My future auntie looked at me abstractedly. All her attention was absorbed by the father. Nevertheless, after a little while she turned toward me, and asked whether my mother would come, for she much desired to see her. I made excuses for my mother’s absence as well as I could, and Señorita Aldao returned to her attentions to the friar. “Wouldn’t you like some water, orangeade, ale, sherry wine? A glass of milk? A sip of chocolate?”
“My child!” cried the father, pushing her back familiarly, as one would brush away a fly, “If you want to give me something I would wish,—good gracious, give me half a cigarette, although it were of straw!”
In the twinkling of an eye two cigar-cases flew open, and Señor Aldao and my uncle offered him their cigars, and several matches were immediately lighted. My uncle’s Havana cigar was given the preference.
“You may well enjoy smoking it,” said he, for he was fond of praising what he gave away. “It came from no one less than Don Vicente Sotopeña.”
“Ah, of course he wouldn’t have any but the very best—plague on him!”
“Sit down, sit down and smoke,” they all besought him.
Seated at last, with the cigar between his lips, he proceeded to answer the questions of each and every individual. They wanted to know when he had left Compostela, and how were the other friars, and what was going on there.
I sat a little apart from the rest, overcome by a singular feeling of abstraction, a sort of mental intoxication. Reclining on a bench, I perceived that at my back the branches of a magnificent creeper were spread like green silk tapestry. It was the Datura, or “Trumpet of the Day of Judgment”; and it did not require a very vivid imagination to compare its gigantic white blossoms to cups full of exquisite perfume. A double jasmine, entwined with the Datura, stretched itself along the wall. Those pleasant odors, set astir by the light breeze, mounted to my brain and quickened my young blood, inspiring me with an eager longing for love,—an ethereal, pure, and deep love—an absorbing passion, ready to defy all laws, both human and divine. When we make a change of abode,—even though our fortune may not be altered,—when we enter a circle of unknown people, our imagination and self-love become excited, and those to whom we were totally indifferent yesterday, suddenly become of interest to us, and we feel anxious in regard to the opinion they may form of us, and to the feelings with which we inspire them.
The government official, the army officer, who is sent to a distant post, has a vague idea of the place where he is going to reside. But scarcely has he set foot in it, when the past is blotted out, and the present rules over him with the great power of the actual, and the stimulus of the novel and unknown.
In that way, excited by my new horizon, though somewhat mortified in the bottom of my heart because they paid no attention whatever to me, I imagined that those people, barely seen for the first time, strangers to me a few moments before, would yet have some decisive influence on my heart or fortune. I began by imagining that in the bosom of that family, so peacefully gathered together enjoying the moonlight, a very strange moral drama was being unfolded, of which the friar undoubtedly knew the mystery.