The Gloomy Eyes

After the first few weeks of breaking up with Elena, one night I couldn’t help attending a ball. I had been sitting for a long time, exceedingly bored, when Julio Zapiola, seeing me there, came over to greet me. He is a young man, endowed with rare elegance and a virile character. I had held him in high esteem many years before, and he was then returning from Europe after a long absence.

Thus our chat, which on another occasion wouldn’t have gone beyond eight or ten phrases, prolonged itself this time into a long and unburdened sincerity. I learned that he had married; his wife was right there that night. For my part, I informed him of my courtship with Elena—and our recent breakup. Possibly I complained about the bitter situation, as I remember telling him that I believed any reconciliation to be utterly impossible.

“Do not trust such convulsions,” Zapiola said to me with a calm and serious air. “Almost never does one know at first what will happen or what will be done later. I have in my marriage a novel infinitely more complicated than yours; which does not prevent me from being today the happiest husband on earth. Listen to it, because it may be of great use to you. Five years ago I saw quite frequently a school friend whom I had loved very much before, and above all he me. Whatever the boy promised was fully realized in the man; he was as before inconstant, passionate, with feminine depressions and exaltations. All his anxieties and suspicions were sickly, and you do not ignore how one suffers and makes others suffer with this way of being.”

One day he told me he was in love, and that he would possibly marry very soon. Although he spoke to me with wild enthusiasm about the beauty of his fiancée, this appreciation of his regarding the beauty in question had no value for me. Vezzera insisted, getting irritated with my pride.

“I don’t know what pride has to do with this,” I remarked to him.

“If that’s just it! I am sickly, excitable, exposed to continuous scrutinies and I must always be wrong. You, no! What you say is the just balance of what you have seen!”

“I swear to you...”

“Bah; leave me in peace!” he concluded, increasingly irritated by my tranquility, which for him was another manifestation of pride.

Every time I saw him again in the following days, I found him more exalted with his love. He was thinner, and his eyes laden with dark circles shone with fever.

“Would you like to do something? Let’s go to his house tonight. I’ve already told her about you. You’ll see whether or not she is as I’ve told you.”

We went. I don’t know if you have suffered a similar impression, but when she extended her hand to me and we looked at each other, I felt that through that lukewarm contact, the splendid beauty of those somber eyes and of that mute body was infiltrating a warm wave into my whole being.

When we left, Vezzera said to me:

“And?... is she as I told you?”

“Yes,” I answered him.

“Can impressionable people then communicate an impression conforming to reality?”

“This time, yes,” I couldn’t help laughing.

Vezzera looked at me sideways and remained silent for a long time.

“It seems,” he told me suddenly, “as if you were granting me her beauty only as a supreme grace!”

“Are you crazy?” I answered him.

Vezzera shrugged his shoulders as if I had evaded his answer. He continued without speaking to me, visibly displeased, until at last he turned his feverish eyes toward me once again.

“Really, really do you swear to me that you find her pretty?”

“But of course, idiot! I find her very pretty; do you want more?”

He calmed down then, and with the inevitable reaction of his feminine nerves, he spent an hour with me in wild enthusiasm, burning with the memory of his fiancée.

I went several times more with Vezzera. One night, to a new invitation, I replied that I wasn’t feeling well and that we would leave it for another time. Ten days later I answered the same, and likewise the following week. This time Vezzera looked me straight in the eyes:

“Why don’t you want to go?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to go, but rather that I find myself today in little humor for those things.”

“That’s not it! It’s that you don’t want to go anymore!”

“Me?”

“Yes; and I demand of you as a friend, or as yourself, that you tell me precisely this: Why don’t you want to go anymore?”

“I don’t feel like it!... Do you like that?”

Vezzera looked at me the way consumptives condemned to rest look at a strong man who does not boast of it. And in reality, I believe his phthisis was already rushing upon him.

He immediately noticed his sweaty hands, which were trembling.

“For days I’ve noticed them thinner... Do you know why you don’t want to go anymore? Do you want me to tell you?”

His nostrils were contracted, and his accelerated breathing closed his lips.

“Come on! Don’t be... calm down, that’s best.”

“It’s that I’m going to tell you!”

“Don’t you see that you’re delirious, that you’re dying of fever?” I interrupted him. Fortunately, a violent fit of cough stopped him. I pushed him affectionately.

“Lie down a moment... you’re sick.”

Vezzera reclined on my bed and crossed both hands over his forehead.

A long time passed in silence. Suddenly his voice reached me, slow:

“Do you know what I was going to tell you?... That you didn’t want María to fall in love with you... That’s why you weren’t going.”

“How stupid!” I smiled.

“Yes, stupid! Anything, everything you want!”

We fell mute again. At last I approached him.

“Tonight we’re going,” I told him. “Do you want to?”

“Yes, I want to.”

Four hours later we were arriving there. María greeted me as if she had stopped seeing me the previous day, without seeming in the least bit worried about my long absence.

“Ask her even,” Vezzera laughed with visible affectation, “why he has spent so much time without coming.”

María imperceptibly wrinkled her brow, and turned to me with smiling surprise:

“But I suppose you wouldn’t have had the desire to visit us!”

Although the tone of the exclamation asked for no answer, María remained for an instant in suspense, as if waiting for it. I saw that Vezzera was devouring me with his eyes.

“Even if I should be eternally ashamed,” I replied. “I confess there is some truth...”

“Isn’t it true?” she laughed.

But already in the movement of Vezzera’s feet and the dilation of his nostrils, I knew his nervous tension.

“Tell him to tell you,” he addressed María, “why I really didn’t want to come.”

The attack was so perverse and cowardly that I looked at him with true rage. Vezzera feigned not to realize, and sustained the tense expectation with the convulsive tapping of his foot, while María contracted her eyebrows again.

“Is there something else?” she smiled with an effort.

“Yes, Zapiola is going to tell you...”

“Vezzera!” I exclaimed.

“... That is, not his motive, but the one I attributed to him for not coming here anymore... do you know why?”

“Because he believes that you are going to fall in love with me,” I anticipated, addressing María.

Even before saying this, I saw quite clearly the ridiculousness I was about to fall into; but I had to do it. María burst into laughter, thus making the weariness of her eyes much more noticeable.

“Yes? Were you thinking that, Antenor?”

“No, you would suppose... it was a joke,” he laughed too.

The mother re-entered the living room, and the conversation changed course.

“You’re a scoundrel,” I hastened to tell Vezzera in the eyes when we left.

“Yes,” he answered me looking at me clearly. “I did it on purpose.”

“Did you want to ridicule me?”

“Yes... I wanted to.”

“And aren’t you ashamed? But what the devil is the matter with you? What do you have against me?”

He did not answer me, shrugging his shoulders.

“Go to the devil!” I muttered. But a moment later, as I parted from him, I felt his cruel and distrustful gaze fixed on mine.

“Do you swear to me by whatever you hold most dear, by whatever you hold most dear, that you don’t know what I’m thinking?”

“No,” I answered him dryly.

“You’re not lying, you’re not lying?”

“I am not lying.”

And I was lying profoundly.

“Good, I’m glad... Let’s drop this. Until tomorrow. When do you want us to go back there?”

“Never! It’s over.”

I saw that true anguish dilated his eyes.

“Don’t you want to go anymore?” he told me with a hoarse and strange voice.

“No, never again.”

“As you wish, better... You’re not angry, are you?”

“Oh, don’t be a child!” I laughed.

“And I was truly irritated against Vezzera, against myself...”

The following day Vezzera entered my room at dusk. It had been raining since morning with a severe storm, and the dampness and cold were weighing me down. From the very first moment I noticed that Vezzera was burning with fever.

“I’ve come to ask you for something,” he began.

“Cut it out!” I interrupted. “Why did you go out on a night like this? Don’t you see that you’re playing with your life by doing this?”

“I don’t care about life... in a few months this is over... for the better. What I want is for you to go back over there.”

“No! I already told you.”

“No, come on! I don’t want you to not want to go! This is killing me! Why don’t you want to go?”

“I’ve already told you: I-don’t-want-to! Not another word about this, do you hear?”

The anguish of the previous night made his eyes abnormally wide again.

“Then,” he articulated in a deeply strained voice, “it’s what I think, what you know I thought when you lied last night. So... Well, let’s drop it, it’s nothing. Until tomorrow.”

I stopped him by the shoulder and he immediately slumped into the chair, with his head on his arms upon the table.

“Stay,” I told him. “You’re going to sleep here with me. Don’t be alone.”

For a while we sat in profound silence. Finally he articulated without any intonation:

“It’s just that I get a crazy urge to kill myself...”

“That’s why! Stay here!... Don’t be alone.”

But I could not hold him back, and I spent the whole night uneasy.

You know what a terrible power of attraction suicide has, when the fixed idea has tangled itself in a web of diseased nerves. It would have been necessary at all costs for Vezzera not to be alone in his room. And even so, the motive always persisted.

What I feared happened. At seven in the morning a letter from Vezzera was brought to me, he having been dead for four hours already. He told me in it that it was far too clear that I was in love with his fiancée, and she with me. That as for María, he had the most complete certainty and that I had done nothing but confirm my love to him with my refusal to go further. That I should be far from believing that he was killing himself out of grief, absolutely not. But he was not a man capable of sacrificing anyone to his selfish happiness, and that was why he was leaving me and her free. Besides, his lungs were giving out... it was a matter of time. That I should make María happy, as he would have wished..., etc.

And two or three more phrases. It is useless to recount to you in detail my turmoil of those days. But what stood out clearly for me in his letter—for me who knew him—was the despair of jealousy that led him to suicide. That was the only motive; the rest: sacrifice and a clear conscience, had no value whatsoever.

Amidst it all remained most vividly, radiant with sudden happiness, the image of María. I know the effort I had to make, when she belonged to Vezzera, to stop going to see her. And I had believed I could guess as well that something similar was happening in her. And now, free! yes, the two of us alone, but with a corpse between us.

After a fortnight I went to her house. We spoke vaguely, avoiding the slightest allusion. She scarcely answered me; and although she made an effort to do so, she could not sustain my gaze for a single moment.

“Then,” I told her at last, standing up, “I think the most discreet thing is for me not to come and see you ever again.”

“I think the same,” she replied.

But I didn’t move.

“Never again?” I added.

“No, never... as you wish,” she burst into a sob, as two defeated tears rolled down her cheeks.

As I drew near she put her hands to her face, and as soon as she felt my touch she shuddered violently and burst into sobs. I bent down behind her and put my arms around her head.

“Yes, my dearest soul... will you? We can be very happy. That doesn’t matter at all... will you?”

“No, no!” she answered me, “we couldn’t... no, impossible!”

“Later on, yes, my love!... Yes, afterwards?”

“No, no, no!” she redoubled her sobs still further.

Then I left in despair, thinking with rabid bitterness that that imbecile, by killing himself, had killed the two of us as well.

Here my story ends. Now, would you like to see her?

“María!” he addressed a young woman passing by on someone’s arm. “It’s time; it’s three o’clock.”

“Already? Three o’clock?” she turned around. “I wouldn’t have thought so. Well, let’s go. Just a moment.”

Zapiola then said to me:

“You see, my friend, how one can be happy after what I’ve told you. And your case... Wait a second.”

And while introducing me to his wife:

“I was telling X how close we came to not being happy.”

The young woman smiled at her husband, and I recognized those dark eyes of which he had spoken to me, and which, like all those of that temperament, sparkle with happiness when laughing.

“Yes,” she replied simply, “we suffered a little...”

“You see!” Zapiola laughed as he said goodbye. “In your place I would go back to the drawing-room.”

I remained alone. Elena’s thought returned once more; but amidst my displeasure I recalled at every moment the impression Zapiola received upon seeing María’s eyes for the first time.

And I did nothing but remember them.