María Lucena, with her mother and a chorus girl friend were waiting for him.
“Well, you’re pretty late,” said María Lucena as she saw him enter the café.
Quentin shrugged his shoulders, sat down and called the waiter.
María Lucena was the daughter of a farm operator near Cordova. She had little voice, but a great deal of grace in her singing and dancing; a strong pair of hips that oscillated with a quivering motion as she walked, a pale, vague-looking face; and a pair of black, shining eyes. María Lucena married a prompter, who after three or four months of wedded life, considered it natural and logical that he should live on his wife; but she broke up the combination by throwing him out of the house.
The girl who accompanied María Lucena in the café was a chorus girl of the type that soon stand out from their sisters and begin to take small parts. She was a small woman, with very lively black eyes, a thin nose, a mouth with a mocking smile that lifted the commissures[212] of her lips upward, and black hair adorned with two red carnations.
The old woman with them was María’s mother; fat, wrinkled, and covered with moles, with a lively but suspicious look in her eyes.
Quentin began to eat supper with the women. His melancholy fit of blues of the day before had left him, but he looked sad for dignity’s sake, and because it was consistent with his character.
María Lucena, who had noticed Quentin’s abstraction, glanced at him from time to time attentively.
“Well, let’s be going,” said María.
The two girls and the old woman arose, as it was time for the entertainment to begin, and Quentin was left alone, distracted by his efforts to convince himself as well as others, that he was very sad.
Then Springer, the Swiss, came in and sat by Quentin’s side.
“What’s the matter?” he said, taking his friend’s funereal look seriously.
“I feel sad today. Yesterday I saw a girl I used to like. The granddaughter of a marquis. She who married Juan de Dios.”
“What then? What happened to you?”
“She looks badly. She won’t last long.”
“The poor little thing!”
In a lugubrious voice Quentin told all about his love affair, heaping on insignificant details, and wearying excuses.
Springer listened to him with a smile. His fine, spiritual countenance changed expression sympathetically with everything his friend said. Then he himself spoke confusedly. Yes, he too had had a romantic love[213] affair, ... a very romantic one, ... with a young lady; but he was only a poor Swiss plebeian.
Any one who heard them would have said that Quentin’s affair had lasted years, and the Swiss’s only days. It was exactly the opposite. Quentin’s fidelity lasted just about two or three months, at the end of which time he began his affair with María Lucena. On the other hand, the Swiss had been faithful for years and years to an impossible love.
As they chatted, Don Gil Sabadía, the arch?ologist, appeared in the café. After shaking hands with the Swiss and with Quentin, he sat down at their table.
“It’s a long time since I have seen you,” he said to Quentin. “How about it—are we gaining ground?”
“Psh! If I could get out....”
“Don’t pay any attention to him today,” said Springer. “He’s full of spleen.”
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the arch?ologist.
“Women.”
“The females in this city are very attractive, comrade; they are good to look at.”
“They seem insignificant to me,” said Quentin.
“Man alive, don’t say that,” exclaimed the Swiss.
“Pale-faced, rings under their eyes, weak, badly nourished....”
“Will you deny their wit, too?” asked Springer.
“Yes,” answered Quentin. “They make a lot of gestures, and have a fantastic manner of speech that is overloaded with imagery. It’s a sort of negro talk. I always notice that when María Lucena tells something, she compares everything, whether material or not, with something material: ‘it’s better than bread,’ or ‘it has [214]less taste than a squash’ ... everything must be materialized; if not, I don’t believe she would understand it.... She is like a child ... like an impertinent child.”
“What a portrait!” exclaimed the Swiss, laughing.
“Then she makes divisions and subdivisions of everything; every object has twenty names. There is a little bottle of cherry brandy in the house—of that cherry brandy that I hold as something sacred; well, sometimes María calls it ‘the parrot,’ sometimes ‘the greenfinch,’ and sometimes, ‘the green bird.’... And that isn’t all. The other day, pointing to the bottle, she called to her mother from her bed: ‘Mother, bring me that what’s-its-name.’... So you see, for that class of people, language is not language—it is nothing.”
“Doesn’t that indicate inventive genius?” asked the Swiss.
“But what do I want of inventive genius, Springer?” exclaimed Quentin loudly. “Why, a woman doesn’t need inventive genius! All she needs is to be pretty and submissive, and nothing else....”
“You are tremendous,” said the Swiss. “So that for you, a woman’s intelligence is of no account?”
“But that isn’t intelligence! That is to intelligence what the movement of those men who go hopping about nodding to one and talking to another, is to real activity. The former is not intelligence nor is the latter activity. The thing is to have a nucleus of big, strong ideas that direct your life.... As the English have.”
“I have an antipathy for the English,” said the Swiss. “As for Andalusia, I believe that if this country had more culture, it would constitute one of the most comprehensive and enthusiastic of peoples. Other Spaniards are constantly bargaining with their appreciation and[215] admiration; the national vice of Spain is envy. Not so with the Andalusians. They are ready to admire anything.”
“It’s a racial weakness,” exclaimed Quentin. “They are all liars.”
“You, who are an Andalusian, must not say that.”
“I? Never. I am a Northerner. From London, Windsor.... Why did I ever come here?”
María Lucena, her little friend, and her mother came in. The Swiss and Don Gil bowed to them.
“You must defend the Andalusians,” said Springer to the actress; “for Quentin is turning them inside out.”
“What’s he here for, then?” inquired María bitterly.
“That’s just what I was saying,” added Quentin. “What did I come to this city for?”
“I know what all this sadness comes from,” said María Lucena in Quentin’s ear.
“Do you? Well, I’m glad.”
“You saw your cousin yesterday; the one with a face that looks as if she had a sour stomach. They say that she can’t yet console herself for her former sweetheart’s leaving her. That’s why she is so sad.”
Quentin shrugged his shoulders.
“Has she had the baby yet, or is it just dropsy?”
Again Quentin did not deign to answer. She indignantly turned her head away.
“So, because you saw her changed into a worm, you came in so sad and downhearted yesterday, eh?”
“Possibly,” said Quentin coldly.
“If you had seen me in the same condition, you would have felt it less.”
“What intelligence![216]”
“Well, son, it’s time we quit,” replied the actress angrily. “If you think nothing of me, I feel the same way toward you.”
Quentin shrugged his shoulders. The others, seeing the prelude to a tempest, were silent.
María Lucena’s voice grew shrill and disagreeable.
“Do you know what her stepmother, the Countess, said? Well, she said: ‘For all her prudishness, that hussy has married Juan de Dios for his money!’”
“What that female said is not important.”
“All women are just females to you....”
“And it’s true.”
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