-Iii- · III

Steam began to hiss in the boilers of the great engine, which set in motion both the workshop machinery and the washing apparatus. The water, which played so principal a part in this operation, began to flow through the high conduits from which it was to pour over the cylinders. Loud laughter from women and harsh barks from men returning from their morning dram heralded the day’s labor; and at last the cylindrical screens began to revolve with an infernal shriek; the water rushed from one to another in fine spray, and the dirty earth was tossed in a dizzy whirl, rolling and tumbling from wheel to wheel until it was reduced to a fine, chocolate-colored silt. The sound was like a thousand jaws with loose teeth chewing sand; it seemed a mill by its dizzying movement, a kaleidoscope by the play of light, water, and earth, and a huge rattle composed of countless oddments by its noise. One could not fix one’s gaze, without feeling vertigo, upon that ceaseless tossing of an infinite skein of water threads, now clear and transparent, now dyed red by ferruginous clay; nor could any human head unaccustomed to such a spectacle endure the fierce battle of a thousand cogwheels ceaselessly biting one another, of hooks crossing and scraping, and of screws that, as they turned, wailed with a piteous cry for oil.

The washing took place in the open air. The driving belts came humming from the engine house. Other belts were set in motion, and then was heard a rhythmic crash, a deafening beat like the tread of giants or a violent internal throbbing of Mother Earth. It was the great steam hammer of the workshop beginning to strike. Its mighty blow pounded iron like soft dough; and those forms of wheels, axles, and rails, which seem eternal to us because of their hardness, began to warp, twisting and contorting like agonized faces. The hammer, dealing uniform blows, created new forms as hard as those of geology, which are the laborious handiwork of ages. Indeed, the works of force closely resemble those of patience.

Black men, who looked like coal made human, gathered around the red-hot objects pulled from the forges, working them with that incandescent extension of the fingers called tongs. A strange sculpture is that which takes fire for its genius and the hammer for its chisel! The wheels and axles of thousands of tramcars and the damaged pieces of the washing apparatus were repaired there, while picks, mattocks, and barrows were constructed. At the back of the shop saws made the timber shriek, and that same iron, schooled to labor by fire, mangled the generous fibers of trees uprooted from the soil.

Outside, too, the mules had been harnessed to long trains of wagons. They were seen passing by, hauling waste earth to dump on the embankments, or ore to carry to the washing plant. Those long reptiles crossed and passed one another without ever colliding. They entered the mouths of the galleries, where their resemblance to the slippery denizens of damp crevices became complete; and when an unruly mule brayed in the darkness of the tunnel, one might have fancied the saurians were squabbling with shrill cries. Far off, in the remotest ravines, hundreds of men struck the earth with picks to tear from it, piece by piece, its treasure. They were the sculptors of those capricious and colossal shapes that stood attentive, with silent gravity, to the invasion of man into the mysterious geological spheres. The miners tore down here, bored yonder, excavated farther off, scraped elsewhere, broke through the chalky rock, shattered the delicate plates of Samnite and schistose slate, cast aside the argillaceous limestone, separated the limonite and oligist, and broke up the precious dolomite, turning over the ground incessantly until they came upon zinc silicate—that silver of Europe which, though it be the stuff of which saucepans are made, is none the less a magnificent source of wealth and civilization. Upon it Belgium has raised the standard of her moral and political greatness. Truly, tinplate has its epic too.

The sky was clear; the sun poured forth its beams unhindered, and the vast domain of Socartes gleamed with a sudden crimson hue. Red were the sculptured rocks, red the precious ore, red the waste earth piled upon the long embankments like Babylonian ramparts; red the ground, red the rails and the cars, red all the machinery, red the water, and red the men and women who toiled across the whole expanse of Socartes. The deep brick color was uniform, with subtle variations, and universal over all: upon the earth and the houses, upon the iron and the clothing. The women busy at the washing looked like a choir of equivocal nymphs fashioned from raw ferruginous clay. Down the ravine toward the river ran a stream of scarlet water. One would have thought it was the sweat of that immense labor of men and engines, of iron and muscles.

Nela came out of her house. She too, though she did not work in the mines, was lightly stained with red, for the dust of the calamine earth spares nobody. She carried in her hand a crust of bread that Señana had given her for breakfast; and eating it, she walked swiftly along, distracted by nothing, serious and pensive. She soon passed beyond the buildings, and having climbed the inclined plane, ascended the steps cut in the earth until she reached the houses of the hamlet of Aldeacorba. The first she came to was a charming ancestral dwelling, large, solid, cheerful, recently restored and painted, with stone firewalls, carved eaves, and a broad coat of arms encircled with granite foliage. The house would sooner have lacked its crest than its grapevine, whose leafy shoots resembled a mustache perched on the proper part of its face, the two windows being the eyes, the coat of arms the nose, and the long balcony the mouth, ever smiling. To make the personification complete, a beam projected from the balcony to support the clothesline, and with this addition the house with a face was smoking a cigar. Its roof was shaped like a forage cap, with a dormer window resembling a tassel. The chimney could be nothing other than an ear. One did not need to be a physiognomist to perceive that this house breathed peace, comfort, and an easy conscience.

Access to it was through a small walled courtyard, and on the right side lay a fine kitchen garden. When Nela entered, the cows were being driven out to pasture. After exchanging a few words with the farm lad, who was a formidable youngster of some three spans in height and ten years of age, she went toward a stout, mustachioed gentleman, grizzled, ruddy-faced, with a pleasant countenance and kindly glance, of an appearance half-soldier and half-yeoman, who appeared in shirtsleeves and suspenders, displaying his hairy, muscular arms to the elbow. Before the girl could speak, the gentleman in suspenders turned indoors and said:

“My son, here is Nela.”

From the house came forth a young man, a statue formed of the finest human clay—grave, erect, with his head motionless and his eyes fixed and set in their sockets like lenses displayed in a showcase. His face seemed of ivory, chiseled with exquisite refinement; yet while his skin had the softness of a maiden’s, it was masculine in the highest degree, and there was no part or lineament in his features that lacked that sovereign perfection with which Hellenic thought was expressed thousands of years ago. Even his eyes, purely sculptural because they lacked sight, were very beautiful, large and finely cut. What impaired them was their fixedness and the thought that behind that fixedness lay night. Deprived of the gift that forms the core of human expression, that face of a blind Antinous possessed the cold serenity of marble, transformed by genius and chisel into a statue and by vital energy into a human being. A breath, a ray of light, a sensation would have sufficed to animate the fair stone, which, having already all the graces of form, lacked only the consciousness of its own beauty, which springs from the power of perceiving outer loveliness.

He appeared to be twenty years old, and his well-knit, graceful body, built in admirable proportions, was in every way worthy of the peerless head it bore. Never was seen a more sorrowful defect of Nature than that represented by so finished a type of human beauty, endowed on the one hand with wondrous gifts and deprived on the other of the sense that most closely unites man with his fellows and with the marvelous harmony of the universe. So grievous was the flaw that those prodigal gifts were rendered well-nigh useless, just as if, when creating all things, the Creator had left them in darkness so that they could not delight in their own charms. And to make the imperfection—wrath of God!—still more evident, the young man had received a portentous inner light, an intellect of the highest order. This, joined to the lack of power to perceive the visible idea, which is form—being at once divine as an angel, beautiful as a man, and blind as a plant—was truly a terrible thing. We cannot fathom, alas, the secret of these cruel blemishes. If we could, the doors would open for us that conceal the primordial mysteries of the moral and physical worlds; we would understand the vast mystery of sorrow, of evil, of death, and could measure the perpetual shadow that ceaselessly pursues goodness and life.

Don Francisco Penáguilas, the youth’s father, was a man more than good; he was irreproachable, singularly prudent, kind, affable, honorable, magnanimous, and not without learning. No one had ever hated him; he was the most respected of all the wealthy landowners of the district, and more than one dispute was settled through the ever-wise mediation of the gentleman of Aldeacorba de Suso. The house where we have seen him was his birthplace. As a young man he had lived in America, and returning to Spain without fortune, had served in the Civil Guard. Retiring to his native village, where he devoted himself to agriculture and cattle breeding, he inherited a moderate estate, and at the time of our story had just inherited another of great value.

His wife, who was an Andalusian, had died very young, leaving him an only son, who from birth was found to be entirely deprived of the most precious of the senses. This was the sharpest grief that embittered the worthy father’s life. What did it matter to him to amass wealth and see good fortune favor his affairs and smile upon his hearth? For whom was all this? For one who could see neither the sleek cows, nor the smiling pastures, nor the full barns, nor the orchard laden with fruit. Don Francisco would have given his own eyes to his son, remaining blind himself for the rest of his days, if such generosities were practicable in this world of ours; but since they are not, Don Francisco could fulfill the noble promptings of his heart only by providing the unfortunate youth with everything that might soften the darkness in which he lived. For him were all the cares and infinite tendernesses whose secret belongs to mothers, and sometimes to fathers when mothers are no more. He never thwarted his son in anything that might minister to his comfort and amusement within the bounds of virtue and morality. He entertained him with stories and reading; he tended him with solicitous care, looking after his health, his legitimate pleasures, his instruction, and his Christian upbringing; for the master of Penáguilas, who was somewhat strict in his principles, used to say: “I will not have my son be twice blind.”

Seeing him come out, and Nela accompany him, he called to them affectionately:

“Do not go far today. Do not run.... Good-bye.”

He watched them from the gate until they turned the corner of the orchard wall. Then he went indoors, for he had several matters to attend to: writing a note to his brother Manuel, milking a cow, pruning a tree, and seeing whether the speckled hen had laid.

-VI-

Nonsense

Pablo and Marianela set out into the open country, preceded by Choto, who ran to and fro, joyful and frisking, wagging his tail and bestowing his caresses equally upon his master and his master’s guide.

“Nela,” said Pablo, “it is a very beautiful day today. The air is mild and fresh, and the sun warms without burning. Where shall we go?”

“We will strike out across these meadows,” replied Nela, slipping her hand into one of the jacket pockets of the youth. “Let us see what you have brought me today.”

“Search well and you will find something,” said Pablo with a smile.

“Ah, Mother of God! Raw chocolate... and do I not love raw chocolate!... Walnuts... something wrapped in paper... what is it? Ah! Mother of God, a sweetmeat.... Holy God, and do I not love sweetmeats! How delicious it is! In my house we never see such dainty fare, Pablo. We do not live in luxury as to food. True, we do not indulge in it for clothes either. In short, we spend nothing on anything.”

“Where are we going today?” the blind youth asked again.

“Wherever you please, child of my heart,” replied Nela, eating the sweetmeat and throwing away the wrapping. “Speak the word, king of the world.”

Nela’s little black eyes sparkled with joy, and her face, like that of a merry, lively little bird, multiplied its expressions, in constant motion. Looking at her, one fancied one saw a flickering play of trembling reflections, like those produced by light upon the surface of rippling water. That frail creature, in whom the soul seemed pressed and confined within a wretched body, expanded and grew wonderfully when alone with her master and friend. In his company she possessed spontaneity, wit, sensibility, grace, charm, and fancy. When she parted from him, it seemed as if the dark gates of a prison closed upon her.

“Well, I say we will go wherever you like,” observed the blind youth. “I like obeying you. If it suits you, we will go to the woods beyond Saldeoro. That is, if it suits you.”

“Good, good, we will go to the woods,” exclaimed Nela, clapping her hands. “But as there is no hurry, we will sit down whenever we are tired.”

“And is it not a delightful spot where the spring is, Nela, and where there are those great logs that seem placed there on purpose for us to sit upon, and where so many, many birds sing that it is like paradise?”

“We will pass by the mill that you say talks, mumbling its words like a drunken man. Oh, what a lovely day, and how happy I am!”

“Does the sun shine brightly, Nela? Even if you tell me it does, I shall not understand it, for I do not know what shining means.”

“It shines very brightly, yes, my young master. And what does that matter to you? The sun is very ugly. One cannot look it in the face.”

“Why not?”

“Because it hurts.”

“What hurts?”

“The eyes. What do you feel when you are happy?”

“When I am free, with you, the two of us alone in the fields?”

“Yes.”

“Why, I feel a coolness rising within my breast, a sweet softness....”

“There you have it! Mother of God! Now you know how the sun shines.”

“With coolness.”

“No, silly.”

“With what, then?”

“With that.”

“With that? And what is that?”

“That,” affirmed Nela once more, with the most resolute conviction.

“I see that such things cannot be explained. Formerly I formed an idea of day and night. How? You shall hear: it was day when people were talking; it was night when people were silent and cocks crowed. Now I do not use the same comparisons. It is day when you and I are together; it is night when we part.”

“Oh, holy Mother of God!” exclaimed Nela, tossing back the locks that fell over her forehead. “To me, who have eyes, it seems the very same.”