A Young Man's Heart Read online

  “When the dry season begins I will be gone,” Blair answered pathetically.

  The first day, and nearly all of the second, she could not be made to believe him. She merely laughed outrageously. He was trying to tease her in a new way, her attitude seemed to imply. Presently she fell in with his supposed mood, pretended to believe him, asked questions in a mocking vein—how soon was he going? was he going by the San Lázaro station? if he was, then she would wave to him from the window, her people’s house faced the tracks—and above all (subtle hint of disbelief) had he told his father of his plans yet?

  “He was the one told me,” Blair answered limply.

  While she rallied him like this for two days, there was no answering glint of humor in his eyes. Eventually she must have noticed this and wondered what it meant. The chatter and the raucous liveliness stopped after awhile, and something like misery shaded her expression.

  “Then, seguro, you are going?”

  “Seguro que si,” he told her.

  She did not say anything more about it.

  The third day and the fourth came and went, and on the evening of the fourth Giraldy came home and showed him their railway tickets to the coast. It appeared he intended making the overnight trip to see Blair safely on board the boat. The tickets, dangling like paper festoons from his hand, long and blue and gruesome, were kilometrics, that is, at each successive stop the train made, portions were to be detached and given over to the car-men. On arrival, the remainder, if any, could be used to return on. In Blair’s horrified sight they resembled chains, bonds of exile. Giraldy, never dreaming that anything so commonplace as these tickets could inspire thoughts so tragic in anyone, wound them up and returned them to his pocket.

  He had not mentioned the date of their departure. Blair began to dread the evenings and the dinner-hours, never knowing which one would call forth the implacable mandate, fearing each of them in turn was to be the last, only breathing again when the hour for the train had come and gone with Giraldy’s after-dinner cigarette. He became almost animal-like in the way he watched every move on his father’s part until the leisurely sifting of shadows over the face of the world made another day’s respite a certainty. Each turn of a fork, each movement of the lips, that might betoken a phrase about to be spoken, loomed significant, then wavered, ebbed away, to be followed by the next, leaving him no time to steel himself, no time to emerge from the slough of masochistic misery into which he had somehow plunged. He was in a constant panic, eating without recognizing the food he touched, directing furtive prayers along each visible sunbeam, like so many pneumatic tubes, until it seemed that the vacillating sun sank through sheer weight of his importunities. Then the sense of reprieve that came with the violet of twilight, knowing that the lighted evening train was already hurrying down to the coast by now and there was nothing more to fear from it. At least another day’s security had been granted him. Another radiant morning, another silvery noon.

  He would escape as quickly as possible from the table, scene of so much unguessed misery the past quarter of an hour, and go to his room, to hug his victory to himself. People came to the house or Giraldy went out, but Blair remained in his room, satisfied with the little that had been granted, content to be alone. He went to bed at the earliest possible moment, as though to hurry the new day forward, overlooking the fact that in its train, inseparable, would come evening again, and a renewal of the microscopic agonies. Once he took a pencil and wrote in English on the wall, “I was so happy here,” behind the head of the bed, where it could not be noticed.

  The end of the month drew near, and as he counted the days off on his fingers, until only the fingers of one hand remained, then four, then three, then two, he was lulled into a false sense of security. So many evenings had now gone by, dreaded in anticipation, harmless in realization, without any edict of departure coming from Giraldy, that gradually the whole affair began to assume an aspect of the mythical. It had been so long in happening that presently it seemed it would never happen. Even the occasional presence of Mile. Reynaud, familiarizing herself with the house, added nothing to his worry. The very railway tickets themselves, though he knew them to be already purchased, had no place in Blair’s new scheme of complacency. Besides, were they not kilometrics, as good next month as this, or for that matter, a year from now?

  Then when he least expected it, on the next to the last day of the month, his father stopped in his room before leaving the house in the morning to awaken him with a hand on his shoulder and say, “Blair, have your things together when I get home, we’re taking the train to-night.” Blair sat up after he had gone and clasped his reared knees, and somehow there was none of the dismay he had expected to feel.

  The pitch of anxiety had been reached and passed, the event no longer held the same sting in it for him it might have had had it come sooner. It was like an actor, shorn of its dramatic entrance because it had missed its proper cue.

  He dressed slowly, making a rite of it, telling himself over and over this was his last day here. And when he reached the point of tying his necktie, and had already matched its two ends and tied it, he deliberately undid it again to allow himself the luxury of tying it a second time. It was perhaps on some such day as this that the habit of introspection first took hold of Blair. For everything he did to-day, no matter how trivial, he stood apart from and analyzed, constantly reminding himself that it was for the last time he did that one certain thing, at least in this setting of his early youth. It was as though he were a spectator, surveying the actions of another person, not himself.

  He entered the kitchen with his newly watered hair gleaming in the sunlight, the tips of his fingers thrust under his belt in what he felt sure must be a very dégagé manner, and announced,

  “To-night I go.”

  And the Spanish of it, in his own ears, had the infinite sadness only Spanish can have:

  “Esta noche me voy yo.”

  The old woman said, “He told us that already,” and Mariquita turned abruptly to leave the room. Blair mechanically accepted a cup of lacy chocolate and followed her with his eyes. The desire for breakfast and the wish to further dramatize himself in Mariquita’s sight conflicted for a moment.

  The old woman, with a shrewd glance at him sidewise, declared, “If you put it down, I won’t heat it again.”

  He remained to drink.

  Later, when he found her, she was in the kiosk near the Legation, sitting there with haunted eyes, stripping part of a vine of its leaves. He had come after her bent almost double, walking the baby before him by supporting it under the armpits.

  “Look what you left behind,” he said.

  “What do I care about that one,” she answered, “I will never see you again.”

  “Yes, in a very little while. It’s just for school.”

  “That’s what you say,” she answered sullenly. “Don’t try to pretend, I know better. You will stay there until you grow up. Your father doesn’t want you back.”

  “Who told you?”

  “You will stay there. You will never think of me. You will marry there. Then it will be over.”

  “Who told you?” he repeated, enjoying the sense of importance she gave him.

  He sat down beside her.

  “I will never marry anyone else, Mariquita. Mariquita, I will never love anyone else.”

  She turned to look at him with an expression of almost anguished pleasure on her face.

  “Until the end of your life?”

  “Until the end of my life.”

  She drew the oblivious baby toward her and put her arms about its neck, detaching a chain of small turquoise beads which lay hidden under its smock, ending in a diminutive agate cross. She held this out to him on the flat of her hand.

  “Touch it,” she said, “and promise.”

  His lighter hand covered her tawny palm for a moment, the cross pressed flat between the two of them, with the beads escaping in a bright blue loop over their wrists, lik
e a subtle hidden manacle.

  “If you don’t keep your word,” she threatened vaguely, “something terrible will happen to you, you wait and see.”

  In the afternoon Blair packed, a matter that took five or ten minutes, throwing his few belongings into a venerable satchel that Giraldy had emptied and left standing in a corner for him. The old woman, come to look on, allowed him to finish and then got to her knees with a snarl of dissatisfaction, pulled everything out, and packed it over again.

  Giraldy was later than usual in returning home, and with six o’clock well past and the smells of lard and peppers that emanated from the kitchen momentarily increasing in strength, Blair began to worry that they would miss the train, an anxiety that would have been inconceivable to him a week or two earlier. He went to the door of the house several times to scan the street and see if his father was approaching.

  Finally Giraldy arrived, and with him in the carriage was the Reynaud girl, flushed with pleasure and toying with a carnation in her gloved hands, twirling it about on its stalk and beating time with it against her wrist, occasionally flirting it past her nostrils. It was evident that they were both in a very good mood. She jumped down with a little “Houp la!” from the carriage, unassisted and preceding her escort. And when Giraldy spoke to Blair a faint essence of sweet liquor could be detected about him, not yet rancid with the passage of hours.

  “Comment ça va?” remarked Mile. Reynaud blithely on her way in, chucking Blair under the chin, and she stalked past him and into the house as though it already belonged to her.

  He rejoined his allies in the rear of the flat. Without even a glance from her kitchen doorway the old woman seemed cognizant of any arrival or departure occurring within the house. “Does she stay?” she demanded truculently.

  “It looks like it,” he agreed.

  Scowling, she shuffled forth to set a new place at the table, and muttering under her breath, increased the quantities of the ingredients she was preparing at the stove.

  “One after the other. Why doesn’t your father get married?”

  “It doesn’t seem to appeal to him,” Blair answered coolly.

  Mariquita tittered and gave his shoulder one of her familiar pushes.

  Almost as soon as they sat down to dinner he discovered Mile. Reynaud proceeding to ruin the aroma of even the most succulent dishes by sheer strength of the perfumery she had drenched herself with. The rice that was the old woman’s forte, garnished with peppers, cinnamon and garlic, tasted as if flavored with cologne. Attar of roses seemed to destroy all the ordinary pungency of the black beans in their rich gravy of tomato and lime. Brackish violet-water lurked within the coffee-cups. She was anti-social, this girl.

  Still, much as he felt he ought to regret that this Farewell Supper of his was being poisoned by her, he found the presence of a third party at their meal to be a distinct relief. It alleviated the usual heaviness and silence of eating alone with Giraldy, and dissipated the last possible vestige of melancholy at thought of leaving, making him thankful to escape the new régime that he saw impending. For Mile. Reynaud had all Estelle’s early blatancy and aliveness without any of her finesse. There was a strong suggestion of the gamin about her, in the way she held herself and the way she spoke. It was as though, along with her legendary immersion in the Bay of Biscay, she had discarded her ladylike-ness as being irrelevant.

  When the old woman approached the table she glanced up at her and remarked, “What is your name, eh?” using the insolent second person singular. And being informed of it, she proceeded airily, “Well, I like this rice dish. You must make it for me while the señor is away,” a rather tactful way of informing her that she intended remaining in the house during Giraldy’s absence. The old woman, furiously silent, withdrew to the kitchen to loose a querulous tirade there with Mariquita and the baby for an audience. Mile. Reynaud smirked understanding, as though she counted it a victory on her part to anger someone, no matter whom.

  For one thing, she was never at a loss for something to say. She chatted throughout the course of the meal with a machine-gun-like rapidity, each word a tiny vivacious explosion of thought on the endless cartridge-belt that was her tongue. And Blair, ignored by both, ignored them in his turn, aware of only crackling fragments of her speech as she lapsed from Spanish to the French he was not meant to understand, and back again, at times too quickly to quite conceal the gist of some remark from him.

  “ . . . very sincere . .. ask anyone who knows me . . . all my friends will tell you so . . . when you come back . . . I can’t promise . . . you must find that out for yourself.”

  Blair turned his eyes to the window, to where the expiring sunbeams were slowly merging one by one into a paler, more diffused luminousness through which stars were beginning to bore their way like the points of gleaming needles, seen, then lost, then found again, at last becoming fixed each in its proper place as the darkening sky set them off. Unbelievable that a day or two ago at about this time each evening the thought of leaving here had chilled him with fright, that these same dissolving beams of light had been a rosary of procrastination for him, told off one by one with the prayer, “Another night gained, another night gained.” All at once he turned his head to the two people at the table with him and heard himself say, “We’ll miss the train.”

  Giraldy, without troubling to look at him, remarked, “Well, go out and get a carriage.”

  Blair stood up from the table and walked out of the room, leaving the two of them there together, with their mockery of love and their reading of one another’s eyes, feigning youth and loyalty and candor. He crossed the patio, and it was quite dark now, and looked up and could see stars in the square black opening above him. They disappeared for a moment while he passed through the street-doorway, and then he was out of the house and the whole heavens seemed full of them. At the very bottom of the sky, in the west, a stripe of green, lengthwise like a snake, still marked where the light had last been.

  He walked as far as the corner and whistled and motioned with his arm, summoning the solitary hack that was standing as usual outside the entrance to the Legation grounds. The driver slowly guided it around in a half-circle, it had been facing the other way, and made for him, and Blair, without waiting for it to stop, jumped on the step and accompanied it back to the house, one arm and leg swinging free. Just as they drew up, Mariquita came out of the doorway. Or rather she stepped forward as though she had been standing there waiting.

  “You’re going now?” she said anxiously.

  “As soon as he comes out.”

  They withdrew to the opposite side of the street, while the coachman alighted and went in to announce himself.

  They crouched against the plaster wall, ghostly white now in the darkness, a mantilla of blue tracery thrown over it and them by the shadow of the bougainvillea sprays above, shoulder to shoulder, their arms about one another, looking toward the house and the empty carriage standing before the door. And there, all at once, their childhood came to an end. They were silent, and they were no longer as young as they had been yesterday.

  Flowers perhaps had been thrown over this wall, flowers snatched at by a devout hand and never allowed to touch the ground. More than once it must have heard light whispers and the throaty trill of a guitar. And long ago, when love was still abroad in the land, perhaps someone clutching a small black lace fan had one night dropped lightly down from it into a pair of waiting arms. And Estelle, too, staring at it from her window across the street, had seen outlined upon it the portent of a better course of action. So now these two, children until a moment ago, who had played at its foot and whose hands had carelessly touched it a hundred times, found that it had bequeathed them their first sorrow.

  “Here, we will stand here, where no one is looking.”

  “You will remember Mariquita?”

  “And will you remember Blair?”

  “And you will come back like you said?”

  They clasped each other’s han
ds and kissed the knotted fingers, their heads bent close together. It seemed not to occur to them to kiss upon the lips, they were so intent upon holding one another’s hands.

  “When you grow up maybe you’ll be the most beautiful girl in the city. But pretend to all of them. Don’t really love anybody.”

  “But come back Blerr I like you so.”

  Giraldy came out of the house. They dropped their hands to their sides. The coachman appeared, carrying Blair’s bag. Blair started over toward them.

  “Adios.” She remained standing there.

  Blair got into the carriage from one side as Giraldy stepped in at the other. “San Lázaro,” he directed indolently. Blair looked back. She was still there, but gave no sign, not even a wave of the hand; she stood motionless beside the wall. They turned a corner and she was gone. “Forever,” the world in all its wisdom seemed to say. But he replied, “I know better. I know better.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  His Bride

  1

  When he opened his eyes the morning after their arrival, Eleanor was standing at the window looking out. She was holding the coarse net curtains apart to obtain a better view, and her extended arms gleamed whitely with the play of the morning sunlight. He raised one shoulder and lay quietly watching her. Her hair, in great disorder, was silver in the light, and the outline of her narrow little body was sketched in silhouette through the ridiculous lilac voile nightdress she had brought from New York. She was more charming than ever. Again, and for the thousandth time, he told himself how glad he was he had married her. She turned her head slightly, and in granting him his first boon of the day, her profile, discovered him to be awake.

  “Blair,” she exclaimed, “it’s beautiful, beautiful. I’m so glad you brought me.”

  He came and stood beside her, and arms interlocked behind their backs, the entire city lay spread before them, not unreal and seen from a great height as it would have been in the North, but just slightly below them, its rooftops on a level with the eye, and in the clear air even the furthest houses stood out distinctly, each with its tiny window-openings, balconies and roof-tiles all microscopically complete, as on a doll-house held in the palm of one’s hand. And even beyond those, a ribbon of green haze that lay coiled around the city’s outermost limits told where the suburbs and the open country began, fading to a milky blue miles away where the slow climb of the uplands set in, and just above that emerging again to full color-strength in the silver and purple masses of Our Lady of the Snows and its sister peaks, as sharply defined as though cut out with scissors.