The Inn of the Cats · II

A few days later I left Seville, and many years passed without my returning to it, and I forgot many things that had happened to me there; but the memory of such great, unknown, and tranquil happiness was never erased from my mind.

As I have said, many years elapsed after I left Seville without my entirely forgetting that afternoon, the memory of which sometimes passed through my imagination like a benevolent breeze that refreshes the burning brow.

When chance led me once more to the great city that is so rightly called the queen of Andalusia, one of the things that most caught my attention was the remarkable change that had taken place during my absence. Buildings, blocks of houses, and entire neighborhoods had sprung up at the magic touch of industry and capital: everywhere factories, gardens, recreational estates, leafy avenues; but, unfortunately, many venerable antiquities had disappeared.

I visited many superb buildings once again, full of historical and artistic memories; I wandered and lost myself once more among the thousands and thousands of twists and turns of the curious Santa Cruz neighborhood; during my walks I missed many new things that had risen I know not how; I longed for many old things that had vanished I know not why, and finally I made my way to the riverbank. The riverbank has always been the favorite place for my excursions in Seville.

After I had admired the magnificent panorama offered at the point where the iron bridge joins its opposite banks; after I had surveyed, with absorbed gaze, the thousand details, palaces, and white homesteads; after I had reviewed the innumerable ships moored in their waters, unfurling to the air the light pennants of a thousand colors, and heard the confused hum of the dock, where everything breathes activity and movement, ascending the river’s current with my imagination, I transported myself as far as San Jerónimo.

I remembered that calm, restful, and luminous landscape where the rich vegetation of Andalusia displays its natural charms without adornment. As if I had gone in a boat upstream, I saw pass by once more, with the help of memory, on one side the Cartuja with its groves and its tall, slender towers; on the other the Humeros neighborhood, the ancient city walls, half Arab, half Roman, the orchards with their fences covered in brambles, and the waterwheels shaded by a few isolated and corpulent trees, and finally, San Jerónimo... Upon arriving here with my imagination, the memories I still kept of the famous inn presented themselves to me more vividly than ever, and I fancied that I was once again witnessing those popular festivities, and hearing the girls sing as they swung on the swing, and seeing the groups of common folk wander through the meadows, some eating a snack, others arguing, some laughing, others dancing, and all of them stirring about, overflowing with youth, animation, or joy. There she was, surrounded by her children, far now from the group of lasses who laughed and sang, and there he was, calm and satisfied with his happiness, looking with tenderness, gathered around him and happy, at all the people he loved most in the world: his wife, his children, his father, who was then as he had been ten years before, sitting at the door of his inn, impassively rolling his paper cigarette, with no other change than having his head, which had been gray, as white as snow.

A friend who was accompanying me on the walk, noticing the sort of trance in which I had been absorbed by these ideas for a few minutes, finally shook me by the arm, asking me:

“What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking,” I answered him, “about the Venta de los Gatos, and turning over here, inside my imagination, all the pleasant memories I keep of an afternoon I spent in San Jerónimo... At this very moment I was finishing a story that I had left started there, and I was finishing it so much to my liking that I believe it can have no other ending than the one I have given it. And speaking of the Venta de los Gatos,” I continued, turning to my friend, “when are we going there one afternoon to have a snack and a spell of revelry?”

“A spell of revelry!” exclaimed my interlocutor, with an expression of astonishment that I could not account for at the time; “a spell of revelry! Well, I must say the place is well suited for the purpose.”

“And why not?” I replied, in turn astonished by his astonishment.

“The reason is very simple,” he told me finally; “because a hundred paces from the inn they have built the new cemetery.”

Then it was I who looked at him with astonished eyes, and I remained silent for a few moments before adding a single word.

We returned to the city, and that day passed, and several more passed, without my being able to entirely shake off the impression that such unexpected news had caused me. No matter how much I turned it over, my story of the dark-haired girl had no ending now, for I could not conceive an invented one, a picture of happiness and joy with a cemetery for a background seeming utterly unlikely to me.

One afternoon, resolved to clear up my doubts, I feigned a slight indisposition so as not to accompany my friend on our accustomed walks, and I set out alone on the road to the inn. When I left the Macarena and its picturesque suburb behind me, and began to cross that labyrinth of orchards along a narrow path, I already fancied I noticed something strange in all that surrounded me.

Whether the afternoon was a little overcast, or whether my state of mind inclined me toward melancholy ideas, the truth is that I felt cold and sadness, and noticed a silence that reminded me of complete solitude, as sleep reminds one of death.

I walked for a while without stopping, finished crossing the orchards to shorten the distance, and entered the road of San Lázaro, from where the convent of San Jerónimo can already be glimpsed in the distance.

Perhaps it is an illusion; but it seems to me that along the road the dead travel, even the trees and the grass ultimately take on a different color. At least it seemed to me there that warm and harmonious tones were lacking, freshness in the grove, breeze in the space, and light in the terrain. The landscape was monotonous, the figures black and isolated.

Here a cart moving slowly along, covered in mourning, without raising dust, without the crack of a whip, without commotion, almost without movement; yonder an ill-favored man with a hoe on his shoulder, or a priest in his long, dark habit, or a group of badly dressed or repulsive-looking old men, with extinguished candles in their hands, returning silently, with lowered heads and eyes fixed on the ground. I believed myself transported I know not where; for everything I saw reminded me of a landscape whose contours were the same as ever, but whose colors had been erased, so to speak, leaving nothing of them but a dubious half-tint. The impression I experienced can only be compared to that which we feel in those dreams in which, by an inexplicable phenomenon, things are and are not at the same time, and the places where we believe ourselves to be are transformed in part in a bizarre and impossible way.

Finally, I arrived at the little inn: I remembered it more by the sign, which still kept its name written in large letters on one of its walls, than by anything else; for as for the homestead, it seemed to me that it had even changed its shape and proportions. At once I can assure you that it was much more ruinous, abandoned, and sad. The shadow of the cemetery, which rose in the background, seemed to stretch toward it, enveloping it in a dark projection like a shroud. The innkeeper was alone, completely alone. I recognized that he was the same man from ten years ago; and I recognized him I know not why, for in this time he had aged to the point of appearing a decrepit and dying old man, whereas when I saw him he was scarcely fifty, and overflowed with health, contentment, and life.

I sat down at one of the deserted tables; I asked for something to drink, which the innkeeper served me, and from one stray word to another we finally drifted into a sustained conversation about the love story whose final chapter I still did not know, despite having tried to guess it several times.

“Everything,” the poor old man told me, “everything seems to have conspired against us since the time you remind me of. You already know: Amparo was the apple of our eyes, she had been raised here since she was born, she was almost the joy of the house; she never could miss her own, because I loved her like a father; my son also grew up loving her since they were children, first like a brother, later with an even greater affection. She was already on the eve of getting married; I had offered them the best of my modest property, for with the proceeds of my trade I felt I had more than enough to live comfortably, when I don’t know what evil devil grew envious of our happiness, and shattered it in a moment. First it began to be whispered that they were going to place a cemetery on this side of San Jerónimo: some said closer, others further away; and while we were all uneasy and fearful, trembling for this project to be carried out, a greater and more certain misfortune fell upon us.”

One day two gentlemen arrived here in a carriage. They asked me a thousand and one questions about Amparo, whom I had taken out of the foundling home when she was little; they asked me for the swaddling clothes in which she was abandoned and which I kept, it turning out in the end that Amparo was the daughter of a very rich gentleman, who worked through the courts to tear her away from us, and worked so hard that he managed to achieve it. I do not even wish to remember the day they took her away. She wept like a Magdalene, my son wanted to do something crazy, I was like stunned without understanding what was happening to me. She left! That is to say, she did not leave, because she loved us too much to leave; but they took her away, and a curse fell upon this house. My son, after an outburst of dreadful despair, fell into something like a lethargy; I cannot say what happened to me; I believed that the world had ended for me.

While this was happening, the cemetery began to rise; people fled from these surroundings, the festivals, the songs, and the music came to an end, and all the joy of these fields ended, just as all the joy of our souls had ended.

And Amparo was no happier than we were: raised here in the open air, amid the bustle and liveliness of the inn, educated to be happy in poverty, they took her out of this life, and she withered away just like flowers pulled from a garden to be taken to a drawing room. My son made incredible efforts to see her again, to speak to her for a moment. Everything was useless: her family would not have it. At last he saw her, but he saw her dead. Her funeral passed by here. I knew nothing, and I don’t know why I burst into tears when I saw the coffin. My heart, which is very loyal, shouted to me:

“She is young like Amparo; she too must have been beautiful; who knows if she is the same one? And she was: my son followed the funeral, entered the courtyard, and as the box was opened, he gave a cry, fell senseless to the ground, and thus they brought him back to me. Afterwards he went mad, and mad he is.”

When the poor old man reached this point in his narration, two gravediggers with a sinister figure and repulsive aspect entered the inn. Having finished their task, they came to have a drink “to the health of the dead,” as one of them said, accompanying the joke with a stupid smile. The innkeeper wiped a tear with the back of his hand, and went to serve them.

Night was beginning to fall, dark and most dreary. The sky was black and the countryside the same. From the boughs of the trees still hung, half-rotted, the rope of the swing, stirred by the wind; it seemed to me the cord of a gallows still oscillating after a culprit had been cut down. Only a few confused murmurs reached my ears: the distant barking of the orchard dogs, the squeaking of a water-wheel, long, plaintive, and sharp like a lament, the broken and horrible words of the gravediggers conspiring in low voices over a sacrilegious theft... I know not; in my memory there remains, of this fantastic scene of desolation no less than of the other scene of joy, only a confused recollection, impossible to reproduce. What I seem to hear just as I heard it then, is this song that a plaintive voice intoned, suddenly disturbing the silence of those places:

In the wagon of the dead she has passed by here; she had one hand hanging out, and by it I knew her.

It was the poor boy, who was locked in one of the rooms of the inn, where he spent his days contemplating the portrait of his lover motionless without uttering a word, scarcely eating, without weeping, without his lips parting except to sing that simple and tender ditty, which encloses a poem of sorrow that I learned to decipher then.