I fastened his hands with a handkerchief, and his body with a towel. He might have released himself by the slightest movement, but he was so terrified and subdued that he did not even stir. He only groaned from time to time.
I stretched myself on the bed. Who could have slept in such circumstances? The endless night passed on, and I kept twisting and turning, hiding my face in the pillows, covering my eyes and ears with my hands, as though to shut out the images and sounds which jealousy presented to my mind.
At daybreak I arose from my bed of torture, washed and dressed myself, and without releasing Serafín, or taking leave of anybody, or seeing a single soul, went off to San Andrés, and thence to Pontevedra and Ullosa, like one who flees from the spot where a terrible crime has been committed.
CHAPTER XIX.
My mother, with her usual sagacity, saw at once that I was preoccupied and morose, but she made a mistake as to the cause.
“They must have slighted you at Tejo,” she said. “Don’t say it is not so, for I am sure that they treated you in a shameful manner. If not, why did you rush off like a frightened hare, without taking leave of anybody? Come, now, tell your mother all about it.”
Although I vowed and protested that I had been treated with the greatest kindness, she would not believe it.
“Well, well, keep it to yourself, make a mystery of it; but I’ll find it out, for everything leaks out. Some of the others will tell me all about it.”
I had to tell her all the particulars of the wedding; or, rather, she went ahead of my story, and showed herself acquainted with details in a way that amazed me. She was posted on points where I was ignorant. It was characteristic of her quick and sharp wit to master the minor matters of life, but to remain in ignorance of its deep, eternal laws, which can be perceived only by superior minds, and which will control life until its last breath is drawn, and the universe grows cold through the absence of love.
During the first days of my stay in the village I felt much better. The singular frenzy of the day of the wedding had subsided through lack of external stimuli to revive it; so much so that I came to fancy that my enthusiasm over Carmen, my furious jealousy, the poetic reveries on the beach, were only tricks of the imagination, which is apt to feign the existence of profound feelings where there is really only caprice, vague longings and delusions.