Chapter II · IV

It was a spring day. I was wandering through the chateau park with the air of an inveterate dreamer. Sparrows chirped upon the fresh lilacs, attacking beetles that defended themselves against the pecks with their emerald cuirasses, their breastplates of gold and steel. In the roses was carmine, vermilion, the penetrating wave of sweet perfumes; further on, violets clustered in large clumps, with their peaceful hue and virgin scent. Beyond them, tall trees, dense foliage humming with a thousand bees, statues half-veiled in shadow, bronze discoboli, muscular gladiators in proud gymnastic poses, scented arbors covered in creepers, porticoes in lovely Ionic mimicry, all-white and lascivious caryatids, and vigorous Atlantic telamons with broad shoulders and giant thighs. I was roaming this labyrinth of charms when I heard a splash far in the darkness of the grove, at the pond where white swans float like figures carved in alabaster, while others have necks black as ebony, like a pale leg in a dark stocking.

I drew nearer. Was I dreaming? Oh, never! I felt what you felt when you first beheld Egeria in her grotto.

There in the center of the pool, amid the flutter of startled swans, stood a nymph, a veritable nymph, dipping her rosy flesh into the crystalline water. Her hip at the crest of the foam seemed gilded at times by the dim light filtering through gaps in the leaves. Ah! I saw lilies, roses, snow, gold; I saw an ideal clothed in living form, and amid the splashing of the wounded nymph I heard a mocking, harmonious laugh that set my blood on fire.

Suddenly the vision fled; the nymph rose from the pool like Cytherea from her wave, and gathering her dripping, radiant hair, fled through the rose bushes, past the lilacs and violets, beyond the dense grove, until she vanished—alas!—around a bend; and there I stood, a lyric poet, a duped faun, watching the large alabaster birds as if they mocked me, craning their long necks toward me, their polished agate beaks gleaming at the tip.

Later we lunched together, the same friends from the previous night; triumphant among them all, with his shirt-front and dark cravat, was the obese scholar, future member of the Institute.

And suddenly, while everyone was discussing Frémiet’s latest work in the salon, Lesbia exclaimed in her cheerful Parisian voice:

“Well! As Tartarin says: the poet has seen nymphs...!” Everyone stared at her in astonishment, and she looked at me, looked at me like a cat, and laughed like a tickled girl.

THE BALE

Far away, along the line as though drawn with a blue pencil that parts the waters from the sky, the sun was sinking with its golden dust and whirlwinds of purple sparks, like a vast disc of incandescent iron. The custom-house wharf was growing quiet; watchmen strolled from point to point, caps pulled down over their brows, glancing here and there. The massive arm of the cranes stood motionless, and the day-laborers set out for their homes. Water murmured beneath the pier, and the damp, salty wind blowing from the open sea as night fell kept the moored lighters in continuous rocking.

All the lightermen had departed; only old Uncle Lucas, who had hurt his foot that morning hoisting a cask onto a cart and had worked all day hobbling along, sat on a boulder, gazing mournfully out to sea with his pipe between his teeth.

“Hey, Uncle Lucas! Resting?”

“Aye, master.”

And so began our chat—that pleasant, easy conversation I love to strike up with rugged, honest men who live the bracing life of hard labor, the kind that yields sound health and muscular power, nourished on beans and the boiling blood of the vine.

I looked affectionately upon that rough old man and listened with keen interest to his tale, broken and crude as of a simple soul, yet of an innocent heart. Ah, so he had been a soldier! As a lad he had served under Bulnes! He had even found the stamina to march with his rifle as far as Miraflores! And he was married, and had a son, and...

And here Uncle Lucas:

“Aye, master, he died two years ago!”

Those eyes, small and bright beneath bushy grey brows, grew moist.

“How did he die? At his trade, to put food in our mouths—for my wife, the little ones, and me, master, when I was laid up sick.”

And he told me the whole story as night began to fall, while the waves wrapped themselves in mist and the city lit its lamps; sitting upon the stone, having put out his black pipe and tucked it behind his ear, stretching and crossing his thin, muscular legs clad in dirty trousers rolled up to the ankle.

The lad was honest and hard-working. They had wished to send him to school once he was older; but the poor must not learn to read when there is weeping from hunger in the hovel!

Uncle Lucas was married and had many children.

His wife bore the curse of the poor woman’s womb: fertility. There were many open mouths crying for bread, many dirty children wallowing in the rubbish, many skinny bodies shivering with cold; food had to be brought, rags found, and to do that one had to work like an ox until one had no breath left.

When the son grew up he helped his father. A neighbor, a blacksmith, wished to teach him his craft; but being so frail then—almost a frame of bones—and having to blow his lungs out at the bellows, he fell ill and returned to the tenement. Ah, he was very ill! Yet he did not die. He did not die! And that despite living in one of those human warrens, between four dilapidated, ugly walls in the foul alley of lost women, reeking at all hours, lit at night by scanty lanterns, where harps, accordions, and the shouts of sailors arriving at the brothel—maddened by the chastity of long voyages, drinking like sponges and roaring like demons—echoed in perpetual summons to revelry. Yes! Amid the squalor and the din of reckless feasts, the boy lived, and was soon hale and upon his feet.

Then his fifteenth year arrived.

Uncle Lucas had managed, after a thousand hardships, to purchase a canoe. He became a fisherman.

At the break of dawn, he took to the water with his sturdy lad, carrying their fishing gear. One rowed while the other baited the hooks. They returned to shore in high hopes of selling their catch, amidst the cold breeze and dimming fog, softly humming some mournful tune with their triumphant oar raised upright and dripping with foam.

If sales were good, they made another trip in the afternoon.

One winter day a storm blew up. Father and son, in their little craft, endured the fury of wave and wind out at sea. Reaching land was difficult. Catch and all went overboard, and saving their skins was all they could think of. They fought desperately to make the shore. They were close, but an ill wind drove them against a rock, shattering the canoe to splinters. They escaped with mere bruises, thank God! as Uncle Lucas said in recounting it. After that, both became lightermen.

Yes, lightermen: upon the great flat-bottomed, black barges; clinging to the screeching chain hanging like an iron serpent from the solid crane that looks like a gallows; rowing on their feet in cadence; plying with the lighter from pier to steamer and from steamer to pier; shouting “Heave-ho!” as they shoved the heavy packages to hook them onto the powerful claw that hoists them swinging like a pendulum—yes, lightermen! Old man and boy, father and son, astride a crate, straining together, earning their daily wage for themselves and their beloved leeches in the tenement.

They went to work each day in their old clothes, waists bound with red sashes, their coarse, heavy shoes clattering together until the work began, when they kicked them into a corner of the lighter.

The bustle began: loading and unloading. The father was careful: “Watch out, lad, or you’ll crack your skull! The rope will catch your hand! You’ll break a leg!” And he instructed, trained, and directed his boy with his gruff words of an old workman and a loving father.

Until one day Uncle Lucas could not rise from bed, for rheumatism swelled his joints and bored into his bones.

Oh! And medicine and food had to be bought; of course.

“Son, off to work to earn some coin; today is Saturday.”

And the son went, alone, almost running, without breakfast, to the daily toil.

It was a fine day of clear light and golden sun. On the pier the trucks rolled along their rails, pulleys creaked, and chains clashed. It was the dizzying turmoil of labor, the ring of iron, rattling everywhere, and the wind blowing through the forest of masts and rigging of clustered ships.

Beneath one of the pier’s cranes stood Uncle Lucas’s son with other lightermen, unloading in haste. The lighter full of bales had to be emptied. From time to time the long chain ending in a hook descended, clattering like a ratchet through the sheave; the men lashed the bundles with a doubled rope, hooked them, and up they rose like a fish on a line or a sounding lead, now steady, now swaying from side to side like a clapper in the empty air.

The cargo was piled high. Every now and then the swell gently rocked the lighter loaded with bales, which formed a sort of pyramid in the center. There was one very heavy bale, very heavy indeed. It was the largest of all, broad, fat, and smelling of pitch. It lay at the bottom of the lighter. A man standing on it looked small upon that massive pedestal.

It was like all the prose of commerce wrapped in canvas and banded with iron straps. On its flanks, amid black lines and triangles, were letters that looked like eyes—“diamond letters,” Uncle Lucas called them. Its iron bands were tightened with rough, large-headed nails; and within its belly the monster held, at the very least, lawns and percales.

Only that one remained.

“Up goes the brute!” said one of the men.

“The pot-bellied one,” added another.

Uncle Lucas’s son, eager to finish soon, was getting ready to collect his pay and eat breakfast, knotting a checkered handkerchief around his neck.

The chain descended, dancing in the air. A stout sling was tied around the bale, tested for firmness, and the cry went up: “Hoist!” while the chain strained against the bulk, screeching as it lifted it clear.

The lightermen, standing, watched the enormous weight rise, preparing to head ashore, when a horrible thing happened. The bale—the ponderous bale—slipped from the sling, as a dog pulls its head from a loose collar, and crashed down upon Uncle Lucas’s son, who, caught between the lighter’s gunwale and the heavy mass, was left with crushed kidneys, broken spine, and black blood pouring from his mouth.

That day there was neither bread nor medicine in Uncle Lucas’s home, but only the shattered boy, whom the rheumatic father embraced weeping amid the shrieks of his wife and little ones as they bore the corpse to the cemetery.