Se?orita Esther Volovitch—A Wedding—Manuel, Photographer’s Apprentice Despite Roberto’s advice, Manuel continued as he was, neither looking for work nor occupying himself with anything useful; posing for Alex and acting as servant to all the others who forgathered in the studio.
At times, when he remembered Roberto’s advice, he would wax indignant against him.
“I know well enough,” he would say to himself, “that I haven’t his push, and that I’m not able to accomplish the things he can do. But his advice is all nonsense,—at least, as far as I’m concerned. ‘Have will-power,’ he says to me. But suppose I haven’t any? ‘Make it.’ It’s as if I were told to add a palm to my height. Wouldn’t it be better for me to hunt for a job?”
Manuel began to feel a hatred against Roberto. He would avoid meeting him alone; it filled him with rage that, instead of giving him something, anything at all, Roberto would settle the matter with a bit of metaphysical advice impossible of translation into reality.
The bohemians continued their disordered existence, their everlasting projects, until a gap was[24] opened in their midst. Santín was missing. One day he did not show up at the café, the next he did not appear at the studio, and in a few weeks he was nowhere to be seen.
“Where can that fool be?” they asked one another.
Nobody knew.
One night Varela, one of the writers, announced that he had caught sight of Bernardo Santín sauntering along Recoletos in company of a blonde girl who looked like an Englishwoman.
“The confounded idiot!” exclaimed one of the group.
“That’s old stuff,” replied another. “Schopenhauer said long ago that it’s fools who are most successful with women.”
“I wonder where he got this Englishwoman.”
“That ingle woman![1] He must have got her out of his groin!” suggested a callow youth, who was learning how to write farces.
“Ugh! These cheap jokes are enough to drive a man to drink!” cried several in chorus.
The talk drifted to other topics. Three days after this conversation Santín appeared at the café. He was welcomed with a noisy demonstration, spoons drumming against saucers. When the ovation had ended, they besieged him with the question:
“Who is that Englishwoman?”
“What Englishwoman?”
“That blond girl you’ve been out sporting with!”
[25]
“That’s my sweetheart; but she’s not English. She’s Polish. A girl whose acquaintance I made at the Museo. She gives lessons in French and English.”
“And what’s her name?”
“Esther.”
“A fine article for winter nights,” blurted the fellow who was learning how to write sainetes.
“How do you make that out?” queried Bernardo.
“Easy. ’Cause an estera[2] adds to the comfort of a room.”
“Oh! Oh! Out with him! Throw him out!” rose a general shout.
“Thanks! Many thanks, my dear public,” replied the joker, unabashed.
Santín told how he had come to know the Polish girl. They were all more or less filled with envy of Bernardo’s success, and they set about poisoning his triumph, insinuating that this Polish miss might be an adventuress, that perhaps she was in her fifties, and might have had two or three kids by some carbineer.... Bernardo, who saw through their malice, never returned to the café.
Very early one morning, a couple of weeks after this scene, Manuel was still asleep on the sofa of the studio, and Roberto, according to his habit, was at work upon the translation of the ten pages that constituted his daily stint, when the door of the studio was flung open and in swept Bernardo. Manuel awoke at the sound of his steps, but pretended to be fast asleep.
[26]
“What can this fellow have come for?” he asked himself.
Bernardo greeted Roberto and began crossing the studio from one side to the other.
“You’ve come rather early. Anything the matter?” asked Hasting.
“My boy,” muttered Santín, coming to a sudden stop, “I’ve got serious news for you.”
“What’s up?”
“I’m getting married.”
“You getting married!”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“To whom do you suppose? A woman, of course.”
“I should imagine so. But have you gone mad?”
“Why?”
“How are you going to support your wife?”
“Why.... I earn something at my painting!”
“What can you earn! A mere pittance.”
“That’s what you think.... Besides, my sweetheart gives lessons.”
“And you intend to live off her.... Now I understand.”
“No, no, sir. I haven’t any intention of making her work for me. I’m going to open a photographer’s studio.”
“Photographer’s studio! You! Why, you don’t know the first thing about it!”
“Nothing. I know nothing, according to you. Well, there are stupider asses than me in the picture[27] business. I don’t imagine it takes a genius to be a photographer.”
“No, but it requires a knowledge of photography, and you haven’t the least idea.”
“You’ll see; you’ll see whether I have or not.”
“Besides, it takes money.”
“I have the money.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“A certain party.”
“Lucky boy!”
“You’ll see.”
“I’ll wager you wheedled the money out of your sweetheart.”
“No.”
“Bah! None of your lying.”
“I tell you, no.”
“And I say, yes. Who else would give you the money? Any other person would first have investigated just how much you knew about photography and learned whether you ever worked in a studio; they would require proof of your ability. Only a woman could believe blindly, simply taking a fellow’s word for it.”
“It’s a woman who’s lending me the money, but it isn’t my sweetheart.”
“Come. None of your lies, now. I can’t believe that you’ve come here just to tell me a string of whoppers.”
Roberto, who had interrupted his writing, now resumed it.
[28]
Bernardo made no reply and began to pace up and down the room anew.
“Have you much work left?” he asked suddenly, coming to a stop.
“Two pages. If you’ve got anything to say to me, I’m listening.”
“Well, see here, it’s this way. The money really does come from my sweetheart. She offered it to me. ‘What can we do with this?’ she said to me. And it occurred to me to open up a photographer’s studio. I’ve hired a place on a fourth floor, with a very attractive workroom, in the Calle de Luchana, and I have to put the suite and the gallery in order.... And, to tell the truth, I don’t know just how to arrange the gallery, for there are curtains to be put up.... But I don’t know how.”
“That’s rather rare in a photographer,—not to know how to arrange a gallery.”
“I know how to work the camera.”
“Indeed. You know exactly as much as everybody else: aim, press the bulb, and as for the rest ... let somebody else attend to it.”
“No, I know the rest, too.”
“Do you know how to develop a plate?”
“Yes, I imagine I could.”
“How?”
“How?... Why, I’d look it up in a manual.”
“What a photographer! You’re deceiving your sweetheart most shamefully.”
“She wanted it. I may know nothing now, but I’ll learn. What I’d like you to do is write a couple of lines to these German firms that I’ve noted down[29] here, asking for catalogues of cameras and other photographic apparatus. And then I’d like you to step in to my house, for, with all your talent, you can give me an idea of things.”
“You flatter me most indecently.”
“No, it’s the plain truth. You understand these matters. You’ll come, won’t you?”
“Very well. I’ll come some day.”
“Yes, do. Take my word for it, I really want to settle down to business and work, so that my poor father may be able to live a peaceful old age.”
“That’s the way to talk.”
“And there’s another thing. This youngster that you keep here,—does he work for you?”
“Why?”
“Because I could take him into my house and he might learn the profession there.”
“Now that strikes me as pretty sensible, too. Take him along.”
“Will Alex be willing?”
“If the boy is.”
“Will you speak to him?”
“Certainly. This very moment.”
“And can I count on your writing those letters?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. I’ll be off now, for I have to buy some glass panes. Speak to the boy.”
“Leave that to me.”
“Thanks for everything. And you’ll drop in to my house, won’t you? Remember, my future and my father’s depend on it.”
“I’ll come.”
[30]
Bernardo pressed the hands of his friend effusively and left. Roberto, when he had finished writing, called: “Manuel.”
“What?”
“You were awake, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You heard our conversation?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, if you’re willing, you know what you can do. You have a chance to learn a profession.”
“I’ll go, if you think it best.”
“It’s up to you.”
“Then I’ll go this very moment.”
Without bidding good-bye to Alex, Manuel left the garret and went off to the Calle de Luchana in search of Bernardo Santín. The apartment was nominally on the third floor, but counting the mezzanine and the ground floor, it was really on the fifth. In response to Manuel’s knocking an aged man with reddish eyes opened the door; it was Bernardo’s father. Manuel explained the purpose of his coming, and the old man shrugged his shoulders, and returned to the kitchen, where he was cooking. Manuel waited for Bernardo to arrive. The house was still without any furniture; there was only a table and a few pots and pans in the kitchen, and two beds in a large room. Bernardo arrived, and the three had lunch and Santín decided that Manuel should ask the janitor for a step-ladder and get busy arranging and inserting the panes of glass in the gallery.
After having given these orders he said that he[31] must be off at once to an appointment, and left.
Manuel spent the first day at the top of a ladder, putting the panes into place with bands of lead and gluing the broken ones together with strips of paper.
Arranging the panes was a matter of much time; then Manuel put up the curtains and papered the gallery with rolls of blue printing paper.
Within a week or thereabouts Roberto appeared with the catalogues. He marked with a pencil the things that they would have to order, and instructed Bernardo in the arrangement of the dark room; he indicated a spot best adapted to the installment of a transom, where the plates would be exposed to the sun and the positives made, and informed him upon a number of other details. Bernardo paid close attention to all Roberto said and then handed over all the duties to Manuel. Bernardo, besides possessing little intelligence, was an inveterate idler. He did absolutely nothing. Only when his sweetheart came to see how matters were progressing would he pretend to be very busy.
His sweetheart was a very winsome creature; she seemed to Manuel even pretty, despite her red hair and her lashes and eyebrows of the same colour. She had a pale little face, somewhat freckled, a pinkish, turned-up nose, clear eyes and lips so red and alluring that they roused a desire to kiss them. She was of diminutive build, but very well formed. She did not trill her r’s, gliding over them, and pronounced her c’s before e and i as s instead of th.
[32]
She seemed to be genuinely in love with Bernardo, and this shocked Manuel.
“She can’t really know him,” he thought.
Bernardo, with an unlimited conviction of his own knowledge, explained to the girl all the work he was doing and how he was going to arrange the laboratory. Whatever he had heard from Roberto he spouted forth to his sweetheart with the most unheard-of impudence. The girl found everything sailing along very nicely; doubtless she foresaw a rosy future.
Manuel, who saw through the swindle that Bernardo was perpetrating, wondered whether it would not be an act of charity to inform the blonde miss that her sweetheart was a good-for-nothing mountebank. But, after all, what business was it of his?
Bernardo now led a grand existence; he loitered, he bought jewelry on the instalment plan, he gambled at the Frontón Central. All he did in the house was issue contradictory orders and get matters into a hopeless tangle. In the meantime his father cooked away in the kitchen, indifferent to everything, and spent the day pounding in the mortar or mincing meat in the chopping bowl.
Manuel would go to bed so exhausted that he fell asleep at once; but one night, when he had not sunk into slumber so soon he heard Bernardo, from the next room, declare:
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Is he going to kill him?” asked the voice of the red-eyed old man.
[33]
“Take your time,” replied the son. “You made me lose my place.”
And he began his reading over again, for that was all it was, until he came once more to the sentence, “I’m going to kill you.” On the following nights Bernardo continued his reading, in terrible tones. This, without a doubt, was his sole occupation.
Bernardo was no more worried about things than was his father; all the rest was utterly indifferent in his eyes; he had wheedled the money out of his sweetheart and was now living on it, squandering it as if it were his own. When the camera and other apparatus arrived from Germany, at first he entertained himself by printing positives from plates that Roberto had developed. Soon, however, he wearied of this and did nothing at all.
He was stupid and base beyond belief; he committed one absurdity after the other. He would open the camera while the plates were being exposed, and confuse the various bottles of fluid. It exasperated Roberto to see how utterly careless the man could be.
In the meantime preparations were proceeding for the wedding. Several times Manuel and Bernardo went to the Rastro and bought photographs of actresses made in Paris by Reutlinger, unglued the picture from the mounting and pasted it upon other mountings that bore the signature Bernardo Santín, Photographer, printed along the margin in gilt letters.
The wedding took place in November, at the[34] Chamberí church. Roberto did not care to attend, but Bernardo himself went to fetch him and there was nothing to do but take part in the celebration. After the ceremony they went for a spread to a café on the Glorieta de Bildao.
The guests were: two friends of the groom’s father, one of them a retired soldier; the landlady of the house in which the bride had been living, and her daughter; a cousin of Bernardo’s, his wife, and Manuel.
Roberto engaged in conversation with the bride, who struck him as being very personable and agreeable; she spoke English quite well, and they exchanged a few words in that tongue.
“Too bad she’s marrying such a dolt,” thought Roberto.
At the banquet one of the old men began to tell a number of smutty tales that brought blushes to the bride’s cheek. Bernardo, who had drunk too freely, jested with his cousin’s wife with that coarseness and gracelessness which characterized him.
The return from the ceremony to the house in the evening, was gloomy. Bernardo was in high feather and tried to play the elegant gentleman. Esther spoke to Roberto about her departed mother, and the solitude in which she dwelt.
On reaching the entrance to the house, the guests took leave of the couple. As Roberto was about to go, Bernardo came up to him and, in a lifeless, scarcely audible voice, confessed that he was afraid to remain alone with his wife.
[35]
“Man, don’t be an idiot. What did you get married for, then?”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. Come, stay with me a moment.”
“What! A pleasant joke on your wife that would be!”
“Yes, she’s fond of you.”
Roberto scrutinized his friend, avoiding his eyes, because he had no relish for jests.
“Yes, do stay with me. There’s something else, too.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I don’t know a thing yet about photography, and I’d like you to come for a week or two. I beg it as a special favour.”
“It’s impossible. I have my lessons to give.”
“Come, if only during the lunch hour. You’ll eat with us.”
“Very well.”
“And now, come up for a moment, do.”
“No, not now.” Roberto turned and left.
During the succeeding days Roberto visited the newly married couple, and chatted with them during the meal.
On the third day, between Bernardo and Manuel, they managed to photograph two servant girls who appeared at the studio. Roberto developed the plates, which, as luck would have it, came out well, and he continued visiting his friend’s home.
Bernardo resumed the life of his bachelor days, devoting himself to loafing and amusement. After a few days he failed to show up for lunch. He was[36] absolutely without a glimmer of moral sentiment; he had noticed that his wife and Roberto had a liking for one another, and he imagined that Roberto, in order to be near the place and make love to his wife, would do the work in his stead. Provided that his father and he lived well, the rest did not matter to him.
When Roberto realized the scheme, he grew indignant.
“See here, listen to me,” he said. “Do you imagine I’m going to work here for you while you go idling around? Not a bit of it, my dear fellow!”
“I’m no good for working with these nasty chemicals,” replied Bernardo, sullenly. “I’m an artist.”
“What you are is a good-for-nothing imbecile.”
“Excellent. All the better.”
“You’re utterly worthless. You married this girl just to get the little money she had. It’s disgusting.”
“I know well enough you’ll take my wife’s part.”
“I’m not taking her part. The poor thing was idiotic enough herself to have married the like of you.”
“Do you mean, then, that you don’t care to come here and do the work?”
“I certainly do not.”
“Well, it’s all the same to me. I’ve found a business partner. So you may as well know. I don’t beg anybody to come to my house.”
[37]
“All right. Good-bye.”
Roberto stopped coming. In a few days the partner presented himself and Bernardo discharged Manuel.