Blanca rose.
“I am tired of the old poetry. It is all too sad. What else shall we read?”
“Let’s have a great deal of gay, modern poetry,” suggested Carlos, whose own verses were considered extremely gay and modern. Violeta was always shocked when he called them amusing. He couldn’t mean it. It was only his way of pretending he wasn’t sad when he wrote them.
“Read me all your new ones again.” Blanca was always appreciating Carlos. You could hear it in her voice underneath, like a little trickle of sugar. And Carlos let her do it. He seemed always to be condescending to Blanca a little. But Blanca could never see it, because she really didn’t think of anything but the way she had her hair fixed or whether people thought she was pretty. Violeta longed to make a naughty face at Blanca, who posed ridiculously, leaning over the table.
Above the red silk lamp shade her face was not sallow as usual. The thin nose and small lips cast shadows on her cheek. She hated being pale, and had the habit, while reading, of smoothing her cheeks round and round with two fingers, first one cheek and then the other, until deep red spots would burn in them for a long while. Violeta wished to shriek after watching Blanca do this for hours at a time. Why did not Mamacita speak to her about it? It was the worst sort of fidgeting.
“I haven’t the new ones with me,” said Carlos.
“Then let it be the old ones,” agreed Blanca gaily.
She moved to the bookshelves, Carlos beside her. They could not find his book. Their hands touched as fingers sought titles. Something in the intimate murmur of their voices wounded Violeta acutely. Sharing some delightful secret, they were purposely shutting her out. She spoke.
“If you want your book, Carlos, I can find it.” At the sound of her own voice she felt calm and firm and equal to anything. By her tone she tried to shut Blanca out.
They turned and regarded her without interest.
“And where may it be, infant?” Carlos’ voice always had that chilling edge on it when he was not reading aloud, and his eyes explored. With a glance he seemed to see all one’s faults. Violeta remembered her feet and drew down her skirts. The sight of Blanca’s narrow, gray satin slippers was hateful.
“I have it. I have had it for a whole week.” She eyed the tip of Blanca’s nose, hoping they would understand she wished to say, “You see, I have treasured it!”
She got up, feeling a little clumsy, and walked away with a curious imitation of Blanca’s grown-up gait. It made her dreadfully aware of her long, straight legs in their ribbed stockings.
“I will help you search,” called Carlos, as if he had thought of something interesting, and he followed. Over his suddenly near shoulder she saw Blanca’s face. It looked very vague and faraway, like a distressed doll’s. Carlos’ eyes were enormous, and he smiled steadily. She wished to run away. He said something in a low voice. She could not understand him at all, and it was impossible to find the lamp cord in the narrow, dark hallway. She was frightened at the soft pad-pad of his rubber heels so close behind her as they went without speaking through the chill dining room, full of the odor of fruit that has been all day in a closed place. When they entered the small, open sunroom over the entrance of the patio, the moonlight seemed almost warm, it was so radiant after the shadows of the house. Violeta turned over a huddle of books on the small table, but she did not see them clearly; and her hand shook so, she could not take hold of anything.
Carlos’ hand came up in a curve, settled upon hers and held fast. His roundish, smooth cheek and blond eyebrows hovered, swooped. His mouth touched hers and made a tiny smacking sound. She felt herself wrench and twist away as if a hand pushed her violently. And in that second his hand was over her mouth, soft and warm, and his eyes were staring at her, fearfully close. Violeta opened her eyes wide also and peered up at him. She expected to sink into a look warm and gentle, like the touch of his palm. Instead, she felt suddenly, sharply hurt, as if she had collided with a chair in the dark. His eyes were bright and shallow, almost like the eyes of Pepe, the macaw. His pale, fluffy eyebrows were arched; his mouth smiled tightly. A sick thumping began in the pit of her stomach, as it always did when she was called up to explain things to Mother Superior. Something was terribly wrong. Her heart pounded until she seemed about to smother. She was angry with all her might, and turned her head aside in a hard jerk.
“Keep your hand off my mouth!”
“Then be quiet, you silly child!” The words were astounding, but the way he said them was more astounding still, as if they were allies in some shameful secret. Her teeth rattled with chill.
“I will tell my mother! Shame on you for kissing me!”
“I did not kiss you except a little brotherly kiss, Violeta, precisely as I kiss Blanca. Don’t be absurd!”
“You do not kiss Blanca. I heard her tell my mother she has never been kissed by a man!”
“But I do kiss her—as a cousin, nothing more. It does not count. We are relatives just the same. What did you think?”
Oh, she had made a hideous mistake. She knew she was blushing until her forehead throbbed. Her breath was gone, but she must explain. “I thought—a kiss—meant—meant—” She could not finish.
“Ah, you’re so young, like a little newborn calf,” said Carlos. His voice trembled in a strange way. “You smell like a nice baby, freshly washed with white soap! Imagine such a baby being angry at a kiss from her cousin! Shame on you, Violeta!”
He was loathsome. She saw herself before him, almost as if his face were a mirror. Her mouth was too large; her face was simply a moon; her hair was ugly in the tight convent braids.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she whispered.
“For what?” His voice had the cutting edge again. “Come, where is the book?”
“I don’t know,” she said, trying not to cry.
“Well, then, let us go back, or Mamacita will scold you.”
“Oh, no, no. I can’t go in there. Blanca will see—Mamacita will ask questions. I want to stay here. I want to run away—to kill myself!”
“Nonsense!” said Carlos. “Come with me this minute. What did you expect when you came out here alone with me?”
He turned and started away. She was shamefully, incredibly in the wrong. She had behaved like an immodest girl. It was all bitterly real and unbelievable, like a nightmare that went on and on and no one heard you calling to be waked up. She followed, trying to hold up her head.
Mamacita nodded, shining, crinkled hair stiffly arranged, chin on white collar. Blanca sat like a stone in her deep chair, holding a small gray-and-gold book in her lap. Her angry eyes threw out a look that coiled back upon itself like a whiplash, and the pupils became suddenly blank and bright as Carlos’ had.
Violeta folded down on her hassock and gathered up her knees. She stared at the carpet to hide her reddened eyes, for it terrified her to see the way eyes could give away such cruel stories about people.
“I found the book here, where it belonged,” said Blanca. “I am tired now. It is very late. We shall not read.”
Violeta wished to cry in real earnest now. It was the last blow that Blanca should have found the book. A kiss meant nothing at all, and Carlos had walked away as if he had forgotten her. It was all mixed up with the white rivers of moonlight and the smell of warm fruit and a cold dampness on her lips that made a tiny, smacking sound. She trembled and leaned over until her forehead touched Mamacita’s lap. She could not look up, ever, ever again.
The low voices sounded contentious; thin metal wires twanged in the air around them.
“But I do not care to read any more, I tell you.”
“Very well, I shall go at once. But I am leaving for Paris on Wednesday, and shall not see you again until the fall.”
“It would be like you to go without even stopping in to say good-by.”
Even when they were angry they still talked to each other like two grown-up people wrapped together in a secret. The sound of his soft, padding rubber heels came
near.
“Good night, my dearest Doña Paz. I have had an enchanting evening.”
Mamacita’s knees moved; she meant to rise.
“What—asleep, Violeta? Well, let us hear often from you, my dear nephew. Your little cousins and I will miss you greatly.”
Mamacita was wide-awake and smiling, holding Carlos’ hands. They kissed. Carlos turned to Blanca and bent to kiss her. She swept him into the folds of the gray shawl, but turned her cheek for his salute. Violeta rose, her knees trembling. She turned her head from side to side to close out the sight of the macaw eyes coming closer and closer, the tight, smiling mouth ready to swoop. When he touched her, she wavered for a moment, then slid up and back against the wall. She heard herself screaming uncontrollably.
Mamacita sat upon the side of the bed and patted Violeta’s cheek. Her curved hand was warm and gentle and so were her eyes. Violeta choked a little and turned her face away.
“I have explained to Papacito that you quarreled with your cousin Carlos and were very rude to him. Papacito says you need a good renovating.” Mamacita’s voice was soft and reassuring. Violeta lay without a pillow, the ruffled collar of her nightgown standing up about her chin. She did not answer. Even to whisper hurt her.
“We are going to the country this week and you shall live in the garden all summer. Then you won’t be so nervous. You are quite a young lady now, and you must learn to control your nerves.”
“Yes, Mamacita.” The look on Mamacita’s face was very hard to bear. She seemed to be asking questions about very hidden thoughts—those thoughts that were not true at all and could never be talked about with anyone. Everything she could remember in her whole life seemed to have melted together in a confusion and misery that could not be explained because it was all changed and uncertain.
She wanted to sit up, take Mamacita around the neck and say, “Something dreadful happened to me—I don’t know what,” but her heart closed up hard and aching, and she sighed with all her breath. Even Mamacita’s breast had become a cold, strange place. Her blood ran back and forth in her, crying terribly, but when the sound came up to her lips it was only a small whimper, like a puppy’s.
“You must not cry any more,” said Mamacita after a long pause. Then: “Good night, my poor child. This impression will pass.” Mamacita’s kiss felt cold on Violeta’s cheek.
Whether the impression passed or not, no word of it was spoken again. Violeta and the family spent the summer in the country. She refused to read Carlos’ poetry, though Mamacita encouraged her to do so. She would not even listen to his letters from Paris. She quarreled on more equal terms with her sister Blanca, feeling that there was no longer so great a difference of experience to separate them. A painful unhappiness possessed her at times, because she could not settle the questions brooding in her mind. Sometimes she amused herself making ugly caricatures of Carlos.
In the early autumn she returned to school, weeping and complaining to her mother that she hated the convent. There was, she declared as she watched her boxes being tied up, nothing to be learned there.
1923
The Martyr
RUBÉN, the most illustrious painter in Mexico, was deeply in love with his model Isabel, who was in turn romantically attached to a rival artist whose name is of no importance.
Isabel used to call Rubén her little “Churro,” which is a sort of sweet cake, and is, besides, a popular pet name among the Mexicans for small dogs. Rubén thought it a very delightful name, and would say before visitors to the studio, “And now she calls me ‘Churro!’ Ha! ha!” When he laughed, he shook in the waistcoat, for he was getting fat.
Then Isabel, who was tall and thin, with long, keen fingers, would rip her hands through a bouquet of flowers Rubén had brought her and scatter the petals, or she would cry, “Yah! yah!” derisively, and flick the tip of his nose with paint. She had been observed also to pull his hair and ears without mercy.
When earnest-minded people made pilgrimages down the narrow, cobbled street, picked their way carefully over puddles in the patio, and clattered up the uncertain stairs for a glimpse of the great and yet so simple personage, she would cry, “Here come the pretty sheep!” She enjoyed their gaze of wonder at her daring.
Often she was bored, for sometimes she would stand all day long, braiding and unbraiding her hair while Rubén made sketches of her, and they would forget to eat until late; but there was no place for her to go until her lover, Rubén’s rival, should sell a painting, for everyone declared Rubén would kill on sight the man who even attempted to rob him of Isabel. So Isabel stayed, and Rubén made eighteen different drawings of her for his mural, and she cooked for him occasionally, quarreled with him, and put out her long, red tongue at visitors she did not like. Rubén adored her.
He was just beginning the nineteenth drawing of Isabel when his rival sold a very large painting to a rich man whose decorator told him he must have a panel of green and orange on a certain wall of his new house. By a felicitous chance, this painting was prodigiously green and orange. The rich man paid him a huge price, but was happy to do it, he explained, because it would cost six times as much to cover the space with tapestry. The rival was happy, too, though he neglected to explain why. The next day he and Isabel went to Costa Rica, and that is the end of them so far as we are concerned.
Rubén read her farewell note:
“Poor old Churro! It is a pity your life is so very dull, and I cannot live it any longer. I am going away with someone who will never allow me to cook for him, but will make a mural with fifty figures of me in it, instead of only twenty. I am also to have red slippers, and a gay life to my heart’s content.
“Your old friend,
“ISABEL.”
When Rubén read this, he felt like a man drowning. His breath would not come, and he thrashed his arms about a great deal. Then he drank a large bottle of tequila, without lemon or salt to take the edge off, and lay down on the floor with his head in a palette of freshly mixed paint and wept vehemently.
After this, he was altogether a changed man. He could not talk unless he was telling about Isabel, her angelic face, her pretty little tricks and ways: “She used to kick my shins black and blue,” he would say, fondly, and the tears would flow into his eyes. He was always eating crisp sweet cakes from a bag near his easel. “See,” he would say, holding one up before taking a mouthful, “she used to call me ‘Churro,’ like this!”
His friends were all pleased to see Isabel go, and said among themselves he was lucky to lose the lean she-devil. They set themselves to help him forget. But Rubén could not be distracted. “There is no other woman like that woman,” he would say, shaking his head stubbornly. “When she went, she took my life with her. I have no spirit even for revenge.” Then he would add, “I tell you, my poor little angel Isabel is a murderess, for she has broken my heart.”
At times he would roam anxiously about the studio, kicking his felt slippers into the shuffles of drawings piled about, gathering dust, or he would grind colors for a few minutes, saying in a dolorous voice: “She once did all this for me. Imagine her goodness!” But always he came back to the window, and ate sweets and fruits and almond cakes from the bag. When his friends took him out for dinner, he would sit quietly and eat huge platefuls of every sort of food, and wash it down with sweet wine. Then he would begin to weep, and talk about Isabel.
His friends agreed it was getting rather stupid. Isabel had been gone for nearly six months, and Rubén refused even to touch the nineteenth figure of her, much less to begin the twentieth, and the mural was getting nowhere.
“Look, my dear friend,” said Ramón, who did caricatures, and heads of pretty girls for the magazines, “even I, who am not a great artist, know how women can spoil a man’s work for him. Let me tell you, when Trinidad left me, I was good for nothing for a week. Nothing tasted properly, I could not tell one color from another, I positively was tone deaf. That shameless cheat-by-night almost ruined me. But you, amigo, r
ouse yourself, and finish your great mural for the world, for the future, and remember Isabel only when you give thanks to God that she is gone.”
Rubén would shake his head as he sat collapsed upon his couch munching sugared almonds, and would cry:
“I have a pain in my heart that will kill me. There is no woman like that one.”
His collars suddenly refused to meet under his chin. He loosened his belt three notches, and explained: “I sit still; I cannot move any more. My energy has gone to grief.” The layers of fat piled insidiously upon him, he bulged until he became strange even to himself. Ramón, showing his new caricature of Rubén to his friends, declared: “I could as well have drawn it with a compass, I swear. The buttons are bursting from his shirt. It is positively unsafe.”
But still Rubén sat, eating moodily in solitude, and weeping over Isabel after his third bottle of sweet wine at night.
His friends talked it over, concluded that the affair was growing desperate; it was high time someone should tell him the true cause of his pain. But everyone wished the other would be the one chosen. And it came out there was not a person in the group, possibly not one in all Mexico, indelicate enough to do such a thing. They decided to shift the responsibility upon a physician from the faculty of the university. In the mind of such a one would be combined a sufficiently refined sentiment with the highest degree of technical knowledge. This was the diplomatic, the discreet, the fastidious thing to do. It was done.
The doctor found Rubén seated before his easel, facing the half-finished nineteenth figure of Isabel. He was weeping, and between sobs he ate spoonfuls of soft Toluca cheese, with spiced mangos. He hung in all directions over his painting-stool, like a mound of kneaded dough. He told the doctor first about Isabel. “I do assure you faithfully, my friend, not even I could capture in paint the line of beauty in her thigh and instep. And, besides, she was an angel for kindness.” Later he said the pain in his heart would be the death of him. The doctor was profoundly touched. For a great while he sat offering consolation without courage to prescribe material cures for a man of such delicately adjusted susceptibilities.
Flowering Judas and Other Stories: A Library of America eBook Classic Page 4