A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories Page 15

  ‘The mouse! the mouse!’ the young woman exclaimed in a stifled voice, leaving hurriedly.

  Garcia remembered that, the day before, he’d heard Fortunato complaining about a mouse that had chewed some important piece of paper; but he was far from expecting what he saw. He saw Fortunato sitting at the table, in the middle of the study, on which he had placed a saucer filled with alcohol. The burning liquid flickered. Between his thumb and index finger he held a piece of string, tied round the mouse’s tail. In his right hand he held a pair of scissors. At the moment Garcia came in, Fortunato cut one of the mouse’s legs off; then he lowered the poor beast into the flame, quickly, so as not to kill it, and started to do the same with the third leg; he’d already cut one off. Garcia stopped in his tracks, horrified.

  ‘Kill it at once!’ he said.

  ‘Any minute now.’

  And with an inimitable smile, the true reflection of a contented soul as it savoured inwardly the most delicious of sensations, Fortunate cut the third leg off the mouse, and for the third time lowered it into the flame. The miserable animal twisted this way and that, squealing, bleeding, scorched, and still it didn’t die. Garcia averted his eyes, then looked again, and held out his hand to stop the torture, but he couldn’t, because this man, with the radiant serenity of his features, inspired fear. There was one leg left; Fortunato cut it very slowly, following the scissors with his eyes; the leg fell off, and he stopped to look at the half-dead mouse. As he lowered it for the fourth time to the flame, he did it deftly, so as to save, if possible, any shred of life.

  Garcia, facing him, managed to control his disgust at the spectacle and observe the man’s expression. No anger, no hatred; just a vast pleasure, quiet and profound; what you might get from hearing a beautiful sonata, or looking at a perfect piece of sculpture – something like a pure aesthetic sensation. It seemed to him, rightly, that Fortunato had completely forgotten he was there. If that was true, he couldn’t be play-acting – this was the real thing. The flame was dying, the mouse might possibly have a little life left in it, the shadow of a shade; Fortunato turned it to good account by cutting off its nose and again lowering the flesh to the fire. Finally, he let the body drop into the saucer, and pushed the mixture of blood and burned skin away.

  When he got up, he saw the doctor and got a shock. He made a show of anger at the animal that had eaten his piece of paper, but it was obviously put on.

  ‘There’s no anger in the punishment,’ the doctor thought, ‘he does it out of the need for a pleasurable sensation, which can only be provided by another creature’s pain; that’s the man’s secret.’

  Fortunato laid great stress on the importance of the piece of paper and what he’d lost – only time, admittedly, but time was very precious to him these days. Garcia just listened to him, not saying a word; he didn’t believe him for a moment. He remembered his actions, trivial or not, and found the same explanation for all of them. It was as if the man’s sensibility had gone through a key-change, to a peculiar kind of dilettantism – he was a Caligula in miniature.

  When Maria Luisa came back into the study, a little bit later, her husband went to her, took her hands and quietly said: ‘Such a delicate little thing!’

  And, turning to the doctor, he said: ‘Can you believe she nearly fainted?’

  Maria Luisa timidly defended herself, saying she was nervous and a woman, then went and sat by the window with her wool and her needles, her fingers still trembling, just as we found her at the beginning of the story. You’ll recall that, after they’d talked about other things, the three of them went quiet, the husband sitting and looking at the ceiling, the doctor cracking his knuckles. A little later they went to have dinner – but it wasn’t a happy occasion. Maria Luisa was brooding and coughing; the doctor was wondering if she might not be in some danger in the company of such a man. It was only a possibility; but love turned it into a certainty; he feared for her and determined to keep an eye on them.

  She coughed and coughed, and it wasn’t long before the disease unmasked itself. It was tuberculosis, that insatiable old hag that sucks life away and leaves only the bones. It was a blow to Fortunato; he really loved his wife in his way, he was used to her, and losing her was a wrench. He spared no effort, doctors, medicines, a change of air, every possible expedient and palliative. But it was all in vain. She was mortally ill.

  In the final days, as he watched the girl’s final struggle, her husband’s nature subdued any other passion. He never left her side; he fixed his cold, dull eyes on the slow, painful decomposition of life, drank in the beautiful creature’s afflictions one by one. She was thin, transparent, devoured by fever and riddled with death itself. His exacerbated egotism, hungry for sensations, made him hang on every minute of her agony, nor did he pay for this with a single tear, public or private. Only when she died was he stunned. When he came back to his senses, he saw he was alone again.

  At night, when a relative of Maria Luisa’s, who had assisted her while she was dying, went to rest, Fortunato and Garcia stayed in the room, keeping vigil, both of them lost in thought; but the husband was tired, and the doctor told him to go and rest awhile.

  ‘Go and lie down, have a couple of hours’ sleep: I’ll go later.’

  Fortunato went out, lay down on the sofa in the next room, and soon went to sleep. Twenty minutes later he woke up, tried to go to sleep again, nodded off for a few minutes, then got up and went back to the sitting room. He went on tiptoes, so as not to wake the relative, who was sleeping nearby. When he got to the door, he stopped short, astonished.

  Garcia had approached the body, lifted the veil and looked at her dead features for a few moments. Then, as if death had spiritualised everything, he bent over and kissed her on the forehead. That was when Fortunato came to the door. He stopped short, astonished; it wasn’t a kiss of friendship – it might even be the epilogue of an adultery novel. He wasn’t jealous, be it noted; nature had made him in such a way that he was neither jealous nor envious, but it had made him vain, and no less subject to resentment than the next man. He looked on in shock, biting his lip.

  Meanwhile, Garcia leaned over to kiss the dead body again, but he could control himself no longer. The kiss burst into sobs, the eyes couldn’t hold back the tears, which flowed thick and fast; the tears of silent love and irremediable despair. Fortunato, at the door, where he had stopped, quietly savoured this explosion of moral pain, which lasted a long, long, deliciously long time.

  A Pair of Arms

  Ignacio trembled as he heard the lawyer’s shouts, took the plate he was given and tried to eat under a cloudburst of names: layabout, day-dreamer, fool, nutcase.

  ‘Where’s your brain gone? Why do you never hear a word I say? I’ll tell your father everything, so he can beat the laziness out of your body with a good quince cane or a stick; yes, you’re not too old for a beating, don’t think you are! Fool! Nutcase!’

  ‘He’s just the same out there as he is here,’ he went on, turning to Dona Severina, a lady who’d been living with him, maritally so to speak, for years. ‘He gets all my papers mixed up, goes to the wrong addresses, goes to one notary when he should go to another, mixes up lawyers’ names – it’s murder! It’s this doze he’s in all the time. In the mornings, that’s the way it is; you need to break his bones to wake him up … leave it to me; tomorrow I’ll wake him with a broomstick!’

  Dona Severina prodded Borges gently with her foot, as if asking him to stop. He spat out a few more insults, then settled down, at peace with man and God.

  I’ll not say he was at peace with children, because our friend Ignacio was not exactly a child. He was fifteen, and looked every bit of it. The head was handsome, with its dishevelled hair and the dreamy, inquisitive eyes of a lad who questions, searches and never quite finds – all this crowning a body not without charm, even if it was badly dressed. His father’s a barber in Cidade Nova, and placed him as an agent, scribe, clerk, or something of the sort with Borges the lawyer, hop
ing he’d rise in the world, because he thought barristers got a lot of money. All this took place in the Rua da Lapa, in 1870.

  For some minutes there was nothing more than the clink of knives and forks and the noise of chewing. Borges stuffed himself with beef and lettuce; he punctuated the flow with a slug of wine, and carried on in silence.

  Ignacio went on eating slowly, not daring to lift his eyes from the plate or put them where they were at the moment the terrible Borges took off at him. The truth is that at this moment it would be very risky. If he so much as let his eyes wander to Dona Severina’s arms he’d forget himself, and everything else too.

  It was, truly, Dona Severina’s fault, going round with them bare all the time. All her indoor dresses had short sleeves, which stopped a few inches below her shoulder; from that point on her arms were on show. They really were lovely and rounded, in harmony with the lady herself, more plump than she was thin, and they lost none of their colour or softness by exposure to the open air; but it is fair to explain that she didn’t wear them that way to show off, but because she’d already worn out all her long-sleeved dresses. When she was standing she was very striking; when she walked she swayed in a funny way; Ignacio, however, almost never saw her except at table, where, beyond her arms, he could hardly even see her bust. You can’t say she was pretty; but she wasn’t ugly either. She wore no ornament; even her hair was simply arranged; she smoothed, gathered, and tied and fixed it on top of her head with the tortoiseshell comb her mother had left her. At her throat was a dark neckerchief; in her ears, nothing. Her twenty-seven years were solid and in full bloom.

  They finished dining. Borges, when the coffee came, took four cigars out of his pocket, compared them, pressed them between his fingers, chose one and put the others back. With his cigar lit, he placed his elbows on the table and spoke to Dona Severina of thirty thousand things that had no interest for our young friend; but while Borges was speaking, he wasn’t lambasting him, and he could dream at leisure.

  Ignacio made the coffee last as long as he could. Between one sip and the next, he smoothed the cloth down, picked imaginary pieces of skin off his fingers, or let his eyes wander round the pictures in the dining room, which were two, one of St Peter, the other of St John, devotional pictures bought at festival time and framed at home. We can believe he could disguise his thoughts with St John, whose young head brings cheer to Catholic imaginations; but with the austere St Peter it is going a bit far. Ignacio’s only defence is that he saw neither one nor the other. All he saw was Dona Severina’s arms – either because he took a sly look at them, or because they were imprinted on his memory.

  ‘Come on, man! Are you never going to finish?’ the lawyer shouted suddenly.

  There was no help for it; Ignacio drank the last cold drop and retired, as usual, to his room at the back of the house. As he went in he made a gesture of anger and despair, and later went to lean out of one of the two windows looking over the sea. Five minutes later, the sight of the water nearby and the far-off mountains gave him a confused, vague, restless feeling, painful and pleasurable at the same time, like something a plant must feel when its first flower comes into bud. He wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay. He’d been there for five weeks, and life was the same every day, out in the morning with Borges, going round courts and notaries, running round, taking papers to be stamped, to the post, to scribes and officials. He came back in the afternoon, had lunch and went to his room until supper-time; he had his supper and went to bed. Borges didn’t admit him into the family circle, which consisted only of Dona Severina, and Ignacio saw her no more than three times a day, at meals. Five weeks of solitude, of drudgery, far from his mother and sisters; five weeks of silence, because he only said anything once or twice in the street; in the house, he never said a word.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he thought one day, ‘I’ll run away from here and not come back.’

  He didn’t; he felt bound and chained to Dona Severina’s arms. He’d never seen any as pretty and as fresh. His upbringing didn’t allow him to look at them openly; it seems, in fact, that at the beginning he withdrew his eyes in embarrassment. He began to look little by little, once he saw that they never had sleeves to cover them, and he gradually discovered them, looking and loving. At the end of three weeks they were, morally speaking, the tents where he took his repose. He put up with all the work in town, all the melancholy of solitude and silence, and all his boss’s rude abuse, just for the reward of seeing, three times a day, the famous pair of arms.

  That day, when night was falling and Ignacio was stretching out in his hammock (he had no other bed), Dona Severina, in the front room, was thinking over the dinner episode and, for the first time, she suspected something. She rejected the idea immediately – he was only a boy! But there are ideas akin to insistent flies: the more we beat them off, the more they come back and alight on us. A boy? He was fifteen; and she noticed that between the lad’s nose and mouth there was the beginning of a sketch of fuzz. Was it so astonishing that he was beginning to fall in love? And wasn’t she pretty? This last idea wasn’t rejected; rather it was caressed and kissed. Then she remembered his demeanour, his distracted air, his oversights – one incident after another; these were all symptoms, and she thought yes, it was true.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ said the lawyer to her, stretching out on the settee, after a few minutes’ silence.

  ‘Me? Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? It seems everything’s asleep in this house! Leave it to me, I know a good medicine for waking sleepyheads …’

  And so he went on, in the same angry tone, firing off threats, but in fact incapable of carrying them out, for he was more of a loudmouth than a truly nasty man. Dona Severina kept telling him no, he was mistaken, she wasn’t asleep, she was thinking about her good friend Fortunata. They hadn’t been to see her since Christmas; why didn’t they go over there some night soon? Borges replied that he was tired all the time, working like a black man, and he’d no time for idle chat; and he attacked Fortunata, her husband, and their son, who wasn’t going to school, at the age of ten! He, Borges, when he was ten, already knew how to read, write and do his sums, not very well, it’s true, but at least he knew. Ten! He’d come to a good end: a good-for-nothing, he’d be press-ganged in no time. Life in the army would teach him a lesson.

  Dona Severina soothed him with excuses, Fortunata’s poverty, her husband’s bad luck, and caressed him a little fearfully, in case the caresses irritated him some more. It was completely dark; she heard the click of the gas lamp, which had just come on, and saw its glimmer in the windows of the house over the street. Borges, tired out after his day, for he really did work very hard, closed his eyes and started to drop off. He left her in the room, in the dark, alone with herself and the discovery she’d just made.

  Everything seemed to tell the lady it was true; but this truth, once she’d got over the surprise, brought with it a moral complication, which she only recognised by its effects; she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She couldn’t understand herself or settle down, and even thought of telling the lawyer everything, so that he would send the youngster away. But what did it all amount to? Here she stopped in her tracks: in reality, there was nothing more than supposition, coincidence and possibly illusion. No, no, it wasn’t an illusion. Then she started piecing together the vague clues, the lad’s attitudes, his shyness, his distractedness, till she rejected the idea that she was mistaken. In a short while (O perfidious nature!), reflecting that it would be wrong to accuse him baselessly, she admitted she might be deluded, with the single aim of observing him better and seeing what was really going on.

  That very night, Dona Severina looked from under her eyelids at Ignacio’s gestures; she saw nothing, because tea didn’t take long, and the lad didn’t take his eyes off the cup. The next day she was able to observe him better, and later still, extremely well. She saw it was true, she was loved and feared, with an adolescent, virginal love, held back by so
cial ties and a feeling of inferiority which prevented him from understanding himself. Dona Severina realised that she need fear no misdemeanour, and concluded it was better to say nothing to the lawyer; she would save him from one nasty surprise, and the poor child from another. She was already persuading herself that he was a child, and determined to treat him as coolly as she had done till now, or even more so. So she did; Ignacio began to feel that her eyes avoided his, or she spoke sharply, almost as much so as Borges himself. It is true that at other times her tone of voice came out quite soft and even gentle, very gentle; in just the same way her look, generally elusive, wandered elsewhere so much that, just to find some rest, it would sometimes alight on his head; but all this was fleeting.

  ‘I’m going to leave,’ he repeated in the street, as he had when he was first there.

  But he’d come back to the house, and he didn’t leave. Dona Severina’s arms formed a parenthesis in the middle of the long and tedious sentence of the life he was leading, and this inserted phrase had an original and profound idea embedded in it, invented by Heaven only for him. He stayed and carried on as before. In the end, however, he had to leave, and for good; here’s how and why.

  Dona Severina had been treating him with some benevolence. The roughness in her voice seemed to have disappeared, and there was more than softness, there was care and affection. One day she would tell him to keep out of draughts, another that he shouldn’t drink cold water after hot coffee, reminders, advice, the considerate thoughts of a friend and mother, which threw his soul into even greater anxiety and confusion. Ignacio grew so confident of himself that he laughed one day at the table, something he’d never done; and the lawyer didn’t berate him this time, because it was he who was telling a funny story, and no one punishes anyone for applauding them. It was then that Dona Severina saw that the boy’s mouth, charming when he was silent, was no less charming when he laughed.