by Max Brand
XI
One expects adventurers and political climbers to be lean and hungry men, according to Shakespeare’s prescription for them. Caporno was not of that type. And, having seen his daughter, I expected to find a handsome fellow, slender-featured, gray of head, cool and distinguished in his manner and in his appearance.
I was utterly wrong.
I saw a fat man lying in a great easy chair that must have been built to order to accommodate his bulk. I saw a throat that was a loose mass of rolling flesh, and above that throat a face very broad at the jowls, garnished with a huge arched nose and a pair of bright eyes, and to crown all a sloping, narrow forehead. I saw, to match that forehead, small, white, fat hands, and one foot clad in a very small shoe—femininely small. The other foot, swathed in flannel bandages, lay upon a cushioned stool.
This bulky fellow had a table upon either side of him. On the one was a heap of books. On the other was an arrangement of silver pitchers, frosted with dim ice on the outside. And there were glasses, and ice heaped: in other silver dishes—ice chipped neatly into cubes.
He waved to me from a distance, as if I were an old friend.
“Hush,” he said. “Walk softly, Mendez.”
An odd greeting for a stranger.
But one did not think of disobeying Caporno. I soft-stepped quietly forward and found his fat arm rigid in pointing.
“Look! The beauty,” he said.
A great blue jay was standing on the marble rim of the fountain bowl in the center of the patio garden. Now and then he let his body dip forward so that the crystal spray showered over him. Then he flaunted the water off with a jerk of his wings. And the sun, shining upon his water-cleaned feathers, made him as brilliant as a jewel. Suddenly he spread his wings and darted off into the air.
Caporno was stricken with grief. “Ah, ah,” he said. “There is a joy flown out of my life forever. Call him back, Pedro! Call him back, thin devil.”
A little man stepped from the shadow next to the wall. I had not noticed him before. He was of mixed blood. Indian and white, I thought. But he had the face of a philosopher, and above it a crown of perfectly white hair. His skin had been grayed by time. It seemed to be coated with dust. He was a very erect little man, wonderfully thin, but not unhealthy in appearance. I saw that he was old, very, very old. I thought that I had never seen so old a man. And yet, at the first glance, he appeared anything but that. There was hardly a wrinkle in his face.
Pedro, as he came in answer to the voice of his master, paused just behind the chair.
“I have not understood how to talk to a bird . . . since fifty years, señor,” he said.
“You . . . ha? Not for fifty years?” Caporno whistled, and then glanced aside at me with a shrewd look.
“An old scoundrel, Mendez, you see?”
Of course, there was no answer to make to such a question; I did not attempt one.
“Sit down,” said Caporno. “Pedro, why is there not a chair? I told you the gentleman would come to see me.”
“Not until this afternoon,” said Pedro, without changing his expression.
He spoke to what was apparently an empty door, but instantly a mozo appeared from the house and placed a chair for me.
“So here we are, but we have not touched hands.”
He stretched a fat palm to me. I took it. It was like handling a thing not of flesh, for there was no warmth in it.
“What will you drink?” he asked as I sat down. “Whiskey?”
I shook my head.
“Wine, then?” he murmured approvingly. And he waved his hand at the liberal store of liquids on the table.
“I shall not drink,” I told him.
“Ah, señor,” he said sadly. “Are you one of those who have caught the terrible American habit? You drink nothing?”
“Not,” I said, “when I talk to Señor Caporno.”
He glanced sharply aside at this, reading me, and reading me not covertly, but openly, his thought showing in his eyes. Then he began to smile. His great loose throat began to quiver, and the smile proceeded to a chuckle. The chuckle deepened to laughter; the laughter spread and extended to a terrific gale of mirth that roared like thunder up and down the patio and sent crowding echoes back against my ears.
The laughter ended with a screech, and he made a futile grasp at his swathed foot. Then he lay stiffly back in his chair, moaning and groaning and wriggling his finger in the air, and twisting his face into a thousand contortions.
“Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!” cried Caporno. “What pain! What exquisite pain. Through the whole soul! My whole soul is now in my foot. Pedro!”
Pedro did not move from the shadow against the wall.
“Pedro!”
“¿Señor?”
“Will not purgatory fire be like this?”
“Hellfire, señor,” said Pedro.
There was a gasp from Caporno, and he twisted in his chair as though about to rise and put his hands on the old man. However, that sudden movement seemed to bring back the twinge, and he lay gasping and groaning for another moment, his eyes closed.
“You are going to be bad for my gout, Mendez,” he said at last. “I see that you are going to be bad as the devil for my gout. Ah, ah!”
The last two groans seemed to banish every vestige of his pain, and he shrugged himself into a more erect position in his chair.
“Now I can be sure of at least one half hour of comfort,” he said. “Gout and I arrange truces between our battles. And we never break the truce. Never! There was a time when I played the man and refused to make a sound. I have smiled and talked small talk to pretty fools of women while the gout was rending me. I have risen, Mendez, and danced divinely with them, while my foot was a burning mass of fire. But I have learned. Gout is a devil. It torments me until I scream. But when it hears me cry out, it knows that it has done very well. So I cry just as loud as the pain is. Sometimes I scream like a woman. Do I not, Pedro?”
“Or like a puma, señor,” said the old man.
At this pointed rejoinder I half expected that my host would break into a furious exclamation, but he did not seem to hear.
“Screaming will rout the gout quicker than anything else,” said Caporno. “What is it that you said you would have to drink?”
“Water, Señor Caporno.”
“Ah, well, you are wise. Only a very great fool drinks when he talks with me. I, however, drink constantly, and upon all occasions. There is no moment that is not improved by liquor . . . if one can afford it. If one can afford it.”
He repeated that last idea, nodding and blinking and smiling to himself. As I write down what this man did, I feel as if I were describing a beast. As a matter of fact, he was not exactly repulsive. I thought that he was a great deal of a pig. I thought also that he was a great deal of a man.
“Wine, Pedro!” he snapped. “Cold wine. Ice cold. I am hot at present from laughing and screaming.”
He looked askance at me. “The laughing was your fault, Mendez. I shall not forgive.”
He wagged his finger at me. “And now,” he said, “when are you coming to live with me?”
It took me aback, as of course he intended that it should.
“It is a question of which I have not thought,” I said.
“It is a question of which you have thought,” he said. “Oh, yes, you have thought of it very seriously. People always think seriously of the suggestions that poor old Caporno makes to them. Very! Yes, you have thought of it. And what have you decided?”
It angered me a little, but not as much as you would suspect. I was more and more entertained. I felt that this rascal was no more to be trusted than a wildcat, or a thunderbolt. And yet I was immensely charmed by him and his very violence, his insolence, his conceit, his enormous egotism that seemed to embrace the entire world.
Pedro had poured the wine.
Caporno raised the glass and squinted at the fountain through it.
“As for the idea which . . .,
” I began.
“Be quiet one instant. I am about to drink,” said Caporno.
And he drank. First he took a sip. Then he took a small swallow. Then he smacked his lips loudly and shook his head from side to side, grimacing with ecstasy. Then he finished off the glass.
He lay back with a sigh of weariness and extended the glass, which Pedro received.
“Ah,” said Caporno, “wine is delicious, but an effort. Gin, tequila, brandy, whiskey . . . they are a small effort to drink. One need not use one’s heart. One need not pour out one’s soul into the glass. But with wine . . . it is very hard to make myself, every time I raise the glass, say . . . ‘This is the first time I have tasted it. What is this strange liquid?’ Very hard, and harder still to cheat my nose and make it believe that it has never inhaled that same identical fragrance before. Well, you were saying what? Something of no importance . . . folderol to the effect that you saw no reason why you should come to live with me in my house. Am I right?”
“You are right,” I said. “Except that it is not folderol, as you call it.”
“Ah, young men, young men, what fools they are.” Caporno sighed. “How they waste the precious hours and the opportunities of life . . . thinking, judging, hesitating, making choices. Do you not know, Mendez, that the one thing of importance is to live?”
“Señor,” I said, “I learn from you.”
He twisted his head violently toward me.
“Yes,” he said, “I think that you may have enough sense to learn.”
XII
After this, his manner changed suddenly. “Now, my young friend,” he said, “let us talk frankly and seriously to one another. In the first place, you are right in not drinking with me. In the second place, time flies and we must get on with our business, must we not?”
“As you please, señor,” I said, and I glanced sharply at Pedro.
The old man paid no heed to me, but Caporno, although he had not seemed to take the slightest notice of me, was instantly aware of the meaning of that look of mine.
“As for Pedro,” he said, “don’t fear to speak out before him. He is a shadow, not a man. He is a spirit, not flesh. How close can you guess your own age, Pedro?”
“Since my eightieth year, I have been like a vain girl, Señor Caporno. I have not kept track of the birthdays.”
“You do not look that age,” I could not help saying—although, in fact, after inspecting him closely, he looked as old as a sheet of papyrus.
“That is a foolish compliment,” said Caporno. “But there is no harm done. He cannot hear you.”
“¿Señor? When he hears you so perfectly?”
“His ear is tuned to my voice. That is all. He has spent the last fifty years listening to me and studying me. Have you not, Pedro?”
“I have watched you, señor.”
“You see that he will never agree with me. Because he is afraid of spoiling me. Me! However, pay no more attention to him. I keep him as a sort of skeleton at the feast. What I say to you he will hear. What you say to me is a closed book to him. Are you content?”
“As you will, then,” I said.
“Very good. Speak first about yourself, because of course you know enough about me.”
“I have heard something of you, señor.”
“No, no, no,” he said with a childish expression of annoyance. “You have heard a great deal. Everyone talks about me. It is my pleasure to be talked about. I need much talk. Many words are a purgative that carry away the evil reputation. If it is only to damn me, I am glad to have people talk about me. Because too much damning turns the mind around on itself. My enemies protest too much about the evil that is in me, as though I were a devil. The world sees that I am not a devil. Suddenly it leaps to another extreme. It says that I am good. And, as I said before, you need not lie about it. You have heard how I cheated my people?”
“I have heard it,” I admitted.
He nodded and rubbed his hands together.
“When there is too much blood in a man, it needs letting. In the same way, I let the blood of my nation. I cooled them. I forced them to change the old constitution and draw up a new one, which is good. Had it not been for me, they would still be robbed to this day. They should write me down as their greatest benefactor . . . their most perfect patriot. However, time will give me my reward.”
I could not help chuckling.
“In the meantime, you do not trust me,” he said.
I was silent.
“Confess!” he insisted.
“Perhaps not, then,” I said.
“Excellent! Then you sit down with opened eyes! However, you will find so much good in me that you will be astonished. Now that you know enough about me, tell me about yourself.”
“What shall I tell you?”
“Whatever you please . . . as much as you please . . . no man can tell me too much about himself.”
I decided to dose him with some of his own medicine.
“I believe,” I said, “that knowledge concerning a man is a bitter medicine that is to be got by a prescription from a doctor.”
“What prescription,” he said, “had you for the knowledge that you admit that you have of me?”
“Ah,” I said, “you are yourself the physician and apparently are not afraid to prescribe for your own health. As for myself, however, I am willing to tell you the story of my life. It is for your ear only, however, as I hate publicity.”
“Agreed,” he said, and he dropped his head upon his hand and looked down upon the ground, as one who did not wish to disconcert me with any close observation. I was all the more amazed by this behavior because of the abruptness and the terseness of his manner in preceding moments of our interview. But as time went on, I saw that this was not delicacy on his part. It was rather a desire to center his whole mind more forcibly upon what I had to say to him, and, therefore, he would not waste any force by fixing his eyes upon me. And I could feel, from moment to moment, the keenest criticism of what I had to say.
It was as blunt and as matter of fact as I could make it.
I said: “The family of Mendez comes from northern Spain.”
“I think that it has a Castilian ring,” said Caporno politely.
“On the contrary,” I said, “we come from Arragon.”
“By that I am not so well pleased,” he said.
“In the course of our family history,” I said, “we have never distinguished ourselves in the arts of peace.”
He cast one side glance at my blunt, ugly features, made for sustaining blows, and at my thick, wide shoulders, made for dealing them.
“I believe it,” he said.
“Except for one bishop,” I said, “and he was disgraced and read out of orders because, in the midst of a campaign, he, too, violently sacked and burned a town.”
Caporno made a faint clucking sound, and I knew that the rascal’s sympathy was not for the ruined inhabitants of that fictitious town.
“But, aside from this one peaceable flaw,” I said, “we have been distinguished rather as people who knew various ways of breaking the law, almost all by violence. My ancestors were famous for their intimate knowledge of the landscape. They knew every narrow ravine and every dark passage of the mountains of Arragon. They knew every fellow who could be corrupted by a gold piece and turned into an assistant villain. And, accordingly, they carried on their depredations so very luckily that they were never arrested without having enough money hidden away in their mountain holds to corrupt the judgment of the king or of the king’s ministers.”
Here Caporno saw fit to interrupt my tale by straightening in his chair and breaking into the heartiest but the most silent laughter—so immoderate that it lasted for some moments and in the end he had to wipe the tears from his eyes.
“This is delightful,” he said. “They remained rough brigands in the mountains to the end, then?”
“Not at all,” I said. “We were always careful to maintain one member of the fa
mily . . . some bold, adroit, and cunning man of a pleasing address, near the person of the king himself. This representative of the family was always notable for his generosity to the clergy, his charity to the poor, his amiable conversation, his prudent relief of his fellow nobles. . . .”
“Nobles?” said Caporno, darting in the question like the flicker of a sword blade across the conversation.
“Ah, señor,” I said a little sadly, “ingenuous though I am trying to be with you, you surely will not ask me to give you my full title?”
“Have you not mine?” he said testily.
“And what is your title?” I asked, assuming a passion of sudden scorn that was uncontrollable. “What is your title . . . except that of chief legal thief?”
He did not explode with passion. He merely said: “Whereas, you, my dear friend?”
“Whereas my people,” I said, “have robbed under the very hand of one of the greatest kings in Christendom and singed the beards of the generals who were sent out to drag them into the courts of justice.”
“This is beautiful,” said Caporno with an astonishing humility. “And I accept the rebuke. Pray continue.”
“As I have said, we maintained one representative in the court of the king, and this man was usually of the greatest value to us when we fell into times of trouble, for he would know exactly what hands must be crossed with silver and what hands must be crossed with gold before our arrested or suspected men could regain their freedom. You will understand how this could be?”
“Most perfectly,” Caporno answered, smiling.
“In this manner,” I said, “we have gone on down the ages, robbing gaily, sometimes not with impunity, and yet again with great success, distinguished in the wars to which our country has been a party, distinguished also for our piety.”
“Ha?” cried Caporno.
“Piety,” I repeated.
“But how could that be?”
“With part of the spoils that my ancestors have taken in war . . . and in peace . . . they have built a great church that stands across a mountain valley and its golden chimes make music through. . . .”