"If, in spite of all this," said my host, "Don Emilio enjoyed good health, he could easily get up again, for he is young and he has a great head for business. But the poor man is very ill, very ill. I have not seen him for some time, but by all that I hear it is his last sickness."
These words made me very sad. It was dinnertime; but, although I went and sat down at table, I could scarcely take a morsel of food. I went out afterwards, intending to go to the house of Martí—he was living now in an apartment in the Calle de Caballeros. Before arriving I turned about, fearing to disturb him at that hour, or cause him any emotion that might hinder him from resting well. I directed my steps to the residence of his brother-in-law, Sabas, that he might prepare Martí, or at least advise me when it would be best for me to go to see him. Sabas's plump wife, as lively, busy, and sweet as ever, received me with her usual affability. Her idolized husband had gone out.
"He is at Emilio's house?" I said, as the natural thing.
"No, I believe—" she hesitated. "You had better go to the theatre. Maybe he is there. As the doctor found Emilio better to-day, he said that he would go and celebrate."
She blushed as she uttered these words. I showed no surprise, in order not to increase her confusion. After kissing my old friends, her children, I went off to the theatre that she named in search of their elegant papa.
When I entered, the play had already begun. I took up a position in a corner behind the stalls and scrutinized the theatre. I was not long in seeing him in his place in a proscenium box. These boxes in the provinces, as in the capital, are the sacred spots, whence the superior beings of each locality radiate their splendors. Accustomed to lay down the law for the multitude, the gilded youths who meet there, converse, argue, smoke, and yawn, firmly convinced that they have no duties to fulfil towards the masses, those who listen placidly from the stalls. They dwell separate like the gods of Olympus, in conscious enjoyment of their perfections and their power, grinning at the actors, tossing compliments to the actresses, and from time to time talking in loud voices with their kind in the opposite boxes, over the heads of the rabble of the unfashionable.
Sabas belonged to the ruling caste, although his face showed none of the marks that characterize it, neither the flabby flesh, the pallid skin, nor the loose mouth, signs of the life of self-indulgence.
His dark, sunburned face, peeled in places, offered rather an extremely industrious aspect. It would not have been strange if he had arrived that same night from Madagascar or Java, after enriching himself in a caoutchouc expedition. This was doubtless the opinion of the contralto of the company (much richer in avoirdupois than in voice), to judge by the timid admiration and the blushes wherewith she received his ardent compliments every time that the exigencies of the piece obliged her to go near his box. I sat down in one of the butacas and waited for the fall of the curtain. I confess that I was less interested in what was going on on the stage than in the play that was revealed between the box and the footlights. Sabas, leaning his chin in his hand with a purely Oriental languor, fixed his gaze of serpent-like fascination upon the contralto. She, overcome with an irresistible terror, made efforts to flee from that glance and escape. In vain. In spite of herself, even in the most important scenes and against all the demands of the play, she would break abruptly away from the tenor in a love duet and turn towards that tropical and fascinating man of the quivering nostrils. She listened with eagerness to his voice vibrating like a cry in the desert, hoping ever that he would end by offering her fifty elephants, a necklace of pearls, and the heads of three rajahs, his enemies.
When the act was ended I went without delay to the box. Sabas received me with the grave indifference which, in all perfectly cultivated countries, expresses elegance. I explained my wishes at once. He accepted them benignly; disdaining his conquest, secure like all heroes of arriving always in time to conquer, he took his hat and we left the theatre. We walked for some time in silence. I felt my heart oppressed with sadness wherein I perceived with alarm a certain anticipation of something pleasant. This something could be nothing else than the presence of Cristina. Yes, I recognized it with shame; yet in that sad hour it absorbed me more than anything else in the world.
Sabas stopped after a time, took his pipe from his mouth, and, looking at me attentively some moments, remarked solemnly: