LITMIR.BIZ

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and Bruno were dancing at that moment: she, wearing a follao of blue boleros, a red-flowered tumbadillo, a white shirt embroidered with black, and a choker and earrings of ruby-coloured glass, danced with all the gentleness and grace that were to be expected from her cimbrador stature. Bruno, with his threaded ruana cloths folded over his shoulders, his brightly coloured blanket breeches, flattened white shirt, and a new cabiblanco around his waist, tapped his feet with admirable dexterity.

      After that hand, which is what the peasants call every piece of dancing, the musicians played their most beautiful bambuco, for Julian announced that it was for the master. Remigia, encouraged by her husband and the captain, at last resolved to dance a few moments with my father: but then she dared not raise her eyes, and her movements in the dance were less spontaneous. At the end of an hour we retired.

      My father was satisfied with my attention during the visit we made to the estates; but when I told him that I wished henceforth to share his fatigues by remaining at his side, he told me, almost with regret, that he was obliged to sacrifice his own welfare to me, by fulfilling the promise he had made me some time before, to send me to Europe to finish my medical studies, and that I should set out on my journey in four months' time at the latest. As he spoke to me thus, his countenance took on a solemn seriousness without affectation, which was noticeable in him when he took irrevocable resolutions. This happened on the evening when we were returning to the sierra. It was beginning to get dark, and had it not been so, I should have noticed the emotion his refusal caused me. The rest of the journey was made in silence; how happy I should have been to see Maria again, if the news of this journey had not come between her and my hopes at that moment!

      Chapter VI

      What had happened in those four days in Mary's soul?

      She was about to place a lamp on one of the tables in the drawing-room, when I approached to greet her; and I had already been surprised not to see her in the midst of the family group on the steps where we had just dismounted. The trembling of her hand exposed the lamp; and I lent her assistance, less calm than I thought I was. She looked slightly pale to me, and around her eyes was a slight shadow, imperceptible to one who had seen her without looking. She turned her face towards my mother, who was speaking at the moment, thus preventing me from examining it in the light that was near us; and I noticed then that at the head of one of her plaits was a wilted carnation; and it was doubtless the one I had given her the day before I left for the Valley. The little cross of enamelled coral that I had brought for her, like those of my sisters, she wore round her neck on a cord of black hair. She was silent, sitting in the middle of the seats my mother and I occupied. As my father's resolution about my journey did not depart from my memory, I must have seemed sad to her, for she said to me in an almost low voice:

      –Did the trip hurt you?

      –No, Maria," I replied, "but we have been sunbathing and walking so much....

      I was going to say something more to her, but the confidential accent in her voice, the new light in her eyes which I surprised me with, prevented me from doing more than look at her, till, noticing that she was embarrassed by the involuntary fixedness of my glances, and finding myself examined by one of my father's (more fearful when a certain passing smile wandered on his lips), I left the room for my room.

      I closed the doors. There were the flowers she had gathered for me: I kissed them; I wanted to inhale all their scents at once, seeking in them those of Mary's dresses; I bathed them with my tears.... Ah, you who have not wept for happiness like this, weep for despair, if your adolescence has passed, because you will never love again!

      First love!… noble pride in feeling loved: sweet sacrifice of all that was dear to us before in favour of the beloved woman: happiness that, bought for one day with the tears of a whole existence, we would receive as a gift from God: perfume for all the hours of the future: inextinguishable light of the past: flower kept in the soul and which it is not given to disappointments to wither: only treasure that the envy of men cannot snatch from us: delicious delirium… inspiration from heaven… Mary! Mary! How I loved you! How I loved you! How I loved you!…

      Chapter VII

      When my father made his last voyage to the West Indies, Solomon, a cousin of his whom he had loved from childhood, had just lost his wife. Very young they had come together to South America; and on one of their voyages my father fell in love with the daughter of a Spaniard, an intrepid naval captain, who, after having left the service for some years, was forced in 1819 to take up arms again in defence of the kings of Spain, and who was shot dead at Majagual on the twentieth of May, 1820.

      The mother of the young woman my father loved demanded that he renounce the Jewish religion in order to give her to her as his wife. My father became a Christian at the age of twenty. His cousin became fond of the Catholic religion in those days, without, however, yielding to the urging that he should also be baptised, for he knew that what he had done for my father, giving him the wife he desired, would prevent him from being accepted by the woman he loved in Jamaica.

      After some years of separation, the two friends met again. Solomon was already a widower. Sarah, his wife, had left him a child who was then three years old. My father found him morally and physically disfigured by grief, and then his new religion gave him comforts for his cousin, comforts which relatives had sought in vain to save him. He urged Solomon to give him his daughter to bring her up by our side; and he dared to propose that he would make her a Christian. Solomon agreed, saying, "It is true that my daughter alone has prevented me from undertaking a journey to India, which would improve my spirit and remedy my poverty: she also has been my only comfort after Sarah's death; but you will it, let her be your daughter. Christian women are sweet and good, and your wife must be a saintly mother. If Christianity gives in supreme misfortunes the relief you have given me, perhaps I would make my daughter unhappy by leaving her a Jewess. Do not tell our relatives, but when you reach the first coast where there is a Catholic priest, have her baptised and have the name Esther changed to Mary. This the unhappy man said, shedding many tears.

      A few days later the schooner that was to take my father to the coast of New Granada set sail in Montego Bay. The light ship was testing her white wings, as a heron of our forests tests his wings before taking a long flight. Solomon came into my father's room, who had just finished mending his shipboard suit, carrying Esther seated in one of his arms, and hanging on the other a chest containing the child's luggage: she held out her little arms to her uncle, and Solomon, placing her in those of his friend, dropped sobbing on the little boot. That child, whose precious head had just bathed with a shower of tears the baptism of sorrow rather than the religion of Jesus, was a sacred treasure; my father knew it well, and never forgot it. Solomon was reminded by his friend, as he jumped into the boat that was to separate them, of a promise, and he answered in a choked voice: "My daughter's prayers for me, and mine for her and her mother, shall go up together to the feet of the Crucified.

      I was seven years old when my father returned, and I disdained the precious toys he had brought me from his journey, to admire that beautiful, sweet, smiling child. My mother showered her with caresses, and my sisters showered her with tenderness, from the moment my father laid her on his wife's lap, and said, "This is Solomon's daughter, whom he has sent to you.

      During our childish games her lips began to modulate Castilian accents, so harmonious and seductive in a pretty woman's mouth and in the laughing mouth of a child.

      It must have been about six years ago. As I entered my father's room one evening, I heard him sobbing; his arms were folded on the table, and his forehead resting on them; near him my mother was weeping, and Mary was leaning her head on her knees, not understanding his grief, and almost indifferent to her uncle's lamentations; it was because a letter from Kingston, received that day, gave the news of Solomon's death. I remember only one expression of my father's on that afternoon: "If all are leaving me without my being able to receive their last farewells, why should I return to my country? Alas! his ashes should rest in a strange land, without the winds of the ocean, on whose shores he frolicked as a child, whose immensity he crossed young and ardent, coming to sweep over the slab of his grave the dry blossoms of the blossom trees and the dust of the years!

      Few people who knew our family would have suspected that Maria was not my parents' daughter. She spoke our language well, was

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