The Promise · II

Upon uttering these last words, the count stood up and took a few paces as if beside himself and gripped by a profound terror.

The squire wiped away a tear that was running down his cheek. Believing his master mad, he did not insist, however, on contradicting his ideas, and contented himself with saying to him in a deeply moved voice:

“Come... let us leave the tent for a moment; perhaps the evening breeze will refresh your temples, calming that incomprehensible pain, for which I find no words of comfort.”

The Christian encampment stretched across the entire plain of Guadaíra, until it touched the left bank of the Guadalquivir. Opposite the camp and standing out against the luminous horizon rose the walls of Seville, flanked by battlemented towers and strongholds. Above the crown of battlements overflowed the greenery of the Moorish city’s thousand gardens, and amid the dark patches of foliage gleamed the snow-white belvederes, the minarets of the mosques, and the gigantic watchtower, upon whose aerial parapet the four great golden spheres—struck by the sun and seeming from the Christian camp like four flames—flashed sparks of light.

Don Fernando’s enterprise, one of the most heroic and daring of that era, had brought around him the most celebrated warriors from the different kingdoms of the Peninsula, with not a few coming from strange and distant lands as well, called by fame to unite their efforts with those of the holy king.

Spread out along the plain, therefore, could be seen tents of every shape and color, upon the peaks of which fluttered in the wind various banners bearing party-per-pale shields, stars, griffins, lions, chains, bars, and cauldrons, and a hundred other heraldic figures or symbols that proclaimed the name and quality of their owners. Through the streets of that improvised city circulated in all directions a multitude of soldiers who, speaking diverse dialects and each dressed according to the custom of his country and armed after his own fashion, formed a strange and picturesque contrast.

Here some noblemen rested from the fatigues of combat, seated on larch benches at the door of their tents and playing backgammon while their pages poured wine for them in metal cups; there some foot soldiers took advantage of a moment of leisure to mend and repair their weapons, broken in the last skirmish; farther on, the most expert crossbowmen of the host covered a target with arrows amid the acclamations of the multitude, astounded by their skill; and the rumble of drums, the clamor of trumpets, the voices of itinerant merchants, the clanging of iron against iron, the songs of the minstrels who entertained their listeners with accounts of portentous feats, and the shouts of the heralds publishing the ordinances of the camp masters, filling the air with a thousand and one discordant noises, lent to that picture of martial customs a life and animation impossible to paint with words.

The Count of Gómara, accompanied by his faithful squire, walked through the lively groups without raising his eyes from the ground, silent, sad, as if no object struck his sight nor the slightest murmur reached his ear. He walked mechanically, like a somnambulist whose spirit, agitated in the world of dreams, moves and marches without consciousness of its actions and as if dragged along by a will foreign to his own.

Near the king’s tent and in the middle of a circle of soldiers, little pages, and common folk who listened to him with their mouths open, hurrying to buy some of the trinkets that he announced at the top of his lungs and with hyperbolic praises, stood a strange personage, half pilgrim, half minstrel, who, now reciting a sort of litany in barbarous Latin, now uttering a buffoonery or a ribald joke, mixed into his endless tale jests capable of making a crossbowmen blush with devout prayers, stories of picaresque loves with saints’ legends. In the immense saddlebags hanging from his shoulders a thousand different objects were jumbled and confused: ribbons touched at the sepulcher of Saint James; slips of parchment with words that he claimed were Hebrew, the very ones spoken by King Solomon when he founded the temple, and the only ones to free oneself from all kinds of contagious diseases; marvelous balms to knit men cut in half; Gospels sewn in little brocade bags; secrets to make oneself loved by all women; relics of the patron saints of every place in Spain; trinkets, little chains, belts, medals, and many other baubles of alchemy, glass, and lead.

When the count drew near the group formed by the pilgrim and his admirers, the latter was beginning to tune a sort of bandura or Arab guittern with which he accompanied himself in the recounting of his romances. After he had stretched the strings well one after another and very calmly, while his companion went around the circle extracting the last farthings from the listeners’ meager purses, the pilgrim began to sing in a nasal voice and with a monotonous, plaintive tune a ballad that always ended with the same refrain.

The count approached the group and paid attention. By a seemingly strange coincidence, the title of that story corresponded in every way to the gloomy thoughts that gripped his spirit. As the singer had announced before beginning, the ballad was titled the Romance of the Dead Hand.

Upon hearing such a strange announcement, the squire struggled to drag his master away from that spot; but the count, his eyes fixed on the minstrel, remained motionless, listening to this ditty:

The maiden has a lover who called himself a squire; the squire announces to her that to the wars he was departing. —You go and perhaps will not return. —I shall return by my life’s breath. While the lover swears, they say the wind repeated: Ill betide whoever in a man’s promises trusts!

The count with the troop from his castle was sallying forth; she who has recognized him with great affliction was moaning: —Woe is me, for the count is leaving and takes my honor away! While the hapless maid weeps, they say the wind repeated: Ill betide whoever in a man’s promises trusts!

Her brother, who was there, these words was hearing: —You have dishonored us, he says. —He swore to me he would return. —He will not find you if he returns where he was wont to find you. While the unhappy maid dies, they say the wind repeated: Ill betide whoever in a man’s promises trusts!

Dead they bear her to the grove, they have buried her in the shade; for all the earth they threw upon her, the hand would not be covered: the hand where a ring that the count gave her she wore. At night above the tomb they say the wind repeated: Ill betide whoever in a man’s promises trusts!

Scarcely had the singer finished the last stanza when, breaking through the wall of onlookers who stepped back with respect upon recognizing him, the count reached the spot where the pilgrim was, and gripping him firmly by the arm, asked him in a low, convulsive voice:

“From what land are you?”

“From the land of Soria,” he replied without altering.

“And where did you learn that romance? To whom does the story you tell refer?” his interlocutor exclaimed once again, each time with signs of deeper emotion.

“Sir,” said the pilgrim, fixing his eyes upon the count’s with an unshakeable steadfastness: “this ditty is repeated from one to another by the villagers of the field of Gómara, and it refers to an unfortunate woman cruelly wronged by a powerful man. High judgments of God have permitted that when she was buried, the hand upon which her lover placed a ring when making her a promise should remain forever outside the grave. You will know perhaps whose task it is to fulfill it.”

In a miserable hamlet situated to one side of the road that leads to Gómara, I have not long ago seen the spot where it is affirmed the strange ceremony of the count’s marriage took place.

After he, kneeling upon the humble grave, clasped Margarita’s hand in his, and a priest authorized by the Pope blessed the gloomy union, rumor has it that the prodigy ceased, and the dead hand sank down forever.

At the foot of some ancient and stout trees there is a small patch of meadow, which upon the arrival of spring covers itself spontaneously with flowers.

The country folk say that Margaret is buried there.