A Season of Love · II

He loved Lidia dearly; and with the morality of the bourgeois hysteric, she would have debased her daughter to make her happy—that is, to provide her with that which would have made her own happiness.

Thus, the anxiety of Nébel’s father in this regard struck his son deep in his lover’s core. How had Lidia escaped? Because the limpidity of her complexion, the frankness of her passion as a girl who emerged with adorable freedom from her shining eyes, were no longer proof of purity, but rather a step of noble joy by which Nébel ascended in triumph to pluck from a rotten plant the flower that begged for him.

This conviction was so intense that Nébel had never kissed her. One afternoon, after lunch, as he was passing by Arrizabalaga’s house, he had felt a mad desire to see her. His bliss was complete, for he found her alone, in a dressing gown, with curls over her cheeks. As Nébel pressed her against the wall, she, laughing and abashed, leaned back against the masonry. And the boy, before her, almost touching her, felt in his inert hands the high happiness of an immaculate love, which it would have been so easy for him to stain.

But afterward, once his wife! Nébel hurried his marriage as much as possible. His emancipation of age, obtained in those days, allowed him through his maternal inheritance to meet the expenses. There remained the father’s consent, and the mother was pressing this detail.

Her situation, overly equivocal in Concordia, demanded a social sanction that ought to begin, of course, with that of her daughter’s future father-in-law. And above all, she was sustained by the desire to humiliate, to force bourgeois morality to bend the knee before the very impropriety it despised.

Several times already she had touched upon the point with her future son-in-law, with allusions to “my father-in-law”... “my new family”... “my daughter’s sister-in-law.” Nébel kept silent, and the mother’s eyes then shone with greater fire.

Until one day the flame leaped up. Nébel had set October 18 for his wedding. More than a month still remained, but the mother made it clearly understood by the boy that she wanted his father’s presence that night.

“It will be difficult,” Nébel said after a mortifying silence. “It’s very hard for him to go out at night... He never goes out.”

“Ah!” the mother exclaimed alone, biting her lip quickly. Another pause followed, but this one already ominous.

“Because you aren’t making a clandestine marriage, are you?”

“Oh!” Nébel smiled with difficulty. “Neither does my father think so.”

“And then?”

A new and increasingly tempestuous silence.

“Is it because of me that his lordship your father does not wish to attend?”

“No, no, señora!” Nébel finally exclaimed, impatient. “It’s in his nature... I will speak with him again, if you wish.”

“I, wish?” the mother smiled, dilating her nostrils. “Do whatever you see fit... Do you want to leave, Nébel, now? I am not well.”

Nébel left, deeply displeased. What was he going to say to his father? The latter always maintained his outright opposition to such a marriage, and the son had already undertaken steps to dispense with it.

“You can do that, much more, and whatever you damn well please. But my consent for that kept woman to be your mother-in-law, never!”

After three days Nébel decided to clear up this state of affairs once and for all, and for this he took advantage of a moment when Lidia was not there.

“I spoke with my father,” Nébel began, “and he told me it will be quite impossible for him to attend.”

The mother turned a little pale, while her eyes, in a sudden flash, stretched toward her temples.

“Ah! And why?”

“I don’t know,” Nébel replied in a dull voice.

“That is... does his lordship your father fear soiling himself if he sets foot here?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated with unconscious obstinacy.

“The thing is, it’s a gratuitous offense that gentleman is doing us! What does he take himself for?” she added with a now altered voice and trembling lips. “Who is he to put on such airs?”

Nébel then felt the lash of reaction in the deep stock of his family.

“What he is, I don’t know!” he replied, his voice equally precipitous, “but not only does he refuse to attend, he doesn’t give his consent either.”

“What? What does he refuse? And why? Who is he? The one least authorized for this!”

Nébel stood up:

“Señora...”

But she had stood up as well.

“Yes, him! You are a child! Ask him where he got his fortune, stolen from his clients! And with those airs! His irreproachable, spotless family, they fill their mouths with that! His family!... Tell him to tell you how many walls he had to jump to go sleep with his wife before getting married! Yes, and you come to me with your family!... Very well, go away; I’ve had it up to here with hypocrisies! Have a good time!”

Nébel lived four days wandering in the deepest despair. What could he expect after what had happened? On the fifth, at dusk, he received a note:

“Octavio: Lidia is quite ill, and only your presence could calm her.

María S. de Arrizabalaga.”

It was a trick, there was no doubt. But if his Lidia truly...

He went that night and the mother received him with a discretion that astonished Nébel, without excessive affability, nor the air of a sinner asking forgiveness either.

“If you want to see her...”

Nébel entered with the mother, and saw his adored love in bed, her face with that powder-free freshness that only 14 years give, and her body gathered under the bedclothes that notably concealed her full youth.

He sat down beside her, and in vain did the mother wait for them to say anything to each other: they did nothing but look at each other and laugh.

Suddenly Nébel felt that they were alone, and the mother’s image arose sharp and clear: “she is leaving so that in the transport of my reconquered love, I lose my head and the marriage thus becomes forced.” But in that quarter of an hour of final bliss offered to him in advance and for free at the cost of a marriage promissory note, the boy of 18 felt—just as before against the wall—the pleasure, without the slightest stain, of a pure love in all its halo of poetic idyll.

Only Nébel could tell how great his bliss was, recovered after the shipwreck. He too forgot what had been in the mother an explosion of calumny, a rabid craving to insult those who do not deserve it. But he had the coldest determination to remove the mother from his life once they were married. The memory of his tender fiancée, pure and laughing in the bed from which a corner had been untucked for him, kindled the promise of an unalloyed voluptuousness, from which not even the smallest diamond had been stolen.

The following night, upon arriving at Arrizabalaga’s house, Nébel found the hallway dark. After a long while, the servant ajarred the glass door:

“The ladies are not in.”

“Have they gone out?” he asked, surprised.

“No, they are going to Montevideo... They’ve gone to Salto to sleep on board.”

“Ah!” Nébel murmured, terrified. He still had a hope.

“The doctor? Can I speak with him?”

“He’s not in, he went to the club after eating...”

Once alone in the dark street, Nébel raised and let fall his arms with mortal discouragement: It was all over! His happiness, his bliss reconquered a day before, lost again and forever! He foreboded that this time there was no possible redemption. The mother’s nerves had snapped wildly, like piano keys, and he could do nothing more.

It was beginning to drizzle. He walked to the corner, and from there, motionless under the streetlight, he contemplated the pink house with a stupid fixedness. He walked around the block, and stopped again beneath the streetlight. Never, never!

Until half past eleven he did the same. At last he went home and loaded his revolver. But a memory stopped him: months before he had promised a German draftsman that before committing suicide—Nébel was an adolescent—he would go see him. A lively friendship bound him to the old soldier of Wilhelm, cemented over long philosophical chats.

The next morning, very early, Nébel knocked at the poor man’s room. The expression on his face was overly explicit.

“Is it now?” the paternal friend asked him, squeezing his hand hard.

“Pst! Anyway!...” the boy replied, looking the other way.

The draftsman, with great calm, then told him his own love drama.

“Go home,” he concluded, “and if at eleven you haven’t changed your mind, come back and have lunch with me, if there’s anything to be had. Afterwards you’ll do as you please. Do you swear it to me?”

“I swear it,” answered Nébel, returning his firm grip with a great desire to weep.

At home a card from Lidia was waiting for him:

“Adored Octavio: My despair couldn’t be greater, but Mama has seen that if I married you great sorrows were in store for me, I have understood like her that the best thing was for us to part and she swears never to forget you

your Lidia.”

“Ah, it had to be thus!” cried the youth, seeing at the same time with dread his altered face in the mirror. “The mother was the one who had inspired the letter, she and her cursed madness! Lidia could not help writing, and the poor girl, distraught, wept all her love into the draft. Ah! If I could see her someday, tell her how I have loved her, how much I love her now, adored of my soul!”

Trembling he went to the nightstand and took up the revolver, but he remembered his new promise, and for a while he remained motionless, stubbornly cleaning a stain on the cylinder with his fingernail.

One afternoon, in Buenos Aires, Nébel had just boarded the tramway, when the car stopped a moment longer than convenient, and he, who was reading, turned his head at last. A woman with a slow and difficult step was advancing. After a quick glance at the uncomfortable person, he resumed his reading. The lady sat down beside him, and as she did so looked intently at Nébel. The latter, although he felt from time to time the foreign gaze resting upon him, continued his reading; but at last he grew tired and raised his face in surprise.

“I thought it was you,” exclaimed the lady, “though I still doubted... You don’t remember me, is that not so?”

“Yes,” replied Nébel, opening his eyes wide, “Mrs. Arrizabalaga...”

She saw Nébel’s surprise, and smiled with the air of an aging courtesan who still tries to look well to a youth.

Of her, when Nébel had known her eleven years before, only the eyes remained, though more sunken, and extinguished now. The yellow complexion, with greenish tones in the shadows, was cracking into dusty furrows. The cheekbones jutted out now, and the lips, ever thick, pretended to hide an entirely decayed set of teeth. Beneath the haggard body one could see alive the morphine coursing among the exhausted nerves and watery arteries, until it had turned into that skeleton the elegant lady who one day leafed through the Illustration by his side.

“Yes, I am very aged... and ill; I’ve already had kidney attacks... and you,” she added, looking at him with tenderness, “always the same! It’s true you are not yet thirty... Lidia is the same too.”

Nébel raised his eyes:

“Unmarried?”

“Yes... How glad she’ll be when I tell her! Why don’t you give the poor thing that pleasure? Don’t you want to come and see us?”

“With pleasure,” murmured Nébel.

“Yes, come soon; you know what we have been to... Anyway, Boedo, 1483; apartment 14... Our position is so meager...”

“Oh!” he protested, getting up to leave. He promised to go very soon.

Twelve days later Nébel was due to return to the sugar mill, and beforehand he wanted to keep his promise. He went there—a miserable suburban apartment.—Mrs. Arrizabalaga received him, while Lidia tidied herself up a little.

“So eleven years!” observed the mother again. “How time flies! And you who could have an infinity of children with Lidia!”

“Surely,” smiled Nébel, looking around.

“Oh! We are not very well off! And above all how your house must be furnished... I always hear talk of your cane fields... Is that your only establishment?”

“Yes... in Entre Ríos as well...”

“How fortunate! If one could... Always wishing to go spend a few months in the country, and always with the wish!”

She fell silent, casting a fleeting glance at Nébel. The latter, with a tight heart, relived vividly the impressions buried eleven years in his soul.

“And all this for lack of connections... It is so hard to have a friend in these circumstances!”

Nébel’s heart contracted more and more, and Lidia entered.

She too was much changed, because the charm of a fourteen-year-old’s candor and freshness is never to be found again in a twenty-six-year-old woman. But beautiful always. His masculine sense smelled in the gentle tranquility of her gaze, in her soft neck, and in all that indefinable something which denounces to a man love already enjoyed, that he ought to keep veiled forever the memory of the Lidia he had known.

They spoke of very trivial things, with the perfect discretion of mature persons. When she left again for a moment, the mother resumed:

“Yes, she is a bit frail... And when I think that in the country she would recover right away... Look, Octavio: do you permit me to be frank with you? You know I’ve loved you like a son... Couldn’t we spend a season at your establishment? How much good it would do Lidia!”

“I am married,” replied Nébel.

The lady had a gesture of lively vexation, and for an instant her disappointment was sincere; but immediately she crossed her comical hands:

“Married, you! Oh, what a misfortune, what a misfortune! Forgive me, you know!... I don’t know what I’m saying... And does your wife live with you at the mill?”

“Yes, generally... Now she is in Europe.”

“What a misfortune! That is to say... Octavio!” she added, opening her arms with tears in her eyes, “to you I can tell it, you have been almost my son... We are little short of in misery! Why won’t you let me go with Lidia? I am going to make a mother’s confession to you,” she concluded with a cloying smile and lowering her voice, “you know Lidia’s heart well, don’t you?”

She waited for an answer, but Nébel remained silent.

“Yes, you know her! And do you think Lidia is a woman capable of forgetting when she has loved?”