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Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
 Mahmoud Darwish

Unfortunately,

It Was Paradise

Selected Poems

Translated and Edited by

i\!Iunir Akash and Carolyn Forche

(with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein)

University of California Press Berkeley· Los Angeles· London

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Darwish, Mahmoud.
[Poems.English.Selections]
Unfortunately, it was paradise: selected poems I Mahmoud Darwish; translated and
edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche, with Sinan Antoon and Am ira El-Zein.
p.cm.
ISBN o-520-23753-6 (cloth: alk.paper)-ISBN o-520-23754-4 (paper: alk.paper)
I. Akash, Munir. II. Forche, Carolyn. III. Title.

PJ7820.A7 A22 2003

892'. 716-dc21 2002068454

Manufactured in Canada

10 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of ANSIINISO Z39-48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).(§
The publisher gratefully acknowledges
the generous contribution to this book
provided by the Lannan Foundation.
 Pero yo ya no soy yo

Ni micasa es ya micasa.

But now I am no longer I,

nor is my house any longer my house.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Contents

Achnowledgments Munir Akash xiii

Introduction Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche xv

from Fewer Roses (1986)

I Will Slog over This Road 3

Another Road in the Road 4

Were It Up to Me to Begin Again s

On This Earth 6

I Belong There 7

Addresses for the Soul, outside This Place 8

Earth Presses against Us 9

We Journey towards a Home 10

We Travel Like All People 11

Athens Airport 12

I Talk Too Much 13

 We Have the Right to Love Autumn 14

The Last Train Has Stopped 15

On the Slope, Higher Than the Sea, They Slept 16

He Embraces His Murderer 17

Winds Shift against Us 18

Neighing on the Slope 19

Other Barbarians Will Come 20

They Would Love to See Me Dead 21

When the Martyrs Go to Sleep 22

The Night There 23

We Went to Aden 24

Another Damascus in Damascus 25

The Flute Cried 26

In This Hymn 27

from I See What I Want to See ( 1993)

The Hoopoe 31

from Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? ( 1995)

I See My Ghost Coming from Afar 55

A Cloud in My Hands 58

X
 The Kindhearted Villagers 61

The Owl's Night 63

The Everlasting Indian Fig 65

The Lute of lsmael 67

The Strangers' Picnic 71

The Raven's Ink 74

Like the Letter "N" in the Qur'an 77

Ivory Combs 79

The Death of the Phoenix 82

Poetic Regulations 85

Excerpts from the Byzantine Odes of Abu Firas 87

The Dreamers Pass from One Sky to Another 89

A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaqat) 91

Night That Overflows My Body 94

The Gypsy Woman Has a Tame Sky 96

from A Bed for the Stranger ( 1999)

We Were without a Present 101

Sonnet II 105

The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger 106

The Land of the Stranger, the Serene Land 108

xi
 lnanna's Milk 110

Who Am I, without Exile? 113

Lesson from the Kama Sutra 115

Mural (2ooo)

Mural 119

Three Poems (before 1986)

A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips 165

As Fate Would Have It 169

Four Personal Addresses 179

Glossary 183

xii
Acknowledgments

Any collection of this sort requires the support and assistance of more people
than can be named here. Each of them knows who he or she is, and to each of
them many thanks. I offer my sincere appreciation to the Lannan Foundation
for their generosity and their unfailing support. Patrick Lannan and the won­
derful family of his foundation by their insight, bravery, and service to human­
ity have taught me dedication. Special thanks to the poet Mahmoud Darwish
for his patience in answering my many questions and, of course, for his guid­
ance and very helpful comments along the way. Each poem in this collection
has been carefully selected from Darwish's entire work in collaboration with
the poet hi mself.
This enterprise could not have been possible without an exceptional team
of translators. All have known Darwish and his work for a long time. When
I expressed to Mahmoud Darwish my desire to translate this col lection, he
asked me to work in collaboration with a leading American poet who could
give the translations a single consistent tone. What Carolyn Forche has done
here, in this very short period of time, is an enterprise short of miraculous. She
recreated the poems translated with a different sensibility and made them har­
monious in a single voice. For this and for her wholehearted dedication I can't
thank her enough. A heartfelt expression of gratitude to Daniel M oore and
Laura Cerruti for their painstaking review and exceptional editorial expertise.
Their drive, vision, and unique poetic sensibility turned a dream into reality.
Very special thanks to Harry Mattison, Ibrahim Muhawi, and Kinda Akash for
their insightful reading and their many helpful suggestions, and to Caroline
Roberts and Kaia Sand for their meticulous copy editing. Grateful acknowl­
edgment is made to the editors and publishers of the following journals in
which some of these poems were first published: Tikkun, Salmagundi, Brich,
American Poetry Review, and Fence.
Finally, I have to admit that all the great work in this collection exists
thanks to these wonderful people and that every mistake in it is mine.
MunirA!wsh

xiv
Introduction

Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity. Critically acclaimed as one of the most

i mportant poets in the Arabic language and beloved as the voice of his people,
he is an artist demanding of his work continual transformation and a living leg­
end whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. Few poets have
borne such disparately bestowed adulation, nor survived such dramatic vicis­
situdes of history and fate as Mahmoud Darwish; even fewer have done so
while endeavoring to open new possibilities for poetry while assimilating one
of the world's oldest literary traditions. His poetry has been enthusiastically
embraced since the publication of his first volume, Leaves of Olive, in 1 964. Af­
ter the Arab defeat in the 1 967 war, Darwish raised his voice in searing lyrics
confronting the pain of everyday life for Palestinians. In a realism stripped of
poetic flourish, the "poetry of resistance" was born. With Nerudian transpar­
ency, his poems of the sixties and early seventies reflected his pain over the
occupation of his homeland and his lingering hopes for its liberation. In the in­
tervening years, the poetry of Darwish exemplified a brilliant artistic restless­
ness, with each volume opening new formal territory and poetic concerns.
With the publication of this collection, Darwish will celebrate his sixty-first
birthday and nearly four decades of writing. He is the poet laureate of Pales­
tine-a poet sharing the fate of his people, living in a town under siege, while
providing them with a language for their anguish and dreams. Any serious
study of his work must take into account the context in which it was written :
the years of exilic wandering and survival; the aesthetic, metaphysical, and po­
litical struggles particular to this poet.
Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of Birwe, in the district of Akka
(Acre) in upper Galilee, Palestine, on March 13, 1942. When he was six years
old, the Israeli Army occupied and subsequently destroyed Birwe, along with
4 1 6 other Palestinian villages. To avoid the ensuing massacres, the Darwish
family fled to Lebanon. A year later, they returned to their country "illegally,"
and settled in the nearby village of Dayr al-Asad, but too late to be counted
among the Palestinians who survived and remained within the borders of the
new state . The young Darwish was now an "internal refugee," legally classified
as a "present-absent alien," a species of Orwellian doublethink that the poet
would later interrogate in his lyric meditation "The Owl's Night," wherein the
present is "placeless, transient, absurd," and absence "mysterious," "human,"
and "unwanted," "going about its own preoccupations and piling up its chosen
objects. Like a small jar of water," he writes, "absence breaks in me." The newly
"alienated" Palestinians fel l under military rule and were sent into a complex
legal maze of emergency rulings. They could not travel within their homeland
without permission, nor, apparently, could the eight-year-old Darwish recite a
poem of lamentation at the school celebration of the second anniversary of Is­
rael without subsequently incurring the wrath of the Israeli military governor.
Thereafter he was obliged to hide whenever an Israeli officer appeared. Dur­
ing his school years, and until he left the country in 1970, Darwish would be
imprisoned several times and frequently harassed, always for the crimes of re­
citing his poetry and traveling without a permit from village to village.
Birwe was erased from land and map, but remained intact in memory, the
mirage of a lost paradise. In 1997, the I sraeli-French filmmaker, Simone Bit­
ton, went to what had been Birwe to film Darwish's childhood landscape, but
found nothing but ruins and a desolate, weed-choked cemetery. On April 16,
200 1 , Israeli bulldozers began paving a new road through the graves, unearth­
ing human remains throughout the site. The vanished Palestinian village be­
came, for the displaced poet, a bundle of belongings carried on the back of the
xvi
refugee. Den ied the recognition of citizenship in the new state, Darwish set­
tled on language as his identity, and took upon himself the task of restoration
of meaning and thus, homeland:
Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but has no answer.
I am my language, I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.
I am my language . . . ("A Rhyme for the Odes," 9I)
We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing . . .
Ours is a country of words: Tal k. Talk. ("We Travel Like All People," II)
In 1996, after twenty-six years of exi le, Darwish was granted a permit to
visit his fami ly and was warmly embraced by his compatriots, the "internal ref­
ugees." Thousands of cheering Palestinians greeted him in a festive way,
chanting his popular poems. Darwish later reflected on the pain and longing
he felt for his homeland: "As long as my soul is alive no one can smother my
feeling of nostalgia for my country which I still consider as Palesti ne."
Darwish's twentieth book of poems , the recently published Mural, fuses
lyric and epic in an impassioned meditation on the whole of his life and his
own confrontation with mortality. The realized ambitions of this poem ex­
emplify the poet's impressive range. Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic
forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibi lity to the richly veined ore of
its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his
own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical
or public reception. He has, as an artist, repeatedly confounded expectations,
without shirking the role assigned to him by his peoples' historical experience.
Perhaps no poet in our time has borne this weight : to be the esteemed and re­
vered voice of a people, while remaining true to poetry itself, however her­
metic and interior-to be at once culturally multiple and spiritually singular.
His poetry is both the linguistic fruit of an internalized collective memory and
an i mpassioned poetic response to his long absorption of regional and interna­
tional poetic movements. As much as he is the voice of the Palestinian dias­
pora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.
xvii
 It is the soul of Palestine that Darwish has made resonant in his work, giv­
ing it presence in the midst of suffering and hardship. Moving from city to
city, exile to exile, he has written out of a distinctly Palestinian sensibility and
conscience, out of the richness of Palestine's cultural past and a belief in its
common destiny. At the same time, he has become a poet and citizen of the
world.
Darwish's poetic fraternity includes Federico Garcfa Lorca's canto hondo
(deep song), Pablo Neruda's bardic epic range, Osip Mandelstam's elegiac poi­
gnancy, and Yehuda Amichai's sensitive lyric responsiveness to the contempo­
rary history of the region. As a poet of exilic being, he resembles C. P. Cavafy,
and shares with other poet-exiles of the past century a certain understanding
of the exilic condition of literary art. Although his later collections became
more universal in outlook, they are also a powerful outcry and statement of
anguish-both of the topography of the soul and the calamity of his people.
They lament the degeneration of the human condition and strive to stimulate
latent forces to create a new destiny. If any particular obsession is sustained
throughout his oeuvre, it would be the question of subjectivity itself, not only
the mutability of identity, but its otherness. It is the spiritual dimension of
what was, unfortunately, paradise, that he has most sustained in his life and
work.
"I have found that the land is fragile," he said in Palestine As Metaphor:

and the sea, light; I have learned that language and metaphor are not
enough to restore place to a place . . . . Not having been able to find my
place on earth, I have attempted to find it in History, and History cannot
be reduced to a compensation for lost geography. It is also a vantage point
for shadows, for the self and the Other, apprehended in a more complex
human journey. . . . Is this a simple, artistic ruse, a simple borrowing?
Or is it despair taking shape? The answer has no importance. The essen­
tial thing for me is that I have found a greater lyrical capacity, a passage

xviii
 from the relative to the absolute, an opening for me to inscribe the
national within the universal, for Palestine not to be limited to Palestine,
but to establish its aesthetic legitimacy in a greater human sphere. 1

It is our hope that this volume, and the recently published collection, The
Adam ofTwo Edens, 2 will extend his readership in the English-speaking world
in this time of calamity in the poet's homeland.
MunirAkash
Carolyn Fore he
Bethesda, Maryland
August 2001

1. Mahmoud Darwish, La Palestine comme nuitaphore Entretiens (Paris: Sindhad,

Actes Sud, 1997), 25.
2. Mahmoud Darwish, The Adam of Two Edens, ed. and with introduction by Munir
Akash (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2ooo).

xix
 from

Fewer Roses

Translated h)' 1\t/unir Akash and Carolyn Forche

I Will Slog over This Road

I will slog over this endless road to its end.

Until my heart stops, I will slog over this endless, endless road

with nothing to lose but the dust, what has died in me, and a row of palms

pointing toward what vanishes. I will pass the row of palms.

The wound does not need its poet to paint the blood of death like a pomegranate!

On the roof of neighing, I will cut thirty openings for meaning

so that you may end one trail only so as to begin another.

W hether this earth comes to an end or not, we'll slog over this endless road.

More tense than a bow. Our steps, be arrows. W here were we a moment ago?

Shall we join, in a while, the first arrow? The spinning wind whirled us.

So, what do you say?

I say: I will slog over this endless road to its end and my own.

3
Another Road in the Road

There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration.

To cross over we will throw many roses in the river.

No widow wants to return to us, there we have to go, north of the

neighing horses.

Have yet we forgotten something, both simple and worthy of our new ideas?

W hen you talk about yesterday, friend, I see my face reflected in the song
of doves.

I touch the dove's ring and hear flute-song in the abandoned fig tree.

My longing weeps for everything. My longing shoots back at me, to kill or

be killed.

Yet there is another road in the road, and on and on. So where are the

questions taking me?

I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there.

I will have to throw many roses before I reach a rose in Galilee.

4
Were It Up to Me to Begin Again

Were it up to me to begin again, I would make the same choice. Roses on

the fence.

I would travel the same roads that might or might not lead to Cordoba.

I would lay my shadow down on two rocks, so that birds could nest on one of

the boughs.

I would break open my shadow for the scent of almond to float in a cloud of dust

and grow tired on the slopes. Come closer, and listen.

Share my bread, drink my wine, don't leave me alone like a tired willow.

I love lands not trod over by songs of migration, or become subject to

passions of blood and desire.

I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at

the threshold.

If I return, I will return to the same rose and follow the same steps.

But never to Cordoba.

5
On This Earth

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the

aroma of bread

at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the

beginning

of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fear

of memories.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the final days of

September, a woman

keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in prison, a cloud

reflecting a swarm

of creatures, the peoples' applause for those who face death with a smile,

a tyrant's fear of songs.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady

of Earth,

mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name

later became

Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

6
I Belong There

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell

with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.

I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,

a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.

I belong there. W hen heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to

her mother.

And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a

single word: Home.

7
Addresses for the Soul, outside This Place

I love to travel . . .

to a village that never hangs my last evening on its cypresses. I love the trees

that witnessed how two birds suffered at our hands, how we raised the stones.

Wouldn't it be better if we raised our days

to grow slowly and embrace this greenness? I love the rainfall

on the women of distant meadows. I love the glittering water and the scent

of stone.

Wouldn't it be better if we defied our ages

and gazed much longer at the last sky before moonset?

Addresses for the soul, outside this place. I love to travel

to any wind . . . But I don't love to arrive.

8
Earth Presses against Us

Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage.

To pass through, we pull off our limbs.

Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die and yet live.

If only it were our mother so that she might temper us with mercy.

If only we were pictures of rocks held in our dreams like mirrors.

We glimpse faces in their final battle for the soul, of those who will be killed

by the last living among us. We mourn their children's feast.

We saw the faces of those who would throw our children out of the windows

of this last space. A star to burnish our mirrors.

W here should we go after the last border? W here should birds fly after the

last sky?

W here should plants sleep after the last breath of air?

We write our names with crimson mist!

We end the hymn with our flesh.

Here we will die. Here, in the final passage.

Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees.

9
We journey towards a Home

We journey towards a home not of our flesh. Its chestnut trees are not of

our bones.

Its rocks are not like goats in the mountain hymn. The pebbles' eyes are

not lilies.

We journey towards a home that does not halo our heads with a special sun.

Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.

W hen water and wheat are not at hand, eat our love and drink our tears . . .

There are mourning scarves for poets. A row of marble statues will lift our voice.

And an urn to keep the dust of time away from our souls. Roses for us and

against us.

You have your glory, we have ours. Of our home we see only the unseen:

our mystery.

Glory is ours: a throne carried on feet torn by roads that led to every home

but our own!

The soul must recognize itself in its very soul, or die here.

10
We Travel Like All People

We travel like ever yone else, but we return to nothing. As if travel were

a path of clouds. We buried our loved ones in the shade of clouds and

between roots of trees.

We said to our wives: Give birth for hundreds ofyears, so that we may end
this journey
within an hour of a countr)\ within a meter of the impossible!
We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets,

and are born again in the language of Gypsies.

We measure space with a hoopoe's beak, and sing so that distance may forget us.

We cleanse the moonlight. Your road is long, so dream of seven women to bear

this long journey on your shoulders. Shake the trunks of palm trees for them.

You know the names, and which one will give birth to the Son of Galilee.

Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.

Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.

11
Athens Airport

Athens airport disperses us to other airports. Where can Ifight? asks the fighter.
Where can I deliver your child? a pregnant woman shouts back.
Where can I invest my money? asks the officer.
This is none ofmy business, the intellectual says.
Where did you come from? asks the customs' official.
And we answer: From the sea!
Where are you going?
To the sea, we answer.
What is your address?
A woman of our group says: My village is the bundle on my back.

We have waited in the Athens airport for years.

A young man marries a girl but they have no place for their wedding night.

He asks: Where can I make love to her?

We laugh and say: This is not the right timefor that question.
The analyst says: In order to live, they die by mistake.
The literary man says: Our camp will certainly fall.

What do they want from us?

Athens airport welcomes its visitors without end.

Yet, like the benches in the terminal, we remain, impatiently waiting for

the sea.

How many more years longer, 0 Athens airport?

12
I Talk Too Much

I talk too much about the slightest nuance between women and trees,

about the earth's enchantment, about a country with no passport stamp.

I ask: Is it true, good ladies and gentlemen, that the earth of Man is for all
human beings
as you say? In that case, where is my little cottage, and where am I?
The conference audiences applaud me for another three minutes,

three minutes of freedom and recognition.

The conference approves our right of return,

like all chickens and horses, to a dream made of stone.

I shake hands with them, one by one. I bow to them. Then I continue my journey

to another country and talk about the difference between a mirage and the rain.

I ask: Is it true, good ladies and gentlemen, that the earth of Man is for all

human beings?

lJ
We Have the Right to Love Autumn

And we, too, have the right to love the last days of autumn and ask:
Is there room in the field for a new autumn, so we may lie down like coals?
An autumn that blights its leaves with gold.
If only we were leaves on a fig tree, or even neglected meadow plants
that we may observe the seasons change!
If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals
and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife point. May poetry and
God's name have mercy on us!
We have the right to warm the nights of beautiful women, and talk about
what might shorten the night of two strangers waiting for the North to reach
the compass.
It's autumn. We have the right to smell autumn's fragrances and ask the night
for a dream.
Does the dream, like the dreamers themselves, sicken? Autumn. Autumn.
Can a people be born on a guillotine?
We have the right to die any way we wish .
May the earth hide itself away in an ear of wheat!

14
The Last Train Has Stopped

The last train has stopped at the last platform. No one is there
to save the roses, no doves to alight on a woman made of words.
Time has ended. The ode fares no better than the foam.
Don't put faith in our trains, love. Don't wait for anyone in the crowd.
The last train has stopped at the last platform. But no one
can cast the reflection of Narcissus back on the mirrors of night.
Where c an I write my latest account o f the body's incarnation?
It's the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends?
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
Don't put faith in our trains, love. The last dove flew away.
The last train has stopped at the last platform. And no one was there.

15
On the Slope, Higher Than the Sea, They Slept

On the slope, higher than the sea, higher than the cypresses, they slept.
The iron sky erased their memories, and the dove flew away
in the direction of their pointing fingers, east of their torn bodies.
Weren't they entitled to throw the basil of their names on the moon in the water?
And plant bitter orange trees in the ditches to dispel the darkness?

They sleep beyond the limits of space, on a slope where words turn to stone.
They sleep on a stone carved from the bones of their phoenix.
Our heart can celebrate their feast in nearly no time.
Our heart can steal a place for doves to return to earth's bedrock.
0 kin sleeping within me, at the ends of the earth: peace be unto you! Peace.
He Embraces His Murderer

He embraces his murderer. May he win his heart: Do you feel angrier if
I survive?

Brother . . . My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?

Two birds fly overhead. Why don't you shoot upward? What do you say?
You grew tired of my embrace and my smell . Aren't you just as tired of the
fear within me?
Then throw your gun in the river! What do you say?
The enemy on the riverbank aims his machine gun at an embrace? Shoot
the enemy!
Thus we avoid the enemy's bullets and keep from falling into sin.
What do you say? You'll kill me so the enemy can go home to our home
and descend again into the law of the jungle?
What did you do with my mother's coffee, with your mother's coffee?
What crime did I commit to make you destroy me?
I will never cease embracing you .

And I w i l l never release you .

17
Winds Shift against Us

Winds shift against us. The southern wind blows with our enemies.
The passage narrows.
We flash victory signs in the darkness, so the darkness may glitter.
We fly as if riding the trees of a dream. 0 ends of the earth! 0 difficult
dream! Will you go on?
For the thousandth time we write on the last breath of air. We die so they do
not prevail !
We r u n after the echo of our voices. May w e find a moon there.
We sing for the rocks. May the rocks be startled.
We engrave our bodies with iron for a river to billow up.
Winds shift against us. North wind with southern wind, and we shout:
Where can we settle?
We ask mythical women for relatives who would rather see us dead.
An eagle settles on our bodies, and we chase after dreams. May we find them.
They soar behind us to find us here. There is no escape!

We live our death. This half-death is our triumph .

18
Neighing on the Slope

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.

I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.
She says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Downward or upward.

Does a woman in her thirties need a homeland to put a picture in a frame?

Can I reach the summit of this rugged mountain? The slope is either an
abyss or a place of siege.
Midway it divides. What a journey! Martyrs killing one another.
I prepare my portrait for my woman. When a new horse neighs in you, tear it up.

Horses' neighing on the slope. Upward, or upward.

19
Other Barbarians Will Come

Other barbarians will come. The emperor's wife will be abducted. Drums
will beat loudly. Drums will beat so that horses will leap over human bodies
from the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles. So why should we be concerned?
What do our wives have to do with horse racing?

The emperor's wife will be abducted. Drums will beat loudly and other
barbarians will come. Barbarians will fill the cities' emptiness, slightly
higher than the sea, mightier than the sword in a time of madness. So why
should we be concerned? What do our children have to do with the children
of this impudence?

Drums will beat loudly and other barbarians will come. The emperor's wife
will be taken from his bedroom. From his bedroom he will launch a military
assault to return his bedmate to his bed . Why should we be concerned?
What do fifty thousand victims have to do with this brief marriage?

Can Homer be born after us . . . and myths open their doors to the throng?

20
They Would Love to See Me Dead

They would love to see me dead, to say: He belongs to us, he is ours.

For twenty years I have heard their footsteps on the walls of the night.
They open no door, yet here they are now. I see three of them:
a poet, a killer, and a reader of books.
Will you have some wine? I asked.
Yes, they answered.
When do you plan to shoot me? I asked.
Take it easy, they answered.
They lined up their glasses all in a row and started singing for the people.
I asked: When will you begin my assassination?
Already done, they said . . . Why did you send your shoes on ahead to your soul?
So it can wander the face of the earth, I said.
The earth is wickedly dark, so why is your poem so white?
Because my heart is teeming with thirty seas, I answered.
They asked: Why do you love French wine?
Because I ought to love the most beautiful women, I answered.
They asked: How would you like your death?
Blue, like stars pouring from a window-would you like more wine?
Yes, we'll drink, they said.
Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last
poem to my heart's wife. They laughed, and took from me
only the words dedicated to my heart's wife.
22
When the Martyrs Go to Sleep

When the martyrs go to sleep, I wake to protect them from professional

mourners.
I say: Have a good morning at home, a home ofclouds and trees, a mirage
ofwater.
I congratulate them on their safety from injury, and the generosity of

the slaughterhouse.
I take time so they can take me from time. Are we all martyrs?
I whisper: Friends, at least save us one wallfor our laundry lines, and one

night for songs.

I hang your names wherever you wish, so go to sleep. Sleep on the trellis of
that sour vine.
I protect your dreams from your guards' knives, from the revolt
of the scriptures themselves against the prophets.
When you go to sleep tonight, be a song for those who have no songs.
I say: Have a good morning, a home carried on the back of a wild horse.
Then I whisper: Friends, never be like us, a gallows in disguise.

22
The Night There

The n ight there is pitch black . . . and roses are fewer.

The road will fork even more than before. The valley will split open
and the slope will collapse on us. The wound opens wide. Relatives flee.
Victims kill each other to erase their victi ms' sight and find relief.
We'll know more than we knew before. One abyss will lead to another.
When we embrace an idea worshipped by tribes and branded on their
vanishing bodies,
we'll witness emperors engraving their names on grains of wheat to show
their power.
Aren't we changed? Men follow the teachings of the sword
and spil l blood. Let the sand pile up.
Women who believe i n what's between their thighs follow the teachings of
lewdness.
Let the shadow shrink.

Yet, I will fol low the path of the song, even though my roses are fewer.

23
We Went to Aden

We went to Aden ahead of our dreams. The moon was shining

on the wing of a crow. We gazed at the sea.
For whom does the sea toll these bells? To let us hear our own rhythms?

We went to Aden in advance of our history. The Yemen was mourning

l mru' al-Qays, erasing images and chewing the qat leaves.
Didn't you realize, friend, that we were following the Caesar of our time?

We went to the poverty-stricken paradise of the fakirs so as to open windows

in the rocks.
We are besieged by tribes, friend, stricken by misfortunes.
Yet we didn't trade the bread of the trees for the enemy's loaf.

Aren't we still entitled to believe in our dreams and to doubt this homeland?

24
Another Damascus in Damascus

Another Damascus in Damascus, an eternal one .

I was unfair to you , friend, when you criticized my m igration to a heartbeat.
Now it's my right, now after my return, to ask you in friendship:
Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?
Why did you raise up my slopes even higher
so that my horses mayfall on me?
I had hoped to carry you to the gushing spring
of the ode, to the ends of the earth. What a beauty you are !
What a beauty is Damascus if it were not for my wounds.
So let one half of your heart, friend, join one half of mine.
Let u s create a strong and farseeing heart for her, for me, for you .
For another Damascu s t o mirror my soul i n Damascus.

25
The Flute Cried

The flute cried. If only I could go to Damascus as an echo.

Silk weeps on the shores and passes through a sobbing cry.
Landscapes fill with tears. The flute cried and tore the sky into two women.
It divided the road and broke the heart of the sand grouse.
It divided us so we'd fall in love. 0 flute, we plea for mercy!
We are not as distant as the sunset. Are you crying out so as to cry in vain,
or to crush the mountain as well as Adam and Eve's apple? 0 shout of
infinite silence, cry: Damascus, my woman, I will love and I will survive.

The flute cried. If only I could go to Damascus as an echo.

I even believe in what I don't believe. Silky tears burn away our breath.
The flute cried. If only I could cry like the flute, then I would know Damascus.

26
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Temptress (La
tierra de todos)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Temptress (La tierra de todos)

Author: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Translator: Leo Ongley

Release date: November 6, 2020 [eBook #63649]

Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TEMPTRESS

(LA TIERRA DE TODOS) ***
 CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI,
VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII,
XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX,
XX.

THE TEMPTRESS

WORKS OF
VICENTE BLASCO
IBAÑEZ

Novels
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF
THE APOCALYPSE
MARE NOSTRUM (Our
Sea)
BLOOD AND SAND
THE SHADOW OF THE
CATHEDRAL
THE ENEMIES OF WOMEN
WOMAN TRIUMPHANT
(La Maja Desnuda)
LA BODEGA (The Fruit of
the Vine)
THE MAYFLOWER
THE TORRENT (Entre
Naranjos)
THE TEMPTRESS (La
Tierra de Todos)
Other Works
IN THE LAND OF ART
An unconventional tour of
Italy and its treasures of art,
architecture and scenery.
MEXICO IN REVOLUTION
Acute and brilliant chapters
on Mexican affairs as seen by
the author while on the spot.
E. P. DUTTON &
COMPANY

THE TEMPTRESS
(LA TIERRA DE TODOS)

BY
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY

LEO ONGLEY

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1923

By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

First Printing, July, 1923
Second Printing, July, 1923
Third Printing, July, 1923
Fourth Printing, July, 1923
Fifth Printing, July, 1923
Sixth Printing, July, 1923
Seventh Printing, July, 1923
Eighth Printing, July, 1923
Ninth Printing, July, 1923
Tenth Printing, July, 1923
 Eleventh Printing, July, 1923
Twelfth Printing, July, 1923
Thirteenth Printing, Jury, 1923
Fourteenth Printing, July, 1923
Fifteenth Printing, July, 1923
Sixteenth Printing, July, 1923
PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

THE TEMPTRESS
 CHAPTER I

A S usual the Marquis de Torre Bianca got up late. Leaving the security
of his bedroom, he cast an uneasy glance at the letters and newspapers
waiting for him on a silver salver in the library. Some of the postmarks
were foreign. At sight of these he breathed a sigh of relief. That much
respite at least.... But some of the letters were from Paris; and at these he
frowned. He knew what they would be like. They would be long and full of
unpleasant allusions, to say nothing of reproaches and threats.... He noted
uncomfortably the addresses printed on some of the envelopes, and at their
names, his creditors appeared before him, an indignant and vociferous
crowd.... Alas! He knew what was in those letters.
If they had only been addressed to his wife! She received letters like that
with the utmost serenity, as though debts and clamorous creditors were her
native element—“The Fair Elena” her friends called her, acknowledging a
beauty which couldn’t be denied, but which her women friends liked to
allude to as “historic”—it had lasted so long. The Marquis, however, had a
more antiquated conception of honor than the historically fair Elena. He
went so far as to believe that it is better not to contract debts if there is no
possibility of paying them.
Fearful lest the servant should find him still dubiously eyeing his mail,
the Marquis began opening his letters.... After all, they were not so bad!
One was from the firm which had sold the Marquise her most recently
acquired automobile. Of the ten installments to be paid, it had collected
only two.... And there were numerous other letters from shops that supplied
the Marquise with her needs. From her establishment near the Place
Vendome her debts had reached out and permeated the neighborhood. The
maintenance, to say nothing of the comfort, of the establishment,
necessitated the services of innumerable tradespeople.
The servants had just as good a reason to write him letters as the
tradespeople. But instead they relied upon the worldly arts of the Marquise
to provide them with a means of compensating themselves for long unpaid
services. So they expressed their disgust by a reluctant and unbending
attitude in the discharge of their duties.
 The Marquis was wont, when he had finished the perusal of his morning
mail, to look about him with something very like alarm. There was his
Elena, giving parties and going to all the most distinguished festivities in
Paris; occupying the most desirable apartment of an elegant house on a
fashionable street, keeping a luxurious automobile, and never less than five
servants. By what mysterious adjustments and manoeuvres could his wife
and he keep up this manner of life? Every day there were new debts; every
day they required more money for perpetually increasing expenses.
Whatever funds he had disappeared like a river in the sand. And yet Elena
seemed to consider this manner of living reasonable and proper, just as
though it were that of all her friends....
At this point the Marquis caught sight of a letter he had overlooked, a
letter bearing an Italian postmark.
“From Mother,” he said.
As he read it his expression lightened. He even smiled. Yet this letter too
had complaints to make. But they were gentle, resigned.
The echoes of his mother’s voice, awakened in his memory by her
words, called up before him the old white palace of the Torre Biancas, one
of the monuments of his distant Tuscany. Huge, in ruins now, surrounded by
gardens of the past, with vast halls whose floors were tiled, and whose
ceilings were gay with paintings of mythological scenes, it had long
contained a wealth of famous paintings that hung on its bare walls, marking
out their squares and rectangles in the dust gathering for centuries on the
slowly crumbling plaster.
But the pictures and the priceless bits of statuary had already vanished
from their places when the Marquis’ father took possession of his ancestral
halls. His only resource for an income lay in the archives of the Torre
Biancas. Autographs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other Florentines
who had had correspondence with his ancestors, paid the expenses of one
generation....
Around the palace the gardens of three centuries stretched out their
marble steps, and balustrades crumbling under the weight of matted rose
vines, to the Tuscan sun. Mosses and vines crept into the cracks of the
stone, tracing out their patterns with supreme indifference to the decay their
presence caused. On the driveways the ancient box, cut back to form wide
walls and deep triumphal arches, looked as black as the ruins of a burnt city.
It was so long now since the gardens had received any care that they were
beginning to look like a flowering forest. The paths at the step of infrequent
visitors sent out melancholy echoes which startled the birds like the shot of
an arrow, disturbed swarms of insects floating under the outspreading
branches, startled the little snakes crawling among the tree trunks.
Wearing the clothes of a simple peasant, and served only by a little
country girl, the Marquis’ mother lived alone in these vast halls and
gardens, accompanied by thoughts of her son, preoccupied with the
problem he presented. How was she to provide money for him?
The only visitors at the palace were dealers in antiques to whom she sold
one by one the remnants of a splendor already pillaged by those who had
preceded her at Torre Bianca. But she must send several thousand lire to
that last member of the noble line, who was playing a part worthy of his
title in London, Paris, and all the great cities of the world. And convinced
that fortune, so mindful of the first Torre Biancas, would finally remember
her son, she reduced her own needs to the barest necessities, ate peasant’s
food served to her on a rough pine table, in one of those marble rooms in
which nothing now remained that could be sold.
Touched, as always, by her letter, the Marquis was murmuring softly to
himself, “Mother! Mother!” He read again—
“I didn’t know what to do, Federico, after sending you the money you
last received from me. If you could see the house in which you were born,
my son, I wonder what you would say? No one will offer me more than a
twentieth part of its value. But, until some foreigner who really wants to
buy it comes along, I am willing to sell the floors, and even those wonderful
old ceilings, the only things left now that have any market value. Anything
to get you out of your difficulties, to prevent the slightest reproach from
attaching to your name. I can live on very little, perhaps even less than I
allow myself now. But isn’t it at the same time possible for you and Elena
to reduce your expenses a little without Elena’s giving up in any way the
position that being your wife entitles her to? Your wife is rich! Can’t she
help you to keep up your establishment?”
The Marquis paused. The simple way in which his mother expressed her
anxieties hurt him; and her illusions about Elena stabbed him like remorse.
She believed Elena to be rich! She believed that he could induce his wife to
live economically and simply ... hadn’t he tried to at the beginning of their
marriage ...?
Elena’s arrival cut short his reflections. It was already past eleven, and
she was going out to take her daily drive in the Bois. She liked to begin the
day with this open air review of her acquaintances.
The somewhat ostentatious elegance of her dress suited her kind of
beauty. Although between thirty and forty, frequent fasts and eternal
vigilance still preserved her slenderness, which was enhanced by her height;
and the care she took of her person kept her in what might be called that
“third youth” which the women of our great modern cities enjoy.
It was only when she was absent that Torre Bianca was aware of her
faults. As soon as she stepped into the room, his admiration of her took
complete possession of him, making him accede blindly to whatever she
might ask.
She greeted him now with a smile, to which he responded. Putting her
arms about his shoulders she kissed him, and began talking to him with a
childish lisp, which, well he knew, presaged a request. And yet this trick of
hers had never lost its power to stir him, subduing his will.
“Good morning, Bunny! I got up so late this morning, and I have a
thousand things to do before going out, but I couldn’t go without seeing my
darling little Rabbit.... Give me another kiss, and I’m off!”
Smiling humbly, with an air of submissive gratitude like that of a faithful
dog, the Marquis allowed himself to be petted. Elena finally tore herself
away, but before she had quite reached the library door she suddenly
remembered something important and stopped short.
“Have you some money?”
The Marquis’ smile vanished. His eyes put the question:
“How much do you want?”
“Oh, not so much. About eight thousand francs.”
Elena’s tailor, one on the Rue de la Paix, needless to say, had suddenly
stopped being as respectful as Elena thought he should be—his bill was
only three years old!—and he had threatened court proceedings.
At her husband’s gesture when she mentioned this sum, Elena’s childlike
smile vanished; but she still used her little girl’s lisp to complain.
 “You say that you love me, Federico, and you refuse to give me this little
bit of money....”
“There are some of the letters and claims of our creditors....” The
Marquis pointed to the heap on the table.
Elena smiled once more, but this time there was something cruel about
the curl of her lips.
“I can show you a great many documents as interesting as those. But you
are a man, and men are supposed to provide money in their homes so that
their wives needn’t suffer.... How am I to pay my debts if you don’t help
me?”
He looked at her with something like fear in his eyes.
“I have given you such a lot of money! But everything that falls into
your hands vanishes like smoke.”
Elena’s voice was hard as she replied:
“You aren’t going to pretend that a woman of my position, or of my
appearance—since people will mention it—should live in a shabby sort of
way? When a man’s vanity gets so much satisfaction out of having a wife
like me, he ought to bring home money by the million.”
It was the Marquis’s turn to be offended, and Elena, aware of the effect
of her words, suddenly changed her manner, smiled, and came close enough
to be able to put her hands on Federico’s shoulders.
“Why don’t you write to the old lady, Federico? Perhaps she can send us
some money, she can sell an heirloom or something....”
The tone of these words only added to her husband’s irritation.
“The person you mention is my mother, and I wish you would speak of
her as such. As to money, she can’t send us any more.”
Elena looked at her husband with a certain contempt, saying at the same
time, as though to herself:
“This will teach me to fall in love with paupers.... Well, if you can’t get
me this money, I’ll get it!”
As she spoke an expression so significant flickered over her face that her
husband sprang from his chair.
“You had better explain what you mean,” he began, frowning. But he
could not go on. The Marquise’s expression had completely changed. She
broke out into bursts of childish laughter, and clapped her hands.
“At last, my Bunny is really angry. And he thought his wife meant
something bad.... But don’t you know that I love no one but you? Really, no
one else....”
She caught him by the arm, and kissed him repeatedly, in spite of his
attempts to make her stop her caresses. And he ended by yielding to them
and assuming once more his humble suitor attitude.
Elena was warning him now with upraised finger.
“Come, smile a little, don’t be naughty.... But isn’t there really any
money? Do you mean it?”
The Marquis shook his head. Then he looked ashamed of his
powerlessness.
“But I love you just as much,” she said. “Let the old debts wait! I’ll find
a way out—I have before.... Good-bye Federico!”
And she walked backwards towards the door, throwing him kisses; but
once on the other side of the hangings her expression of youthful
lightheartedness vanished. Her lips were twisted with scorn and a look of
frantic ferocity glittered in her eyes.
Her husband too, when he was alone, lost the momentary happiness
Elena’s caresses had afforded him. There lay those letters, and his mother’s
appeal.... He sat at the table, his face in his hands. All his anxieties had
swooped down upon him, he could scarcely breathe in the thick swarm.
Always, at such moments, Torre Bianca called up memories of his youth
as though they could offer him a remedy for present troubles. The happiest
time in his life had been that period when he had been a student in the
Engineering School at Lièges. Eager to restore the fallen splendor of his
house, he had thrown himself into his preparations for a modern career, in
order to set out on the conquest of money, just as his remote ancestors had
done. Before royalty had bestowed a title upon them, they had been
Florentine merchants, like the Medicis, travelling even to the Orient in their
pursuit of fortune. Federico de Torre Bianca wanted to be an engineer for
the same reason that all the other youths of his generation did, in order to
make Italy, once famous for her art, an important modern nation because of
her industries.
 As he recalled his student life the first image that arose was that of
Manuel Robledo, his friend and classmate. Manuel was a Spanish youth
whose frank and happy disposition made it possible for him to meet daily
problems with quiet energy. For several years he had played the part of
older brother to the distinguished young Italian, and Torre Bianca never
failed to think of his friend in difficult moments.
He was such a good fellow! Not even his successive love affairs could
destroy his serenity. He had the poise of a mature man, perhaps because the
important interests of his life were good eating and the guitar....
Torre Bianca, who was endowed with a fatal facility for falling in love,
went about in those days with one of the pretty girls of Liège, and Robledo,
out of good fellowship, feigned an absorbing interest in one of her friends.
As a matter of fact he was always much more attentive to the culinary
activities of their parties than to the not very insistent claims of sentiment.
Yet Bianca had come to discern through this somewhat noisy and
unquestionably materialistic joviality of his friend a certain leaning towards
the romantic which Robledo tried manfully to hide, as though it were a
shameful weakness. Perhaps, in his country, there had been some
experience.... So often, at night, the Italian boy, stretched on his dormitory
bed, heard the guitar softly moaning as Robledo hummed the lovesongs of
his far-away homeland.... Their course over, the friends had parted,
expecting to meet as usual the following year; but that meeting had never
occurred. While Torre Bianca remained in Europe, Robledo roved about
through South America, for the most part in his capacity as engineer, but
now and then he went through an extraordinary transformation, as though
his Spanish blood made it imperative that some of the old Conquistadores
should live in him once more.
At rare intervals he wrote to Torre, but his letters contained more
illusions to the past than to the present. Yet somehow, in spite of his discreet
reticence, Torre Bianca gathered that his chum had become a general in one
of the small republics of Central America.
It was two years now since he had heard from Robledo, whose last letter
announced that he was employed in Argentine, having had enough, for the
time being, of those countries still continually shaken by revolution. He was
contracting for the government as well as for private undertakings, and
constructing canals and railroads; and through all the discomforts of the
rough life he led, the belief that he was helping the advance guard of
civilization to cross one of the earth’s desert places, gave him intimate
satisfaction and happiness.
Torre had among his papers a photograph of his friend in which Robledo
appeared on horseback, wearing an African helmet and a poncho that fell
over his shoulders. Several half-breeds were planting linesman’s flags on
the mesa which, for the first time since creation, was to receive the imprint
of material civilization. Robledo, who was of the same age as himself, must
have been thirty-seven when the photograph was taken; yet he looked many
years younger than Torre Bianca did at forty.
His life of adventure had not let him grow old. Although he was heavier
than in his student days, the smooth face that smiled serenely out of the
photograph indicated perfect physical condition.
Torre Bianca, on the other hand, was of a much slighter build, and thanks
to his fondness for sports, and especially fencing, he preserved a more than
youthful agility. But his face was lined and drawn. There were furrows
between his eyebrows, and the hair above his temples was already streaked
with white, while the corners of his mouth, but slightly hidden by a short
mustache, drooped with what might be lassitude, or what might be
weakness of will. And Torre Bianca, struck by Robledo’s physical
robustness, was encouraged by his photograph to go on thinking of him as
competent to guide and help him, just as he had done in the early days....
As he thought of his friend that morning in the midst of his anxieties, he
said to himself:
“I wish I had him here! His strong man’s strong will would strengthen
mine....”
The butler interrupted his meditation. A caller ... but he would not give
his name.... Torre Bianca made a determined effort to conceal his nervous
dread from the servant. Was it perhaps one of his wife’s creditors trying by
this means to reach him?
“He seems a foreigner, sir. He says he’s a relative....”
The Marquis had a presentiment, but he smiled at it. It was absurd.... Yet
it would be like Robledo to turn up in this fashion, as if he were a character
in a play, coming in just when the action requires his appearance. But how
unlikely that Robledo, who when last heard from was in another
hemisphere, should be on hand to take up his cue like an actor waiting in
the wings! No, life doesn’t provide such neat coincidences ... only books....
He would not see his caller, he told the servant in no uncertain terms. At
that moment some one lifted the door-hangings and to the butler’s
consternation stepped into the room. The caller had grown tired of waiting.
The Marquis, who was easily roused, went threateningly towards the
intruder. His arms outstretched, the latter cried:
“You don’t know me—I’ll bet you don’t!”
Clean-shaven, his skin tanned and reddened by sun and cold, he didn’t
look like the Robledo of the photograph. And yet ... there was something
familiarly distinctive about him, something Torre Bianca recognized as
having once formed a part of his own life.... Something in the vigorous
curve of the shoulders, something about his energetic robustness.
“Robledo!”
The friends embraced; and the servant, convinced now that his presence
was superfluous, left the room.
As they smoked and talked, Robledo and Torre Bianca looked at one
another with eager interest, putting out a hand now and then to assure
themselves that the long absent friend was really there.
It was the Marquis who betrayed the greater curiosity.
“Will you be able to stay long in Paris?” he inquired.
“Oh, just a few months....”
He felt the need, he added, of a long draught of civilization, after
spending ten years in American deserts, absorbed in the strenuous task of
building roads, railroads and canals across their wide extent.
“I want to find out if the Paris restaurants still deserve their reputation,
and see if the French wines are as good as they used to be. And I haven’t
had any fromage de Brie for years—no other country in the world can make
it—and I’m hungry for some!”
The Marquis laughed. The same old Robledo, ready to go three thousand
miles to have a meal in Paris! And then, with great interest, he inquired:
“Are you rich?”
“Poor as ever,” was Robledo’s prompt reply. “But I’m alone in the
world, I’m not married—there’s nothing so expensive as a wife—so, for a
few months I’ll be able to spend money like a regular American millionaire.
I have the money I’ve been earning all this time, I couldn’t spend it in the
desert.”
He turned to look about him at the luxurious furnishings of his friend’s
home.
“You’re the fellow that’s rich, I see!”
The Marquis’s only reply was an enigmatical smile; but Robledo’s words
awakened his worries.
“Tell me about what you have been doing,” the engineer urged. “You
never sent me much news of yourself. Some of your letters must have been
lost, although wherever I went, up to recently, I always established a good
many connections. Yes, I know a little about you. I believe you got married
a few years ago.”
Torre Bianca nodded, and said gravely,
“I married a Russian lady, the wife of a high government official of the
Czar’s court. I met her in London. We met frequently at balls and country
houses ... and finally we married. We make a few pretensions to elegance—
but it’s damned expensive!”
He paused for a moment, as though he wanted to learn what impression
this summary of his life made upon Robledo. But the latter, eager to learn
more, wisely kept silence.
“You, my dear Robledo, leading the simple life of primitive man, are
lucky enough not to know what it costs to live in our civilization. I’ve
worked like a dog just to keep things going—and even at that! And my poor
old mother helps me with whatever she can get out of our family ruins.”
Then Bianca seemed to repent of the note of complaint in what he was
saying; and with an optimism which, a half hour ago, he would have
considered absurd, he smiled, and went on,
“Really I ought not to complain. There is a friendship that means a great
deal in my life. Do you know the banker Fontenoy? You may have heard of
him; he has business all over the world.”
Robledo shook his head. No, he had never heard that name.
“He is an old friend of my wife’s family. Thanks to Fontenoy, I became a
while ago the director of some development projects in foreign countries,
for which I get a salary that would have seemed to me magnificent a few
years ago.”
Robledo expressed his professional curiosity. “Improvements in foreign
countries!” Of course the engineer wanted to know more about that, and
asked some very definite questions. But Torre betrayed a certain uneasiness
in his replies. He stammered, and his sallow cheeks reddened slightly.
“Enterprises in Asia and in Africa—gold mines, and a railroad in China
—a shipping company formed to handle the rice products of Tonkin, and—
as a matter of fact, I’m not up on the scheme as a whole. I’ve never had
time for the trip, and then, too, I can’t leave my wife—But Fontenoy, who
has a great head of business, has been to all these places, and I have the
greatest confidence in him. As a matter of fact, my job is just a matter of
signing reports made by the experts Fontenoy sends out there to satisfy
share-holders.”
Robledo could not conceal a certain astonishment at these words. Torre,
aware of his friend’s wonderment, changed the subject. He began talking of
his wife in a tone which indicated that he thought it one of the achievements
of his life to have won her. He knew that Elena charmed apparently
everyone who came within the reach of her beauty. But as he had never
since his marriage felt the slightest doubt concerning her affections, he was
content to follow her meekly about, scarcely visible in the foaming wake of
her triumphant progress. As a matter of fact, everything that came his way,
invitations, generous pay for his services, a cordial reception wherever he
went, came to him, not because he was the Marquis de Torre Bianca, but
because he was Elena’s husband.
“You’ll see her in a little while. And of course you’ll have lunch with us.
You can’t refuse. I have some choice wines, and since you have come all
the way from the western hemisphere for some Brie cheese, I’ll see that you
get plenty of it.”
And then he added, in a tone that partly betrayed his emotion,
“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you are going to meet my wife.
Everyone calls her ‘la bella Elena’—but she has something so much better
than beauty! She has a disposition just like a child’s—capricious, yes,
sometimes, like a child—and she needs lots of money. But what woman
doesn’t! And I know Elena will be glad to see you—she has heard me speak
so often of my friend Robledo!”
 CHAPTER II

T HE Marquise de Torre Bianca, having come home in good humor, was

disposed to find her husband’s friend very entertaining. For the moment
she had forgotten her pressing need of money, quite as though she had
found a means of satisfying her creditors.
At lunch Robledo had a great deal to do to satisfy her curiosity about
him. She wanted to know all the thrilling episodes of his adventurous life!
Nor could she possibly believe that he wasn’t rich. How unlikely that
anyone from America—either North or South America, it didn’t matter
which—should not be rich, shouldn’t have millions! It required an effort for
the Marquise, as for most Europeans, to reason that even in the New World
there must be people who are poor.
“But I’m not rich at all,” protested Robledo. “Of course I shall try to die
a millionaire, just so as not to disillusion all the people who believe so
firmly that whoever goes to America must by that very fact make a great
fortune, so that he can leave it when he dies to his nieces and nephews in
Europe!”
He began to talk about Patagonia and his undertakings there. With his
partner, a young American from the States, whom he had met in Buenos
Aires, he had tried to colonize several thousand acres near the Rio Negro.
He had risked in this enterprise all his savings, and those of his partner, as
well as whatever sums he could persuade the banks to advance to him; but
he felt certain of the safety of the investment, and he believed that it would
be the source of a great fortune.
It was his job to transform the desert lands of this tract, purchased at a
low price because of their aridity, into irrigated fields. The Argentine
government was carrying on extensive operations in the Rio Negro region,
trying to divert some of its waters. Robledo, who had been one of the
engineers first employed to carry out this scheme, resigned, in order to
colonize the lands which he was buying up in the areas through which the
government irrigation system was sure to be extended sooner or later.
“In a few years, or even in a few months, I may strike gold,” he was
saying. “Everything depends of course on how the river behaves. If it
amiably allows itself to be divided up, and doesn’t rise suddenly, in the grip
of one of those violent convulsions which are so frequent there, and which
destroy the work of years in a few hours.... Meanwhile my partner and I
have been constructing with the strictest economy all the minor canals and
the other arteries which are to irrigate our waste lands; and on the day when
the dike is finished, and the Rio Negro waters flow outward into our desert
property....”
Robledo stopped short, smiling.
“Then,” he went on, “I shall be a millionaire in regular American style.
No one knows what the extent of our fortune may be. One square mile of
irrigated land is worth several millions, and I own several square miles.”
Elena was listening breathlessly. But Robledo, as if made uneasy by the
admiring glance Elena’s green gold eyes shot at him, hastened to add:
“On the other hand these millions may not come for many years! They
may not arrive until I am at death’s door, and then my sister’s children, here
in Spain, will have a good time with the money I’ve worked and sweated
for in America....”
But Elena wanted to hear about his life in the Patagonian wilds, that
immense plain swept in winter by freezing hurricanes that raise towering
columns of dust, and whose sole inhabitants are bands of ostriches, and
straying pumas, that sometimes, under stress of hunger, risk attacking a
solitary explorer.
Human population had in earlier times been represented there by scanty
bands of Indians who scratched a bare living out of the river banks, and by
fugitives from Chile and the Argentine, driven through these desolate
regions by fear, either of the victims of their crimes, or of the law.
Gradually the small forts put up by the government for the troops sent from
Buenos Aires to take possession of the Patagonian desert, were slowly
converted into little villages, scattered about at distances of hundreds of
kilometres through these wild and arid lands.
It was in one of these villages that Robledo lived, slowly transforming
his workmen’s camp into a town which would become, perhaps before the
end of half a century, a flourishing city. America is rich in such
transformations.
Elena was listening delightedly, with the same pleasure she would have
felt at the theatre or cinema in watching an interesting story unfold.
 “That’s what I call living,” she exclaimed. “That kind of life is worthy of
a real man!”
She turned her gold-flecked eyes away from Robledo to look at her
husband almost pityingly, as if he represented all the weaknesses of a soft
civilization which she hated—for the moment!
“And that’s the way to make money,” she went on. “Really the only men
worth considering are those who win wars, or those who win fortunes! Even
though I am a woman, I’d love a life so full of danger....”
Robledo, to protect his host from the implications of the enthusiasm she
was rather aggressively expressing, began to talk about the less glowing
aspects of pioneering; whereupon the Marquise admitted that her
enthusiasm for a life of adventure was somewhat chilled, and ended by
confessing that she really preferred the ease and elegance of her Paris.
“But how I wish,” she added, “that my husband liked that sort of thing!
Conquering, by sheer force of will, some of the vast riches of this earth....
He would come to see me every year, I would think of him all the time he
was away, and even join him out there for a few months! It would be so
much more exciting than this life of ours in Paris—and then, at the end of a
few years, there would be riches, real wealth, immense wealth, like that you
read about, and that you so rarely see in our Old World.”
She paused a moment, then added gravely, looking at Robledo,
“You, for instance, don’t care so much for money. What you want is
adventure, life, activity. You like to use your strength. You don’t really
know what money means. Men like you don’t need much for themselves.
Only a woman can teach men what money is worth in this world!”
She turned to look at Torre Bianca, adding,
“And yet the men who have a woman to take care of never have the
forcefulness, somehow, to accomplish things the way men do when they are
alone in the world....”
Robledo, after this first luncheon at his friend’s house, became a frequent
visitor at the Torre Biancas, dropping in as informally as though he really
were a member of his host’s family.
“Elena likes you very much, really likes you, my dear fellow,” Torre
assured him; and he looked immensely relieved. It would have been so
difficult if he had had to choose between his wife and his friend, as he
would have had to do in case they hadn’t hit it off!
Robledo, for his part, was somewhat disconcerted by Elena. When she
was present he yielded to the charm of her person, to the peculiar seductive
quality that enhanced her beauty. She always treated him with a gracious
familiarity, quite as though he really were her husband’s brother, and took
charge of initiating him in Paris society, giving him plenty of advice and
information so as to prevent his being taken in by those disposed to see an
advantage for themselves in his being a foreigner, and accompanying him to
the fashionable resorts of the city, either at teatime or at night, after dinner.
Her mischievous and childlike expression, her imperturbable way of
looking at him, the childish lisp with which she pronounced certain words,
all had a certain fascination for the engineer.
“She’s a child,” he told himself. “Her husband is right about that. She
has all the tricks of the dolls that society turns out—and she must be
fearfully expensive! But, underneath all this, there is probably a very simple
woman....”
When he was not with her, however, he was less optimistic about his
friend’s wife, and smiled somewhat ironically at the latter’s credulity. Who
was this woman? Where had Torre met her?
He knew concerning her only what his friend had told him. As to that
distinguished functionary of the Czar’s court, her deceased husband, it was
difficult to gather just what the nature of his services had been, perhaps
because they had been so numerous! He had, it seemed, been Grand
Marshal of the court; then again, he had been merely a general. But when it
came to remarkable ancestry, no one could surpass Elena’s father. Torre
Bianca delighted to repeat his wife’s statements concerning a host of
personages of the Russian court, many of them great ladies, who had added
the glory of a love affair with the Emperor to their other distinctions—yes,
all these celebrities were relatives of Elena’s. He had never seen any of
them because they had died a long time ago, or else they lived on their
estates way off in Siberia somewhere.
Some of Elena’s allusions puzzled Robledo. She had never, so she told
him, been in America, yet, one afternoon as they sipped their tea at the Ritz,
she mentioned a trip through San Francisco when she was a little girl. On
other occasions she would mention places in remote parts of the world, or
persons well known in contemporary society as though she knew them
intimately; and he never succeeded in finding out how many languages she
knew.
“I speak everything!” had been her answer when Robledo asked her one
day how many languages she could use. And her anecdotes made him
wonder.... She had always “heard So-and-So tell this joke;” yet the engineer
had his doubts about the real source of her rather daring stories.
“Where hasn’t this woman been?” he thought to himself. “Apparently
she has lived a thousand lives in a few years. Can all this have happened
when she was the wife of that Russian personage?”
His attempts to sound his friend on the subject of the Marquise had only
one result. They showed that Torre’s confidence in his wife hedged him
round like a thick wall of credulity. It was impossible to scale this wall or
make the slightest breach in it. He would never discover the truth about
Elena from her husband. But he did learn that since the day he had met her
in London Torre knew nothing about his wife beyond what she herself had
told him.
Of course, when he married her Federico must have seen some of the
papers required for the civil ceremony.... But no, apparently he had not. The
marriage had taken place in London, and had come off as rapidly as a film
wedding. All that was needed was a minister to read the prayer book, a few
witnesses, and some passports and papers, probably lent for the occasion.
But after awhile Robledo grew ashamed of his suspicions. Federico
seemed happy and proud of his marriage. That gave his friend little right to
interfere.... Besides, his suspicions might very well be due to the fact that he
had lived too long in the woods. He had not yet adjusted himself to the
complexities of life in Paris.
Elena was a woman of elegance, a woman of the kind he had never
known before. It was his classmate’s marriage which made this unexpected
friendship possible. And it was very natural that he should find in this new
society things that seemed startling or even shocking. It had already
happened to him on several occasions to consider as perfectly natural things
that a few minutes earlier had seemed to him quite improper. Undoubtedly
it was his lack of social experience that made him so suspicious.... And
then, at a smile from Elena, at a caressing glance of her gold-flecked green
eyes, he would express a trust and an admiration in no degree inferior to her
husband’s.
Robledo was living near the Boulevard des Italiens in an old house
which he had admired on one of his early visits to Paris. Then it had seemed
to him the nearest approach to Paradise that an earthly building could make.
Now however, he left it frequently to dine with Torre Bianca and his wife.
Sometimes he was their guest in their luxurious home. Sometimes he
played the host at some famous Paris restaurant.
Elena was pleased to have him come to the numerous teas she gave, so
she could show him off to her friends. She took childish delight in opposing
the wishes of the “Patagonian bear,” as she liked to call him, regardless of
the fact that he always declared there were no bears to be found in the part
of the world she attributed him to. He detested these occasions and Elena
shamelessly resorted to ruses in order to get him to come.
Little by little he met all the friends of the house who usually appeared at
the formal dinners given by the Torre Biancas. Elena invariably presented
him, not as an engineer whose enterprises were in their first and most
precarious stages, but as one whose work was already a success, and who
had returned from America well provided with millions. She took care
however to impart this misinformation behind his back, and Robledo was
somewhat at a loss to understand the profound respect with which he was
treated, and the sympathetic attention with which his friends’ guests turned
to listen to him whenever he offered a remark.
The most important guests were several deputies and journalists, friends
of the banker Fontenoy. The latter was a man of middle age, clean-shaven,
entirely bald, who affected the dress and manners of an American business
man.
Robledo, as he looked at him, was reminded of an occasion long ago in
Buenos Aires when a note was to fall due the following day, and he had not
yet been able to raise the money to meet it. Fontenoy looked exactly like the
popular idea of the successful man of affairs who is directing business
enterprises in every quarter of the globe. Everything about him seemed
calculated to inspire confidence, above all his obvious faith in his own
resourcefulness. Yet, at times, he would frown, and plunged in silence, give
the impression of being completely detached from all that surrounded him.
 “He is thinking of some new combination,” Torre Bianca would say to
his guest. “The way that man’s mind works is extraordinary!”
Yet Robledo, without quite knowing why, was again reminded of his
own anxieties and those of so many others way off there in Buenos Aires
when they had borrowed money at ninety days, and were facing the
necessity of meeting this debt on the morrow.
As he left the Torre Bianca’s one evening, Robledo started off down the
Avenue Henri Martin towards the Trocadero, where he expected to take the
subway. One of the guests accompanied him, a dubious looking person,
who sat at the last seat at table, and now seemed quite happy to be walking
along with a South American millionaire. He was a protégé of Fontenoy’s
and edited a business weekly, one of the banker’s innumerable enterprises.
A close and acid person, he seemed to expand only in those moments when
he was criticising his benefactors, which was always the moment their
backs were turned. At the end of a few yards he began to pay off his debt
toward his host and hostess by gossiping about them. He knew of course
that Robledo was a school friend of the Marquis.
“And have you known his wife a long time too?” he inquired, and smiled
meaningly when Robledo admitted that he had first made her acquaintance
a few weeks ago.
“Russian! Do you really think that she is Russian?... Of course that’s
what she says she is, just as she says her first husband was a Marshall of the
Czar’s court.... Yet a good many people can’t help wondering whether there
ever was such a husband. I don’t care to say anything about the truth of all
this. But I do know that I never have met any Russians at the noble lady’s
house.”
He paused to take breath, and added,
“Moreover, some of her supposed countrymen, people in a position to
know what they were talking about, told me that she wasn’t Russian. I’ve
been told that she’s Rumanian, by some people who claim to have seen her
when she was a girl, in Bucharest—and I have heard that she was born in
Italy, and that her parents were Poles.... Well, there you are! And it’s lucky
we don’t have to know the history of all the people who invite us to
dinner....”
Whereupon he glanced at Robledo in an attempt to discover whether he
had succeeded in whetting the Spaniard’s curiosity, and whether it would be
safe for him to go on....
“The Marquis is a good fellow enough. You must know him pretty well.
Fontenoy has given him a fairly important job. He is well aware of Torre
Bianca’s good qualities ... and....”
Robledo sensed that his escort was on the point of saying something
which it would be impossible for him to accept in silence. He called to a
passing taxi, murmured something about a forgotten engagement, and made
haste to be rid of the spiteful sycophant.
In his conversation with Torre Bianca, the latter always took up, sooner
or later, the subject that obsessed him. He needed so much money to keep
up his social position!
“You have no idea how much a wife costs, my dear fellow! Winters at
the Riviera, summers at fashionable watering places, trips to famous resorts
in the spring and fall, all that costs something....”
Robledo always received these outbursts with expressions of sympathy;
but there was an ironic note in them which exasperated Torre.
“Of course anyone who can get along without women is free to assume
that superior air of yours, my dear boy. That’s what people usually do who
know nothing about love....”
Robledo turned white, and the smile that usually played about his lips
vanished. So, he knew nothing about love.... Something stirred in his
memory....
Torre Bianca knew very little of his friend’s early experiences. The
Marquis had a vague impression that Robledo’s sweetheart had married
someone else, or maybe she had died.... Anyway something had happened,
and he suspected that Robledo had, as a consequence of it, vowed never to
marry.... Yet who would suspect that this well-fed, practical, and ironical
friend of his bore a wound that the years had not yet been able to heal?
But, as though fearful that his friend might possibly think of him as
“romantic,” Robledo hastened to smile sceptically.
“When I want women they are not hard to find ... and then I am free to
go my way. Why complicate my life by taking into it a companion I don’t
need?”
As the three friends were leaving the theatre one evening, Elena
expressed a desire to go to a certain Montmartre cabaret that was causing a
stir in Paris by the magnificence of its new decorations, in the Persian style
of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted of course to the architectural
necessities of a faubourg cabaret.
Green lights gave the effect of a sea cave to the high-ceilinged room in
which the crowd looked as livid as so many corpses, recent victims of the
hangman’s art. Two orchestras working in shifts filled the air with jerking
and broken rythms. Violins and banjos vied with indefinable instruments in
the production of disharmonies, while automobile horns, drums and
cymbals, contributed to a pandemonium in which heavy objects crashed on
the ground, rails squeaked, and the barnyard squawked.
In an open space between tables groups of dancers came and went. The
women’s dresses and hats, like rainbow-hued foam flecked with gold,
floated in and out among the black coats of the men and the white squares
of the tablecloths. The orchestras shrieked, and the guests tried hard to be as
noisy as the patrons of a country fair. Those who did not dance lassooed
everything in sight with paper trailers, threw cotton snowballs about, blew
whistles and played with other childish toys. Multicolored balloons floated
on the smoke-laden air, while men and women, as they ate and drank, wore
paper caps of ridiculous cut, baby bonnets tied on with strings, clown’s hats
and fantastic bird-crests.
A forced merriment prevailed, a desire to revert to the stammerings of
babyhood, as though this would give new incentive to the monotonous
sinnings of middle age.
Elena seemed delighted with the scene.
“There’s nothing like Paris, after all, is there Robledo?” she cried.
But Robledo, the savage, smiled with an indifference magnificently
insolent. The three ate and drank, though they were neither hungry nor
thirsty. At every table the champagne bottles appeared, nestling in their
silver pails. One might have thought them the gods of the place, in whose
honor the feast was held. And always, before one bottle was empty, another
took its place as though it had grown out of the frosty depths of the bucket.
Elena, who was looking about with a certain impatience, suddenly
smiled and waved to a man who had just come in. It was Fontenoy, who
joined them at their table.
Robledo suddenly remembered that Elena had mentioned the banker
several times while they were at the theatre. Perhaps she and the banker had
arranged this “chance” meeting at Montmartre?
But Fontenoy was saying to Torre,
“What a coincidence! I have just been dining with some business
friends, and I thought I needed something frivolous to take my mind off my
work for a little while. I might have gone to any one of a dozen other
restaurants, but I just happened to drop in here—and here you all are!”
For a moment Robledo was tempted to believe that eyes can smile
without the help of lips, such a mischievous and triumphant gleam flashed
from Elena’s. But when the champagne bottle had renewed itself three
times in its silver nest, Elena began to look enviously at the dancers. Finally
she exclaimed, like a petulant small girl,
“I’d give anything to dance, and yet none of you gives me an
opportunity!”
The Marquis got up as though at an imperial command, and husband and
wife threaded their way in and out among the other couples.
When they returned to their table, Elena was protesting with comic
indignation.
“Here I’ve come all the way to Montmartre to dance with my own
husband...!”
With an affectionate glance at Fontenoy she went on,
“Of course I wouldn’t think of expecting you to dance with me. You
don’t know how, and anyway it’s too frivolous. Some of your stockholders
might see you, and they’d be sure to lose confidence in you, if they saw you
in this sort of place.”
Turning to Robledo, she inquired,
“Don’t you dance?”
The engineer pretended to be scandalized at the suggestion. Where could
he have learned the modern steps? The only ones he knew were those of the
Chilian “cueca” that his peons always danced on pay days, or the “pericon”
and the “gato” as danced by some old gaucho to the clatter of his spurs.
“So, I shall have to sit here! That’s what happens when I go out with
three men.... I never saw anything so ridiculous!”
But, as though he had heard what she was saying, a young man came
towards their table, a young dancer whom they had often seen at well-
known dancing palaces. Torre made a gesture of annoyance. The fact that
he had heard Elena express her admiration of the dancer had been enough to
arouse his dislike.
The youth enjoyed a certain celebrity. Someone had ironically indicated
to what heights of glory he had attained by calling him “the tango-god.”
Robledo guessed from the smallness of his feet, always encased in high-
heeled shoes, and the brilliance of his thick hair, as black as Chinese laquer,
that he was a South American.
This “tango-god” who allowed his partners to pay for the dances they
had with him—or so those envious of his celebrity whispered—had no
difficulty in persuading Elena to accompany him to the dance floor.
Several times she came back to her place to rest, but in a few minutes
her eyes would begin following the dancer, and he, as though conscious of
an inaudible summons, made haste to seek her out again.
Meanwhile Torre Bianca was not concealing his disgust. Fontenoy
appeared impassive and smiled absently in those intervals Elena spent with
them. But Robledo remembered the absent-minded gestures he had
observed among people who have a promissory note soon falling due....
He looked more attentively at the banker, who seemed absorbed in the
thought of distant things. But little by little Elena’s persistence in dancing
with the young South American had induced on his face an expression of
annoyance quite as marked as her husband’s. Yet, invariably, as she passed
by in her partner’s arms, she smiled mischievously at Fontenoy, as though
his air of disgust delighted her.
Robledo, sitting between the two, thought to himself,
“To look at them it would be hard to say which one looks more like a
jealous husband than the other....”
 CHAPTER III

T HE Countess Titonius appeared one day at one of Elena’s teas. The

Countess was a Russian lady who had married a Scandinavian
nobleman, by which act she had cast him into such complete eclipse
that no one could remember ever having seen him.
Well on the way toward fifty, the Countess still possessed the dregs,
albeit somewhat muddy, of a remote but once heady beauty. Her
overflowing obesity, her white and flaccid flesh, now served as the support
for a head and face much like those of a sentimental doll; and as the
Countess was given to writing amorous verses and reciting them to anyone
within hearing, she was frequently referred to in the circles in which she
moved, as “the five-hundred-weight of poetry.”
Already generously decolleté by mid-afternoon, her gigantic and
barbarous jewels adorned the hollows and rotundities of her quivering flesh,
or set off the high lights of a red gold wig for which the Countess was
perpetually purchasing additional curls.
For the most part her jewels were quite shamelessly false. Most worthy
of respect among their number was a pearl necklace, which, whenever the
Countess deposited her bulk in a chair, dangled grotesquely over the
protruding spheres of her opulent form. The pearls, irregular, triangular-
shaped, and with root marks, resembled the shark’s teeth with which the
members of certain savage tribes like to adorn themselves. Gossip asserted
that they were souvenirs of those lovers of her youth of whom she had been
able finally to extract nothing else.... It was undeniable that the Countess
was given to speaking, with no perceptible restraint, of her innumerable
tender experiences.
No sooner had the Countess learned from Elena’s own lips, that Robledo
was a millionaire fresh from the American wild, than she began casting
glances of passionate interest in his direction. Teacup in hand, she captured
him in a corner, and began a conversation to escape from which he
frantically sought a pretext.
“You, who are such a traveller, such a hero, must give me the benefit of
your experience. Tell me, what is your real opinion about love?”
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