A Season of Love · III

Now she had reinforced her hint with a slight wink. Nébel suddenly realized the abyss he might have fallen into earlier. It was always the same mother, but now debased by her own old soul, morphine, and poverty. And Lydia... Seeing her once again had sent a sudden wave of desire through him for this mature woman, full-throated and already trembling. Faced with the commercial treaty being offered to him, he threw himself into the arms of that strange conquest which fate had provided.

“Don’t you know, Lydia?” her daughter exclaimed joyfully upon returning. “Octavio is inviting us to spend a season at his estate. What do you think?”

Lydia gave a fleeting twitch of her eyebrows and recovered her composure.

“Very well, Mama...”

“Ah! Don’t you know what he says? He’s married. So young still! We are almost like family to him...”

Lydia then turned her eyes to Nébel, and looked at him for a moment with a painful gravity.

“For how long?” she murmured.

“Four years,” he replied in a low voice. Despite everything, he lacked the courage to look at her.

Winter

They did not make the trip together, out of a final married scruple on a railway line where he was well known; but upon leaving the station they got into the household buckboard. When Nébel was left alone on the plantation, he kept no domestic help other than an old Indian woman, for—besides his own frugality—his wife took all the servants with her. In this way he introduced his companions to the faithful native as an elderly aunt and her daughter, who had come to recover their lost health.

Nothing could be more credible, on the other hand, for the lady was rapidly declining. She had arrived shattered, her step hesitant and extremely heavy, and in her anguished countenance the morphine, which she had sacrificed for four hours straight at Nébel’s plea, was crying out for a run through the inside of that living corpse.

Nébel, who had cut short his studies upon his father’s death, knew enough to foresee a rapid catastrophe; her kidneys, deeply affected, sometimes suffered dangerous stops that the morphine only served to precipitate.

Already in the carriage, unable to endure any longer, she had looked at Nébel with stricken anguish:

“If you’ll permit me, Octavio... I can’t take any more! Lydia, sit in the front.”

The daughter quietly hid her mother a little, and Nébel heard the rustle of clothes violently pulled back to prick the thigh.

Suddenly the eyes lit up, and a fullness of life covered that agonized face like a mask.

“Now I’m well... what bliss! I feel fine.”

“You ought to give that up,” Nébel said harshly, looking at her sideways. “When we arrive, you’ll be worse.”

“Oh, no! Better to die right here.”

Nébel spent the entire day upset and determined to live as much as possible without seeing anything in Lydia and her mother other than two poor invalids. But as evening fell, and like the beasts that begin to sharpen their claws at that hour, the male’s lust began to loosen his waist in a cold shiver.

They ate early, for the mother, broken down, wished to go straight to bed. Nor was there any way to get her to consume milk exclusively.

“Ugh! What revulsion! I can’t get it down. And do you want me to sacrifice the last years of my life, now that I could die happy?”

Lydia did not blink. She had spoken very few words to Nébel, and only at the end of the coffee did his gaze lock onto hers; but Lydia lowered hers immediately.

Four hours later Nébel was noiselessly opening the door to Lydia’s room.

“Who is it!” the startled voice rang out suddenly.

“It’s me,” Nébel murmured in a barely audible voice.

A rustling of clothes, like that of someone sitting up abruptly in bed, followed his words, and silence reigned once more. But when Nébel’s hand touched a warm arm in the darkness, the body then trembled in a deep shudder.

Then, inert beside that woman who had already known love before he arrived, there rose from the deepest recesses of Nébel’s soul the holy pride of his adolescence: never to have touched, never to have stolen so much as a kiss from the creature who looked at him with radiant candor. He thought of Dostoevsky’s words, which until that moment he had not understood: “There is nothing more beautiful and strengthening in life than a pure memory.” Nébel had kept it, that unsullied memory, the immaculate purity of his eighteen years, and now it was there, defiled to the chalice on a servant’s bed...

He then felt upon his neck two heavy, silent tears. She in turn would remember... And Lydia’s tears continued one after another, watering like a grave the abominable end of her only dream of happiness.

For ten days life went on in common, although Nébel was out almost all day. By tacit agreement, Lydia and he met very few times alone, and although at night they saw each other again, even then they spent long periods in silence.

Lydia herself had plenty to do caring for her mother, who was bedridden at last. Since there was no possibility of rebuilding what was already rotting, and even at the risk of immediate danger, Nébel thought of cutting off the morphine. But he refrained one morning when he walked abruptly into the dining room, surprising Lydia as she hastily pulled down her skirts. She had the syringe in her hand, and fixed her frightened gaze on Nébel.

“Have you been using that for long?” he finally asked her.

“Yes,” Lydia murmured, bending the needle in a spasm.

Nébel looked at her still and shrugged his shoulders.

However, as the mother repeated her injections with a terrible frequency to drown out the kidney pains that the morphine was finishing off, Nébel resolved to attempt the salvation of the poor creature by withholding the drug.

“Octavio! You’re going to kill me!” she cried out with a hoarse plea. “My son Octavio! I couldn’t live a day!”

“You won’t live two hours if I leave you that!” Nébel cut her off.

“It doesn’t matter, my Octavio! Give it to me, give me the morphine!”

Nébel let her arms stretch out uselessly toward him, and went out with Lydia.

“Do you know how grave your mother’s condition is?”

“Yes... The doctors had told me...”

He looked at her fixedly.

“She is much worse than you imagine.”

Lydia turned livid, and looking outside narrowed her eyes and bit her lips in a near sob.

“Isn’t there a doctor here?” she murmured.

“Not here, nor for ten leagues around; but we’ll look for one.”

That afternoon the mail arrived while they were alone in the dining room, and Nébel opened a letter.

“Any news?” Lydia asked, raising her eyes to him anxiously.

“Yes,” Nébel replied, continuing to read.

“From the doctor?” Lydia asked again a moment later, even more anxiously.

“No, from my wife,” he replied in a hard voice, without lifting his eyes.

At ten at night Lydia came running into Nébel’s room.

“Octavio! Mama is dying!...”

They rushed to the sickroom. An intense pallor already cadaverized her face. Her lips were excessively swollen and blue, and from between them escaped a mockery of a word, guttural and full-mouthed:

“Pla... pla... pla...”

Nébel immediately saw the bottle of morphine on the nightstand, almost empty.

“Of course, she’s dying! Who gave her this?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Octavio! A moment ago I heard a noise... Surely she went to look for it in your room when you weren’t there... Mama, poor mama!” she fell sobbing onto the wretched arm dangling to the floor.

Nébel took her pulse; the heart could beat no more, and her temperature was dropping. After a moment her lips stopped their pla... pla, and large purple spots appeared on her skin.

At one in the morning she died. That afternoon, after the burial, Nébel waited for Lydia to finish dressing while the farmhands loaded the trunks into the carriage.

“Take this,” he said to her when she approached him, handing her a check for ten thousand pesos.

Lydia shuddered violently, and her reddened eyes fixed fully on Nébel’s. But he held her gaze.

“Take it, then!” he repeated, surprised.

Lydia took it and went down to pick up her small suitcase. Nébel leaned over her.

“Forgive me,” he told her. “Do not judge me worse than I am.”

They waited a while without speaking by the steps of the carriage, as the train was not yet leaving. When the bell rang, Lidia held out her hand and prepared to climb up. Nébel pressed it, and stood for a long time without letting go, looking at her. Then, stepping forward, he picked Lidia up by the waist and kissed her deeply on the mouth.

The train pulled out. Motionless, Nébel followed with his eyes the window that was fading from sight.

But Lidia did not lean out.