiogram told them that the barbarian was waiting for them in Montevideo, and she immediately begged me not to go near her. We’ll see what this will do. On the other side of the avenue, they found the “mysterious man.” Maltrana, upon seeing him, was greatly surprised. Oh wonder! The gloomy man wasn’t alone; he had a friend. A young man who looked like a valet was speaking to him. “This is becoming clear, Ojeda. Some accomplice has come to warn you.” The police are undoubtedly waiting for him in Buenos Aires… But that buddy looks like a servant in a big house. Aren’t they planning some dirty trick together?… Anyway, we’ll find out the truth tomorrow. I I’m not leaving without finding out what’s inside the cabin. Tired of rubbing shoulders with the landspeople who filled the decks, they took refuge in the smoking room. The crowd in this lounge was also extraordinary . Almost all the tables were occupied. The passengers were giving gifts to friends who had come to greet them. Fernando looked with melancholy at this vast room, in which, for some, their entire transatlantic life had slipped by. “The last night, Isidro. You can say goodbye to the ship. Tomorrow at this time, with the new impressions of land, perhaps we will have forgotten it.” Both of them, accustomed to life on board, felt a certain sadness at the thought that they would no longer see these places, where they had spent fifteen days of their lives, equivalent to fifteen months in their long tedium and rapid events. Ojeda felt the need to solemnize this last night with something extraordinary, and ordered champagne. “A bottle for both of us, would that be alright, Maltrana? Let’s salute the River Plate; let’s happily present ourselves before the fortune that awaits us… To our luck! ” And after clinking glasses, they remained silent, staring intently at the decorations in that room, as if seeing it for the first time and wishing to carry its image imprinted in their memories. They hadn’t noticed until then the coats of arms adorning the walls amidst golden garlands of fruit and leaves. They were those of all the nations whose ports the ship called at, plus those of Paraguay and Chile. A dome of colored glass rose above the dark gold coffered ceiling. Deep leather armchairs were grouped around the oak tables. On these, many felt rims, indicators of the number of bottles consumed, and large matchboxes with nickel receptacles filled with cigarette butts. The fans hummed constantly, clearing the air of smoke. The mosaic floor offered a clarity conducive to slipping. In the background were, as always, the poker devotees, oblivious to outside events, cards in hand, impassively spying on each other. Their number was smaller. Some had stayed in Rio de Janeiro, others had just landed in Montevideo; but these desertions did not cool the faith of the loyalists; on the contrary, their fervor seemed to intensify. It was the last game: the next day they would separate. And they played oblivious of everything, without knowing for sure if the ship was stationary or had resumed its journey. A large portrait of Goethe adorned the end of the room. The poet, with his Olympian smile, presided over the handling of cards and the continuous drinking of part of the transatlantic flock corralled on the ship of his name. A fallen column served as his seat, and a desolate countryside served as a melancholy background. A wide-brimmed hat shaded his Hellenistic godlike features , and he covered his clothes with a white tunic, like a traveling cloak. With this somewhat grotesque exterior, the artist had depicted him, dreaming among the ruins of the Roman countryside. Maltrana looked at him more closely than usual, as if bidding him farewell. “Let’s say goodbye to our noble friend Don Wolfgang, who has patiently witnessed so many of our follies…” He was a happy man. He wasn’t forced, like us, to run the world in search of money. Fortune was bountiful to him, like one of those passionate old women who like to protect handsome men. He had it all: genius, beauty, glory, and love. He even knew the pride of governing men… But despite his selfish happiness, he knew how to see from his heights, like no one else, the concerns and ambitions of poor mortals. Remember your hero, my friend; Remember how his life ended… It was a colleague of yours, a colonizer. Ojeda smiled as he remembered, based on these hints from his friend, the end of the insatiable Fausto. He had enjoyed two great loves, Margarita and Elena, and neither the naive German bourgeoisie nor the tempting daughter of the The gods had made him know true happiness. Science was another disappointment for him; and so was empire over men, the “power of domination,” with all the satisfactions of pride… At the end of his life, he believed he had found true happiness by dedicating himself to the progress of his fellow men, colonizing an island, building there the future city, where all would be equal, ruled by holy poetry… And to accomplish this enterprise, he struggled with the wild earth and the waters, opening an enormous canal between them. “Yes,” continued Fernando, “he was a colonizer, after having been a lover, a sage, and a monarch. But when he considered his triumphant work, Mephistopheles, his diabolical companion, wicked and mocking, laughed behind his back. “Unhappy man: you think you are opening a canal, and you are opening your own grave.” ” But that will not happen to you. You are young, and you have more dreams than the famous doctor.” Fernando made a gesture of indifference. He was not worried about the future. Death would come for him as it comes for everyone else, unexpectedly, without considering the ambitions and needs of its victim. If men thought about death all the time, few would want to work, convinced in advance of the futility of their efforts. “I believe the same as you,” he concluded courageously. “I will turn the earth and open canals, without opening my grave… My grave is in Europe. But who knows what awaits us before we die in this country we are reaching!” After midnight, the two friends retired to their cabins. The crowd on the decks and in the saloons had thinned out. The Italian commissioners , with their flags and cheers, were already ashore, and like them, the other inhabitants of Montevideo had come to the ocean liner to greet their friends. There were no passenger steamers left around the Goethe. Now there were strong barges floating alongside the ship. The unloading machines moved noisily . Their yellow arms transferred enormous bales from the bow and stern holds to the flat boats. This operation would last until dawn. In addition to the merchandise, the operetta troupe’s enormous baggage had to be unloaded: chests of costumes, decorations, the performers’ luggage. Upon entering his cabin, Ojeda experienced the surprise of immobility. He was accustomed to the distant hum of the machine, which transmitted a slight tremor to the walls. He missed the creaking of the wood, the continuous sound of running water beneath the window. He thought he was now in a house on solid ground. Everything was inert, as if the ship were made of brick with deep roots in the ground. The night silence, punctuated by lightning flashes of noise, was like that of a factory. Just as Fernando began to fall asleep, the rolling of the winches would suddenly resume, accompanied by the shouts of the workers engaged in unloading. The ship couldn’t set sail until after dawn. The captain was waiting for the tide to rise before sailing upriver. Ojeda awoke the next morning as the sun shone through his cabin window. His first impression was one of shock. Something extraordinary had delayed the ship’s departure. It seemed motionless, as if still anchored off Montevideo. But as he approached the window, he didn’t see the city or the numerous ships moored in the port. An endless expanse of water opened up before his eyes; but it was yellowish in places, reddish beyond, with the gentle ripple of short, incessant swells. The ship sailed as if moving through cotton wool, without a shock, without the slightest sway. Its deep keel seemed to glide on invisible rails . The waters, parting before her belly, were muffled and raised no foaming soap. Her eyes, accustomed to the intense blue of the ocean, blinked with a certain strangeness at the yellow expanse, resembling in color a dry meadow. On the promenade deck, Fernando found the passengers dressed in street clothes, as if they were running out of time to jump ashore. Many men were already wearing gloves and walking sticks. The ladies were wearing hats and coats recently purchased in Paris. Perhaps they were too thick for the prevailing temperature, but they were in a hurry to show them off when they stepped ashore, counting on the admiration or smiling envy of their friends. There were still several hours to go before reaching Buenos Aires. The banks, without a single hill or tall forests, remained invisible, and the river lay as immense and solitary as the sea. From time to time, on the red waters, which seemed like liquid mud, a buoy bobbed with a lantern at the top and a white number on its belly, indicating the kilometers between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The Goethe sailed between a double row of these buoys, which marked the channel for deep-draft vessels. On the sides of this channel, the dredging boats emerged motionless, like black whales asleep on the surface of the water. The oblique string of their enormous tanks could be seen entering the water and emerging with a spray of stirred-up mud. The ocean liner moved forward slowly, as if its keel were biting into hidden obstacles at the bottom. It shuddered as it stirred centuries-old silt, overcoming hidden resistances. Around its belly, the waters darkened with a black cloud rising from the depths. The foam stirred by the propellers was flecked with debris in its boiling water. A gusty wind, more violent than that of the ocean, passed over this surface, raising a swell that crashed mightily against the ship’s sides without causing the slightest commotion. Half an hour later, when the wind died away, the surface of the river lay almost motionless. Outside the buoy lines, numerous ships were passing at full steam, or with their sails unfurled. They were frigates on their way to unload, up the Paraná, in the port of Rosario; three-decker steamers, mastless and shallow, similar to floating houses, that provided the daily service between Buenos Aires and Montevideo; small packet boats, similar in shape to the large ocean liners, that sailed up the estuary toward Paraguay and the river ports of call in the heart of Brazil, deep in the virgin forest. Ojeda saw Maltrana coming toward him, smiling and friendly, as if he were running out of time to share good news. “The Kasper family is settled. Nélida just introduced me to her fearsome brother… As for the mysterious cabin, it’s no longer a mystery… A little while ago I was talking with “the gloomy man.” And as if he enjoyed keeping Fernando’s curiosity latent, he began by talking about Nélida and her family. Everyone was happy! The younger brother, stunned by his mother’s reprimands and Mr. Kasper’s patriarchal anger, seemed to have forgotten his threats and refrained from making any revelations to his older brother. Nélida lent him the parrot and the monkey Ojeda had given him in perpetuity, and this generous favor had finally extinguished their old grudges. Busy caressing these companions, he remembered nothing. The father and his wild firstborn had spent several hours the night before and this morning talking about business. And Nélida took advantage of the slightest pause to caress the somber centaur with feline and deceitful gestures , who also seemed to have forgotten his misgivings and threats in his excitement. Isidro had just met them in the smoking room, and Nélida had introduced him to her brother. “A barbarian; believe me, Ojeda.” A grim look, difficulty in speaking, as if she couldn’t remember the words, and a handshake that still hurts. But she thanked me as best she could upon learning from Nélida that another compatriot and I had been very kind to her. She even invited me to spend a few days at her ranch. What a life on the ocean! What things the ship has seen! “And what about the cabin?” asked Fernando. “What’s inside it?”
Maltrana exclaimed again, pondering the surprises of that life at sea, abundant in novelty and contrast. They had been traveling on fourteen million in gold piled in the hold; and as if such wealth weren’t enough, he had slept every night next to a millionaire lady, whose presence on the ocean liner very few knew about. “Have you seen her?” asked Ojeda, frankly interested in this news. “I don’t think I’ll see her: I’m not tempted by curiosity. She’s lost all interest to me… Because I warn you, Fernando, that lady, my cabin neighbor, died a month ago in Paris, and it’s her body that’s coming with us to Buenos Aires.” Isidro had just found out. The ship’s steward had revealed the secret to him, seeing the voyage’s end approaching. “The poor lady had a rather odd poetic name: Doña Matutina Flores.” It seems that in this land they baptize people with rather unusual names… The noble matron’s millions! I don’t know how many: some say thirty, others forty… In short, many houses in Buenos Aires, leagues and leagues of fields, thousands and thousands of cows, shares in all the serious banks. She lived in Paris, like any self-respecting wealthy Argentinian, surrounded by daughters, sons, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. A large family, a true tribe , but with plenty of food. And when Doña Matutina died, they took her to Buenos Aires to be buried, according to her posthumous will. Her children and sons-in-law didn’t want to make the trip with her—this would have touched them greatly—but they came on another ship to divide the inheritance locally. –And the mysterious man?… –He’s simply the butler the deceased had at her hotel on Avenida del Bosque… A majestic servant, who knows how to keep his distance like a diplomat, and that’s why he kept to himself, with a dignified spirit of class. And I who took this stiffness for pride! The memory of his past curiosities arose in Maltrana like remorse. –Poor Doña Matutina!… May she forgive me from heaven for the scandals I’ve caused at her door… I don’t know her, and she leaves me nothing; but I have a certain sympathy for her. You see: half a month of sleeping together, with no other separation than a wooden partition!… And so many times the Argentine ladies have remembered her in their get-togethers on deck, without suspecting that they had her under their feet!… The heirs have behaved well. Instead of putting her in the hold, they’ve rented her a cabin, as if she were a living person. Generous hearts!… The attention and kindness that a few dozen millions inspire!… Isidro couldn’t forget the memory of this corpse, invisibly accompanying him on his journey. “You’ll admit that many things have happened in fifteen days. The nocturnal sessions in the smoking room, love affairs, blows, the challenge of Rio de Janeiro, which almost cost me a foot, millions in gold minted beneath our soles, a deluded corpse thrown into the sea, fifteen nights spent next to another corpse that also represents millions… what a story! And I, who have spent months and months in Madrid, going from home to the café, from the café to the editorial office, and from the editorial office to other places… without anything extraordinary happening to me!… The only remorse I feel after so many events is that of my involuntary insolence with poor Doña Matutina and the scares I gave her guardian. May she forgive me!” It’s a pity we didn’t meet a little earlier, so that he could have dedicated a small memory to me in his will!… At lunchtime, the passengers ate hastily, eager to return to the deck as soon as possible. They expected to see Buenos Aires at any moment. The ocean liner was approaching the Argentine shore. It was not possible to make it out because it was so low, but on the waterline stretched some horizontal blurs, silhouettes of Distant groves of trees. The number of ships increased considerably. Many remained motionless. Sailboats bobbed with their sails draped along their masts, awaiting the irregular palpitations of the wind. When it came, it stirred the white surfaces of the masts like a shiver. Others, anchored and with their masts bare, awaited who knew what. Further on, the Goethe passed between rows of steamers of various shapes and capacities. They formed a floating city, a dead city, with no other sign of life than the occasional boat gliding from one ship to another. The hulls seemed to age in this immobility, as if they had been waiting for years and years in the murky waters, forever grounded, with no hope of returning to the blue horizons of the ocean. They waited their turn to enter the docks of Buenos Aires, crowded with world traffic, and this wait in the middle of the river, a few miles from the port, lasted weeks and weeks at certain times of the year. The passengers of the Goethe would say goodbye cautiously before sighting Buenos Aires. At the last minute, the urgency of disembarking, the need to gather luggage, and the customs visit made friends forget. They offered each other their respective addresses, exchanged cards. The girls said goodbye with a hint of tears. The whole world was about to dissolve. Their story hadn’t lasted a month, but with such intense life! The separation gave greater depth to the memories. People who had regarded each other at the beginning of the voyage with obvious hostility lamented this separation. ” We’ve sympathized so much!… Such good times we’ve had together!” The ladies, who in the early days of the trip had remained in various enemy groups out of national pride, now said their goodbyes with an almost tearful sadness. No one remembered the diplomatic tensions between the “penguins” and the “hostile powers.” Dr. Zurita gave cards to Maltrana and Ojeda. His courtesy was somewhat rude, but naive and genuine. He didn’t like words: they already knew he was their friend. “And you, nice Galician,” he said to Isidro, “if you need anything from me, look for me. Buenos Aires is big, everyone does their own thing, but sometimes you’ll need the support of a companion.” All his “dear friends,” the young men from the night parties at the smoking room, said goodbye to Maltrana . Some made appointments for him that same evening at restaurants frequented by cheerful people. They would introduce him to some very nice friends: all “good people.” The group of Chileans said goodbye to Isidro with frank offers. His homeland wasn’t Buenos Aires; there was less money, less luxury, but life was perhaps happier. “Godito: when you tire of being with the Cuyanos,” come pay us a visit. You just have to cross the Andes. You’ll see women in shawls, like in your homeland; you’ll see them dance the cueca. And what a mess!… Come and don’t be stupid.” Meanwhile, Ojeda, from the bow lookout, contemplated the crowd gathered on the gunwales, eager to see the coveted city as soon as possible. A woman, her hair disheveled and her eyes reddened, was moaning on one side of the deck. Near her, some children were also crying out, tears streaming down their faces. But suddenly they seemed to forget their pain and gazed, like the others, at the horizon, awaiting the appearance of a miracle. They were Muiños’s widow and children. Until shortly before, they hadn’t heard the news of his death. They believed him in the infirmary, accepting Don Carmelo’s pious lies. “Pachín!” the widow howled. A single concern continually returned as the obligatory theme of their lamentations. “They’ve thrown him into the sea!… I’ll never see him again!” And the little ones joined in, like a litter of abandoned puppies. “Father!… Father!” What would become of them!… Mrs. Eufrasia was the only one who tried to console them with her energetic swearing. The others, excited and happy at the proximity of the dreamed-of land, turned their heads, fleeing from their lamentations. Perched on a caramanchel, a man played the bagpipes, greeting Buenos Aires with the melancholic bellow of his swollen hide. From the foredeck, the pastoral flute of the Arabs played. Some children, holding hands, twirled around in time to the music. Suddenly, a cry composed of numerous exclamations, a shriek similar to those that must have emerged from the prows of the first caravels: “There… there! You can see it!” A white cloud with black blotches was emerging from the bottom of the river; something that rose and rose slowly and continuously, like a theatrical apparition through the mouth of a trapdoor. The white, irregular part of the cloud was houses; the black, groves of gardens. Someone on the bow broke into applause with the irresistible enthusiasm of crowds at popular gatherings. This initiative was contagious, and everyone clapped their hands, spreading across the river a roar like hail striking glass. “Buenos Aires!… Long live Buenos Aires!” And they stopped applauding to throw their caps and hats into the air. A swarm of black dots rose and fell over the bow of the Goethe. When the acclamations ceased for a moment, the wailing of the Galician bagpipes, the twittering of the Arabian reeds, and the tragic howl of the poor mother and her calf could be heard: “Pachín! They threw him into the water!… Father! Father! What will become of us!” The popular enthusiasm reached the passengers in the central bow. The music had been placed on the promenade and the usual march began to play, even though the ship was far from the city. Many passengers were walking, keeping time to the music, like children marching in front of a regiment. Some couples were dancing, struggling to match their jumps to the rhythm of the march. Fernando grimaced at the excessive explosion of enthusiasm. “It’s too much,” he thought. “How much happiness must that country contain to please so many people!” The white silhouette of Buenos Aires could be clearly seen against the blue sky . Fernando, who had seen it years before and remembered it as an immense but flat city, almost at ground level, with no projections other than the meager towers of its churches, was surprised to see extremely tall buildings, skyscrapers like those of North American metropolises, buildings topped by minarets and domes, which shone like lanterns in the reflection of the sun. It was beginning to take shape as a sprawling city, externally distinct from the one he had known. A wide, short, deep tugboat, its shape reminiscent of the powerfully built bull, met the ocean liner, pressed against its sides to bring the pilot aboard. Another tugboat of the same appearance positioned itself alongside the bow, rigged with the Goethe, like a trotting dog beside an elephant. The passengers forgot about the city as they attended to their carry-on luggage. The stewards carried them out of their cabins and lined them up on decks and in the corridors. Buenos Aires was growing with prodigious rapidity. Its appearance was not like that of cities located on high coasts, which can be seen hours before reaching them. Situated on a low bank, the ships could distinguish it when they were already alongside. His presence was almost instantaneous and expanded like a drop of water on blotting paper, covering the banks with its expansion, spreading its radiance as if the houses were moving, wanting to occupy the neighboring lands as quickly as possible. The emigrants remained silent, their eyes wide with curiosity. Fernando guessed the thoughts of these people, many of whom were coming straight from the solitude of the fields. “How great!… how great!” Maltrana looked around for Señor Antonio el Morenito. Surely who had momentarily forgotten his original plans to become rich. Perhaps he felt a little doubt, a little fear, and thought like the others: “How grand!” ” And yet, there’s nothing grand about this,” said Isidro. “It’s an ordinary city. If it weren’t for the river, the facade would be ugly… But you sense that behind the row of buildings we can see, which is like the city’s front wall, there are miles and miles of land covered with houses. You can’t see the grandeur, but you guess it. We feel the same as if we were standing in front of a wall behind which an invisible crowd moves . ” The two friends turned their heads when they noticed Conchita leaning on the railing next to them. She had said goodbye repeatedly to Doña Zobeida, but she would later seek her out to make new recommendations. The good lady planned to leave that night for her beloved Salta. She was afraid of the noise and bustle of Buenos Aires, even though she had come from Europe. These were the impressions of childhood that persisted in her. She pitied her traveling companion; poor girl! Alone in that land of perdition filled with foreigners!… Conchita looked at the city with a furrowed brow, her lips pursed. “It’s big, isn’t it, countrywoman?” Isidro said. “Yes… it is. Bigger than I thought,” the young woman replied. A certain disorientation was evident in her. Perhaps she felt fear at the thought of her bold entrance, without a coin in her pocket. But she soon recovered from these hesitations. Her eyes shone with a hostile glow, as if she were about to enter into a fight, and she extended a hand toward the city, as if inviting it to wait for her: “I’ll fix you… faggot!” She didn’t fear her, despite all her grandeur. And while the two friends laughed at this outburst, the girl fled, called once more by Doña Zobeida. The tugboats pulled the Goethe, which had remained motionless , relying on their direction. They were now at the mouth of one of its many basins, gigantic rectangles of water framed by piers and docks. The shore could be seen covered with identical buildings, enormous structures that stretched for miles in rows. The railroad dragged itself along this line of warehouses, an endless barrier to the naked eye between the river and the city. Trams and automobiles flashed by for a few moments in the gaps between one building and another. To starboard, the grove of trees at the head of a dock appeared, with a building draped in signal flags. The water had the filth of enclosed spaces. The foam was blackish. The bow of the ship broke out islands of garbage, which, as they opened, sent their fragments flying toward the docks. The greenish backs and bulging eyes of enormous frogs stood out on the floating timbers . Some water birds swam around the ship, stretching out their long necks. Behind the Goethe, the river lay open, yellow and rippling, like a plain of dry grass. The sailing ships, with their rags blowing in the wind, looked like windmills nestled in this false prairie. As the ocean liner passed among the motionless vessels, the crews rushed to the gunwales to greet it with shouts and waving their caps. Many dead fish floated in the water, lying on their backs with their swollen bellies sticking out. Maltrana, accustomed to seeing ships anchored in the middle of ports or tied up to a dock in the wide expanse of a bay, was surprised by the powerful ocean liners lined up like beasts in square docks resembling aquatic corrals, moving from one to another, submissive to the pull of the tugboats. When they stood still, the ships seemed much larger, squeezed between docks and buildings, as if grounded. The landing stage also attracted his curiosity. It was like a railway station, with a covered iron deck, waiting rooms, Luggage storage and long gates, behind which the crowd gathered. The ocean liner docked at the pier the way a railcar docks at the platform, and the passengers had only to advance up a short ramp to find themselves on land. The Goethe reached the landing stage after several maneuvers by the tugboats. An Italian steamer had just detached itself from it and was retreating to another basin, after unloading its human cargo. Further along, a steamer flying the Spanish flag was also discharging people. At the far end of the landing stage, a dark crowd pressed against the railings. Tricolor flags waved above this sea of heads. A din of distant music answered the Goethe’s band when it took a brief pause in its incessant marches. “The Italians waiting for their great man,” said Ojeda. We ‘d better leave before they organize their demonstration. On the dock platform, a line of sailors, carrying cutlasses on their belts, held back the groups that had entered with permission: commissions awaiting the two speakers, families eager to greet their relatives and friends, waving handkerchiefs, hats, and canes, asking from afar with stentorian shouts how their time in Europe had gone. And while the sailors diligently proceeded to moor the ship, the music continued, the distant cheers continued, and a shout of greetings crossed between the people crowded on the railings and the black human anthill. “Is anyone waiting for you?” Isidro asked, as if pained that they were the only two without a friend on the dock. Fernando didn’t know what to answer. He looked at the good-looking people occupying the platform, unable to see his brother-in-law’s uncle. There was a general shove on the decks. Ashore! The exit was clear. And the two friends, crossing a small bridge, felt the stability of solid ground beneath their feet, marching among the groups advancing to meet the passengers with their hands outstretched or their arms raised, ready for a loving squeeze. A young man with a Spanish accent approached Fernando. “Mr. Ojeda?” He came from his brother-in-law’s uncle. “My boss had to go to your ranch: urgent business; he’ll be back tomorrow. But everything’s ready… You have a room in a hotel on Avenida de Mayo.” He guided them through the groups rushing toward the ocean liner. They were almost alone in the luggage room, and their carry-on bags were searched quickly. The young employee stayed there to take care of the prompt dispatch of the large luggage. He left the building with them to a crowded esplanade, where the flags and music were playing. The Italian crowd shouted with premature enthusiasm, believing that the long-awaited great man was going to appear at any moment: “Eviva il professore! Eviva!” Ojeda and Maltrana advanced through the crowd, almost staggering, as if intoxicated by the sensation of the firm ground beneath their feet and the steam that rose from it, warmed by the sun. A clock pointed to four in the afternoon. Heavy, sticky flies buzzed around their eyes, the first to come out to meet them in this new land. They breathed with delight at the sight of themselves sitting in an open-top automobile, their small suitcases between their feet, speeding along the docks. On one side, the city; on the other, the endless row of warehouses, cut by alleys, at the ends of which could be seen ship hulls, smokestacks, masts, and the waving flags of every country. The city streets that led to the wide riverbank all had a slight, steep slope. “This is the old ravine,” Ojeda explained, “on which the Spanish built the city. Beyond it, everything is a uniform, level plain. This slope is the only one that exists in Buenos Aires. Before, the water reached it. The lands we are marching through were reclaimed from the Plata River.” The car crossed several railway lines stretched across the river. It passed between long rows of heavily loaded wagons, which made the ground tremble. The most diverse smells rose from the warehouses, revealing the bustle and life of a great port. Then, commercial vehicles became fewer, and the number of automobiles and streetcars increased. They passed along a garden. On one side, facing the river, large buildings and arcaded sidewalks, beneath which swarmed the throngs of day laborers. They climbed a slope, and at the top they saw a palace with rose-colored walls spread out. Beyond it, a white plaza opened up with a garden in the center. “Buenos Aires was founded here,” Ojeda said. “That mansion is the Government Palace, what they call ‘the Pink House.’ The Plaza de Mayo is the Plaza de Mayo. That Greek temple, the cathedral; that white obelisk, the Pyramid of Independence.” Some groups of countrymen were climbing the slope, carrying bundles of clothing on their backs. Their wives marched beside them, looking at everything with astonished eyes. The little ones trotted ahead, their mouths open with the same impression of surprise. They were emigrants who had just disembarked from the ships that had arrived before the Goethe, and were heading into the city, in the company of friends who had waited for them at the port. “We’re all one,” Ojeda said cheerfully. “We all come for the same reason. Except they’re coming on foot, and we’re coming by car.” The Avenida de Mayo opened up its long perspective before them: two rows of tall buildings and two lines of tree-lined sidewalks, with large shop windows and numerous cafes and hotels, with tables and chairs scattered outside their doors. In the middle of the street, a row of electric chandeliers, and in the background, somewhat blurred by the distance, a white palace, the Congress, with a slender dome that occupied a large part of the visible sky between the double row of houses. Maltrana, driven by childish joy, began to playfully push his friend. “Buenos Aires!… We’re in Buenos Aires now!” Then he stubbornly looked toward the end of the Avenue, staring at the slender dome, which seemed to radiate light across the sky, tinged red by the fading afternoon sun. The memory of the Argonauts and their adventures to reach the Golden Fleece returned to him. “We, modern and vulgar Argonauts, don’t have to make an effort to go in search of it. It comes to us. There it is. Look how it shines! ” And he pointed to the dome, which reflected the sun’s rays on its edges and in the crystal spotlights embedded in its curves. The azure blue that served as his backdrop also took on a golden glow. A happy omen! Maltrana couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “Smile, Fernando. The sky is dressed up to welcome us. You’d think it was raining gold. Look closely. It’s a downpour of pounds sterling. Prodigious land! ” Ojeda smiled with sweet pity at his friend’s enthusiasm. “Yes; pounds are raining down on this land, but in its heaviness, there are deep… very deep… waves!” Prepare yourself, Maltrana; gather your strength. You have to bend down in painful positions to reach them… you have to sweat a lot to reach them. The journey of the protagonists in The Argonauts comes to an end, but their legacy lives on. Throughout this story, Blasco Ibáñez shows us that dreams and aspirations can lead men to face the impossible. A story that invites us to reflect on sacrifice, courage, and conquering the unknown. Thank you for joining us on this adventure. See you in the next story.