Don Jaime shook his head, discouraged. "I've told you everything I know," he muttered. "I only read the documents once, very quickly, and all I can remember are a lot of official notes and lists of names, among them various soldiers. Nothing that made any sense to me."
Campillo looked at him as one might look at an exotic curiosity. "I assure you, Señor Astarloa, that you amaze me, word of honor. You really have no place in a country where the national pastime consists in firing a blunderbuss at the first person to appear around the corner, a country where two people having an argument will be immediately joined by two hundred more, who just want to find out what the issue is and then take sides. I would like to know..."
Someone knocked at the door, and a plainclothes policeman came in. Campillo turned toward him, nodding, and the new arrival approached and whispered a few words in his superior's ear. The chief of police frowned and shook his head gravely. When the other saluted and left, Campillo looked at Don Jaime.
"Our last hope has just disappeared," he said in a lugubrious tone. "Your friend Cárceles's suffering is over."
Don Jaime dropped his hands to his knees and held his breath. His gray eyes, surrounded by deep lines, fixed on those of the policeman.
"You mean...?"
The policeman picked up a pencil from the table and broke it in two. He showed the two pieces to the fencing master. "Cárceles has just died in the hospital. My agents were unable to get a word out of him, because he never recovered his reason: he died mad with horror." The policeman's fish eyes held Don Jaime's gaze. "You, Señor Astarloa, are now the last link in the chain."
Campillo paused and used a piece of the broken pencil to reach beneath the wig and scratch his scalp.
"If I were in your shoes," he added coolly, ironically, "I wouldn't stray too far from that precious sword-stick of yours."
VIII. With Bare Blades
In a fight with bare blades the same considerations do not apply, and one should rule out nothing as a means of defense, as long as it does not go against the laws of honor.
It was almost four in the afternoon when he left the police station. The heat was suffocating, and he remained for a moment beneath the awning of a nearby bookshop, distractedly watching the carriages traveling back and forth across the heart of Madrid. A few feet away, a peddler selling horchata was crying his wares. Don Jaime went over to him and asked for a glass of the milky liquid, which cooled his throat and offered some temporary relief. Beneath the sun, a Gypsy with a barefoot child clinging to her black skirt was selling bunches of wilted carnations. The little boy suddenly ran off after a passing tram packed with sweating passengers; the conductor shooed him away with his whip, and the child returned, sniveling, to his mother's side.
The cobbles shimmered in the heat. Don Jaime removed his top hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. He stood for a while, not moving. He didn't really know where to go.
He thought of going to the café, but he didn't want to have to answer any of the questions his colleagues would be sure to ask him about Cárceles. He realized that he had missed appointments with his students, and this thought upset him more than anything else that had happened in recent days. He decided that the first thing he should do was write letters of apology.
Someone amid the knots of idle men chatting nearby seemed to be watching him. It was a young man, modestly dressed, who looked like a workman. When Don Jaime turned to look at him, the young man averted his gaze and resumed the conversation he was having with four other men who were standing on the corner of Carrera de San Jerónimo. Worried, Don Jaime examined the stranger distrustfully. Was he actually being watched? That initial fear gave way to a deep irritation with himself. The truth was, he saw everyone as a possible suspect; he saw a murderer in the face of every person he passed and who, for whatever reason, held his gaze for a moment.
Leave his home, leave Madrid. That had been Campillo's advice. Save himself. In a word, flee. He considered all this with growing unease. The only conclusion he was capable of reaching was this: To hell with them, to hell with the lot of them. He was too old to go scampering off into hiding like a rabbit. It was undignified even to think of it. His life had been long and eventful; he had stored up enough memories to justify his years. Why at the last minute besmirch with the dishonor of flight the image he had managed to preserve of himself? Besides, he didn't even know from whom or what he was supposed to flee. He wasn't prepared to spend what remained of his life jumping at the slightest noise, running away from every unfamiliar face. And he was too old to start a new life somewhere else.
Again he felt that sharp pang of sorrow when he remembered Adela de Otero's eyes, the Marqués de los Alumbres's frank laugh, Cárceles's fiery harangues. He decided to block all that from his mind, for if he did not, he risked being dragged down by melancholy and uncertainty, and behind those two feelings he could glimpse fear, an emotion that he refused to acknowledge on principle. He was neither the right age nor of the right character to feel afraid of anything, he told himself. Death was the worst thing that could happen to him, and he was prepared for that. Indeed, he thought with a sense of profound satisfaction, not only was he prepared, he had already faced it unflinchingly the previous night, engaged in a seemingly hopeless battle. The memory of how he had acquitted himself made him half-close his eyes, as if his pride had received a gentle caress. The solitary old wolf had shown that he still had a few teeth to bite with.
He wouldn't run away. On the contrary, he would wait to see what happened. He remembered his family motto, "To me," and that was precisely what he would do; he would wait for them to come to him. He smiled. He had always been of the opinion that every man should be given the opportunity to die standing up. Now, when the future offered only old age, a decaying body, a slow decline in some home for the aged, or a despairing pistol shot, Don Jaime Astarloa, a fencing master of the French Academy of Arms, had the chance to play a trick on Fate by voluntarily embracing what anyone else in his place would recoil from in horror. He couldn't go to look for the enemy, because he didn't know who they were or where they were; but Campillo had said that sooner or later they would come to him the last link in the chain. He remembered something that he had read a few days before in a French novel: "Even if the whole world turned against him, as long as his soul remained calm, he would feel not a moment's sadness." Those wretches would find out what an old fencing master was made of.
The direction his thoughts had taken made him feel better. He looked about him with the air of someone throwing down a challenge to the universe; he drew himself up and set off home, swinging his walking stick. In fact, for those who passed him at that moment, Don Jaime looked like any other scrawny, bad-tempered old man dressed in old-fashioned clothes, out for his daily constitutional to try to warm his weary bones. But had they stopped to look into his eyes, they would have been surprised to discover there a gray glint of remarkable resolve, tempered like the steel of his foils.
HE dined on a few cooked vegetables and put the coffeepot on to boil. While he was waiting, he took a book from the shelf and sat down on the battered sofa. It took him a little while to find a passage that he had carefully underlined in pencil ten or fifteen years before:
Any moral character is closely bound up with scenes of autumn: those leaves that fall like our years, those flowers that fade like our hours, those clouds that flee like our illusions, that light that grows ever feebler like our intelligence, that sun that grows colder like our loves, those rivers that freeze over like our life, all weave secret bonds with our fate...
He read those lines several times, silently moving his lips. Such a thought could easily serve as an epitaph, he said to himself. With an ironic gesture, which he imagined only he could appreciate, he left the book open at that page on the sofa. The smells coming from the kitchen told him that the coffee was ready; he went in and poured some. Then, cup in hand, he returned to the living room.
Night was falling. Venus shone all alone outside
the window, in the infinite distance. He took a sip of coffee, standing beneath his father's portrait. "A handsome man," Adela de Otero had said. He went over to the framed insignia from his former regiment in the Royal Guard, which had symbolized both the beginning and the end of his brief military career. Beside it hung the diploma from the French Academy of Arms, now yellow with age; the parchment was stained with the mildew of many winters. He could remember, as if it were yesterday, the day he received it from the hands of a jury composed of the most respected fencing masters in all Europe. Old Lucien de Montespan, sitting on the other side of the table, had looked at his pupil with pride. "The pupil outstrips the teacher," he would say to him later.
With his fingertips Don Jaime stroked a small vase containing an open fan; it was the only thing that remained to him of the woman for whom he had abandoned Paris. Where was she now? Probably a venerable grandmother, still sweet-natured and distinguished, who would be watching her grandchildren grow up while she busied her once beautiful hands with some embroidery, silently caressing hidden, youthful memories. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten the fencing master.
A bit farther along, on the wall, hung a wooden rosary, its beads worn and blackened with use. Amelia Bescós de Astarloa, the widow of a hero in the war against the French, had held that rosary in her hands until the day she died, and a pious family member had later sent it to her son. Looking at it provoked a strange feeling in Don Jaime: the memory of his mother's face had grown dim with the years; he could now no longer visualize it. He knew only that she was beautiful, and his memory preserved the touch of the fine, gentle hands that used to stroke his hair when he was a child, and the pulse in the warm throat against which he would press his face when he believed himself unhappy. His mind also preserved a faded image, like an old painting: the foreshortened figure of a woman bending over to stir the embers of a great fireplace that filled the walls of a dark, somber living room with a flickering, reddish light.
Don Jaime finished his coffee and turned his back on his memories. He remained for a long time without moving, with no other thought disturbing the peace that reigned inside him. Then he put the cup down, went over to the sideboard, and opened a drawer, taking from it a long, flat case. He undid the clasps and removed a heavy object wrapped in a cloth. He unwrapped the cloth to reveal a Lefaucheux revolver with a wooden handle and a capacity for five large-caliber cartridges. Although he had had that weapon, a present from a client, for five years, he had never wanted to use it. His code of honor was opposed in principle to the use of firearms, which he considered the resort of cowards who wanted to be able to kill from a safe distance. But on this occasion, circumstances allowed him to set aside certain scruples.
He placed the revolver on the table and started loading it, inserting a cartridge into each chamber of the cylinder. Having done that, he weighed the weapon in the palm of his hand for a moment, then put it down again. He looked around him, his hands on his hips, before moving an armchair so that it faced the door. He brought over a table and placed on it the oil lamp together with a box of matches. After another glance to see that everything was where it should be, he extinguished all the gaslights in the house one by one, apart from the light burning in the small hallway between the front door and the studio; he merely turned that down, so it gave off only a pale, bluish light that left the hall in half shadow and the studio in darkness. Then he unsheathed his sword-stick, picked up the revolver, and set both on the table opposite his chair. He stood there for a moment in the shadows, studying the effect, and seemed satisfied. Then he went to the hall and unbolted the door.
He was whistling to himself as he went into the kitchen to refill the pot with coffee and collect a clean cup. He took those over to the chair and put them on the table, next to the oil lamp, the matches, the revolver, and the sword-stick. Then he lit the oil lamp, with the wick turned very low, filled a cup with coffee, and, raising it to his lips, settled down to wait. He did not know how many of them there would be; but he was sure that, from now on, his nights were going to be very long.
His eyes were closing. His head nodded, and he felt a pain in his neck. He blinked, confused. In the dim light of the oil lamp, he reached for the coffeepot and poured a little more into his cup. He took his watch from his pocket; it was a quarter past two in the morning. The coffee was cold, but he drank it down in one swallow, making a face. There was absolute silence around him, and he thought that perhaps they would not come. On the table, the revolver and the bare blade of the sword gleamed in the soft glow of the oil lamp.
THE sound of a passing carriage reached him through the open window, and he listened attentively for a while. He held his breath, intent on the slightest noise that might indicate danger, and he remained like that until the noise had moved off down the street, fading into the distance.
On another occasion, he seemed to hear a creak on the stairs, and he sat for a long time with his eyes fixed on the bluish penumbra in the hallway, while his right hand stroked the butt of the gun.
A MOUSE came and went above him. He looked up at the ceiling, listening to the muted pattering as the little animal moved about the rafters. He had been trying to hunt it down for several days, and had left a couple of traps in the kitchen at the hole near the fireplace. From that hole the mouse usually emerged to make its night raids on the larder. It was obviously a very astute mouse, because the cheese next to the spring was always gnawed, but the trap was never sprung. Don Jaime was obviously up against a mouse of some talent, which made the difference between hunting and being hunted. Listening to the mouse scamper here and there in the roof space, the fencing master was glad that he had not yet been able to trap him. The minuscule company the creature afforded him relieved the solitude of his long wait.
HIS mind, in that state of light, alert sleep, filled with strange images. Three times he thought he saw something moving in the hallway and sat up with a start, and three times he leaned back again in the chair, realizing that his senses were deceiving him. Nearby, the clock of San Ginés struck the quarter hours, and the bell tolled three times.
THIS time there was no doubt. There was a noise on the stairs, a quiet rustling. He leaned forward slowly, concentrating every ounce of his being on listening. Something was moving cautiously on the other side of the door. Holding his breath, his throat tight with tension, he put out the oil lamp. The only light now was the weak glow in the hallway. Without getting to his feet, he picked up the revolver in his right hand and cocked it, muffling the sound of the hammer between his legs. With his elbows resting on the table, he aimed it at the door. He was no marksman, but at that distance it would be difficult to miss. And there were five bullets in the chamber.
He was surprised to hear a gentle knock at the door. It was odd, he thought, for a murderer to ask permission to enter his victim's house. He remained still and silent in the darkness, waiting. Perhaps they wanted to find out if he was asleep.
The knock came again, a bit louder this time, although still far from energetic. It was clear that the mysterious visitor did not want to wake the neighbors. Don Jaime was beginning to feel unsettled. He had expected them to force their way in, not come knocking at his door at three in the morning. Besides, he had left the door unbolted; all they had to do was turn the handle to open it. He waited, holding the air in his lungs, the revolver firm in his hand, his index finger on the trigger. Whoever it was, was bound to come in.
There was a metallic creak. Someone was turning the handle. He heard a slight squeak as the door swung on its hinges. Don Jaime gently expelled the air from his lungs, took another deep breath, and again held it. His index finger began to squeeze the trigger. He would wait until the first figure was framed in the middle of the hallway, and then he would shoot.
"Don Jaime?"
The voice came in a questioning whisper. A glacial cold burst forth in the very center of Don Jaime's heart and spread to his veins, freezing his limbs. He felt the grip of his fingers loosening; the
revolver fell to the table. He raised a hand to his forehead as he got to his feet, stiff as a corpse. Because the slightly hoarse voice, with just a hint of a foreign accent, that came from the hall reached him from the mists of the Beyond. It was none other than the voice of Adela de Otero.
A FEMALE silhouette appeared in the blue penumbra and stopped on the threshold to the living room. He heard a slight rustle of skirts, and then the voice said again, "Don Jaime?"
He held out a hand, feeling for the matches. He struck one, and the tiny flame created a sinister play of light and shadow on his tense features. His fingers were trembling as he lit the oil lamp and lifted it up to illumine the apparition that had just placed death in his soul.
She was standing at the door in a black dress, her hands folded. She was wearing a black straw hat with matching ribbons, and her hair was gathered, as usual, at the nape of her neck. She seemed shy and uncertain, like a disobedient child come to ask forgiveness for arriving home late.
"I think I owe you an explanation, maestro."
Don Jaime swallowed hard as he set the oil lamp on the table. Through his mind passed the image of a mutilated woman lying on a marble slab in the morgue, and it seemed to him that Adela de Otero did indeed owe him an explanation.
The Fencing Master Page 20