A Wedding Trip

by condesa de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Mind and body in Lucía kept pace with each other in their development, like two traveling companions who, arm in arm, ascend the hills and help each other over the rugged places on their journey, and it was a curious fact that, while the materialist physician, Velez de Rada, who attended Señor Joaquin, took delight in watching Lucía and noting how exuberantly the vital current flowed through the members of this young Cybele, the learned Jesuit, Father Urtazu, was also her devoted admirer, finding her conscience as clear and diaphanous as the crystals of his microscope, neither of them being conscious that what they both admired in the young girl was, perhaps, one and the same thing seen from a different point of view, namely, perfect health.

Señor Joaquin desired to give Lucía a good education, as he understood it, and indeed did all in his power to cripple the superior nature of his daughter, though without success. Impelled on the one hand by the desire to bestow accomplishments on Lucía which should enhance her merit, fearing on the other lest it should be sarcastically said in the village that Uncle Joaquin aspired to have a young lady daughter, he brought her up in a hybrid manner, placing her as a day pupil in a boarding school, under the rule of a prudish directress who professed to know everything. There Lucía was taught a smattering of French and a little music; as for any solid instruction, it was not even thought of; knowledge of social usages, zero; and for all feminine knowledge—a knowledge much vaster and more complicated than the uninitiated imagine—some sort of fancy work, as tedious and useless as it was ugly, patterns of slippers in the worst possible taste, embroidered shirt-bosoms, or bead purses. Happily, Father Urtazu sowed among so many weeds a few grains of wheat, and the moral and religious instruction of Lucía, although limited, was as correct and solid as her school studies were futile. Father Urtazu had more of the practical moralist than of the ascetic, and the young girl learned more from him concerning ethics than dogma. So that although a good Christian she was not a fervent one. The absolute tranquillity of her temperament forbade her ever being carried away by enthusiasm; there was in the girl something of the repose of the Olympian goddesses; neither earthly nor heavenly matters disturbed the calm serenity of her mind. Father Urtazu used to say, pushing out his lip with his accustomed gesture:

“We are sleeping, sleeping, but I am very sure we are not dead; and the day on which we awaken there will be something to see; God grant that it may be for good.”

The friends of Lucía were Rosarito, the daughter of Doña Agustina, the landlady of the village inn; Carmen, the niece of the magistrate, and a few other young girls of the same class, many of whom dreamed of the gentle tranquillity, the peaceful monotony of the conventual life, forming to themselves seductive pictures of the joys of the cloister, of the tender emotion of the day of the profession, when, crowned with flowers and wearing the white veil, they should offer themselves to Christ with the exquisite sweetness of adding, “forever! forever!” Lucía had listened to them without a single fiber of her being vibrating responsive to this ideal. Active life called to her with deep and powerful voice. Nor did she feel any desire, on the other hand, to imitate others of her companions whom she saw furtively hiding love-letters in their bosoms or hurrying, eager and blushing, to the balcony. In her childhood, prolonged by innocence and radiant health, there was no room for any other pleasure than to run about among the shady walks that surrounded Leon, leaping for very joy, like a youthful nymph sporting in some Hellenic valley.

Señor Joaquin devoutly believed that he had given his daughter all the education that was necessary, and he even thought the waltzes and fantasies, which she pitilessly slaughtered with her unskillful fingers on the piano, admirably executed. However deeply he might hide it in the secret recesses of his soul, the Leonese was not without the aspiration, common to all men who have exercised humble occupations and earned their bread by the sweat of their brows—he desired that his daughter should profit by his efforts, ascending a step higher in the social scale. He would have been well contented, for his own part, to continue the same “Uncle Joaquin” as before; he had no pretensions to be considered a rich man, and both in his disposition and his manners, he was extremely simple; but if he were willing to renounce position for himself, he was not willing to do so for his daughter. He seemed to hear a voice saying to him, as the witches said to Banquo, “Thou shalt get kings though thou be none.” And divided between the modest conviction of his own absolute insignificance and the moral certainty he entertained that Lucía was destined to occupy an elevated position in the world, he came to the not unreasonable conclusion that marriage was to be the means whereby the desired metamorphosis of the girl into the lady of rank was to be accomplished. A distinguished son-in-law was from this time forth the ceaseless aspiration of the ex-grocer.

Nor were these the only weaknesses of Señor Joaquin. He had others, which we have no compunction in disclosing to the reader. Perhaps the strongest and most confirmed of these was his inordinate love of coffee, a taste acquired in the importing business, in the gloomy winter mornings, when the hoar frost whitened the glass-door of the show-case, when his feet seemed to be freezing in the gray atmosphere of the solitary shop, and the lately-abandoned, perhaps still warm bed, tempted him, with mute eloquence, back to his slumbers. Then, half-awake, solicited to sleep by the requirements of his Herculean physique and his sluggish circulation, Señor Joaquin would take the little apparatus, fill the lamp with alcohol, light it, and soon from the tin spout would flow the black and smoking stream of coffee which at once warmed his blood, cleared his brain, and by the slight fever and waste of tissue it produced, gave him the necessary stimulus to begin his day’s work, to make up his accounts, and sell his provisions. After his return to Leon, when he was free to sleep as long as he liked, Señor Joaquin did not give up the acquired vice but rather reinforced it with new ones; he fell into the habit of drinking the black infusion in the café nearest to his abode, accompanying it with a glass of Kummel, and by the perusal of a political journal—always and unfailingly the same.

On a certain occasion it occurred to the government to suspend the publication of this newspaper for a period of twenty days; a little more and Señor Joaquin would have given up his visits to the café through sheer desperation. For, Señor Joaquin being a Spaniard, it seems needless to say that he had his political opinions like the best, and that he was consumed by a zeal for the public welfare, as we all of us are. Señor Joaquin was a harmless specimen of the now extinct species, the progressionist. If we were to classify him scientifically, we should say he belonged to the variety of the impressionist progressionist. The only event that had ever occurred to him during his life as a political partisan was that one day a celebrated politician, a radical at that time, but who afterward passed over bag and baggage to the conservatives, being a candidate for representative to the Cortes, entered his shop and asked him for his vote. From that supreme moment our Señor Joaquin was labeled, classified, and stamped—he was a progressionist of Don ——’s party. It was in vain that years passed and political changes succeeded one another and the political swallows, always in search of milder climes, took wing for other regions; it was in vain that evil-disposed persons said to Señor Joaquin that his chief and natural leader, the aforesaid personage, was as much of a progressionist as his grandmother; that there were, in fact, no longer any progressionists on the face of the earth; that the progressionist was as much of a fossil as the megatherium or the plesiosaurus; it was in vain that they pointed out to him the innumerable patches sewed on the purple mantle of the will of the nation by the not impeccable hands of his idol himself. Señor Joaquin, even with all this testimony, was not convinced, but, change who might, remained firm as a post in his loyal attachment to the leader. Like those lovers who fix upon their memories the image of the beloved such as she appeared to them in some supreme and memorable moment, and in despite of the ravages of pitiless time, never again behold her under any other aspect, so Señor Joaquin could never get it into his head that his dear leader was in any respect different from what he had been at the moment when, with flushed face, he deigned to lean on the counter of the grocery, a loaf of sugar on the one side and the scales on the other, and with fiery and tribunitial eloquence ask him for his vote. From that time he was a subscriber to the organ of the aforesaid leader. He also bought a poor lithograph, representing the leader in the act of pronouncing an oration, and placing it in the conventional gilt frame, hung it up in his bed-room, between a daguerreotype of his deceased spouse and an engraving of the blessed Santa Lucía, who displayed in a dish two eyes resembling two boiled eggs. Señor Joaquin accustomed himself to look at political events from the point of view of his leader, whom he called, quite naturally, by his baptismal name. Did matters in Cuba assume a threatening aspect? Bah! Señor Don —— says that complete pacification is an affair of a couple of months, at the utmost. Was it rumored that armed men were marching through the Basque provinces? There was no need to be frightened. Don —— affirmed that the absolutist party was dead and the dead do not come to life again. Was there a serious split in the liberal majority, some supporting X, others Z? Very well, very well, Don —— will settle the question; he is the very man to do it. Was there fear of a famine? Do you suppose Don —— is sitting idly sucking his thumb all this time? This very moment the veins (of the public treasury) will be opened. Are the taxes too heavy? Don —— spoke of economizing. Are the Socialists growing troublesome? Only let them dare show themselves with Don —— at the head of affairs and he will soon put them down. And in this manner, without a doubt or a suspicion ever entering his mind, Señor Joaquin passed through the storm of the revolution and entered on the period of the restoration, greatly delighted to see that Don —— floated on the top of the wave and that his merits were appreciated, and that he held the pan by the handle to-day just as he had done yesterday.

Cherishing this sort of adoration for the leader, the reader may imagine what was the delight, confusion, and astonishment of Señor Joaquin at receiving a visit one morning from a grave and well-dressed person who had come to salute him in the name of Don —— himself.

The visitor was called Don Aurelio Miranda, and he occupied in Leon one of those positions, numerous in Spain, which are none the less profitable for being honorable, and which, without entailing any great amount of labor or responsibility, open to the holder the doors of good society by conferring upon him a certain degree of official importance,—a species of laical benefice in which are united the two things that, according to the proverb, cannot be contained in one sack. Miranda came of a bureaucratic family, in which were transmitted by entail, as it were, important political positions, thanks to a special gift possessed by its members, perpetuated from father to son, a certain feline dexterity in falling always on their feet, and a certain delicate sobriety in the matter of expressing their opinions. The race of the Mirandas had succeeded in dyeing themselves with dull and refined colors, which would serve equally well as a background for white insignia or red device, so that there was no juncture of affairs in which they were the losers, no radicalism with which they could not make a compromise, no sea so smooth or so stormy that they could not fish successfully in its waters. The young Aurelio was born, it might be said, within the protecting shadow of the office walls. Before he had grown a beard or a mustache he had a position, obtained for him by paternal influence, aided by the influence of the other Mirandas. At first the employment was insignificant, with a salary that barely sufficed for the perfumes and neckties and other trifling expenses of the boy, who was naturally extravagant. Soon richer spoils fell to his share, and Aurelio followed in the route already marked out for him by his ancestors. Notwithstanding all this, however, it was evident that in him his race had degenerated somewhat. Devoted to pleasure, ostentatious and vain, Aurelio did not possess the delicate art of always and in everything observing the happy medium; and he was wanting in the outward gravity, the composure of manner, which had won for past Mirandas the reputation of being men of brains and of ripe political experience. Conscious of his defects, Aurelio adroitly endeavored to turn them to account, and more than one delicate white hand had written for him perfumed notes, containing efficacious recommendations to personages of widely differing quality and class. In like manner, he gave himself out to be the companion and bosom friend of several political leaders, among others of the Don —— whom we already know. He had never spoken ten consecutive words having any relation to politics with any of them. He retailed to them the news of the day, the newest scandal, the latest double entendre, and the most recent burlesque, and in this way, without compromising himself with any, he was favored and served by all. He caught hold, like an inexpert swimmer, of the men who were more experienced swimmers than himself, and, sinking here and floating there, he succeeded in weathering the fierce political storms which beat upon Spain, following the time-honored example of the Mirandas. But even political influence in time becomes exhausted, and there came a period in which such influence as Aurelio could command, now greatly diminished, was insufficient to keep him in the only place to his taste—Madrid, and he was compelled to go vegetate in Leon, between the government building and the cathedral, neither of which edifices interested him in the least. What was especially bitter to Aurelio was the consciousness that his decline in official life had its origin in another and an irreparable decline,—a decline in his personal attractions. After the age of forty he was no longer the subject of little notes of recommendation, or, at least, these notes were not so warm as before; in the offices of the notabilities his presence had come to be no more regarded than if he had been a chair or a table, and he himself was conscious that his fluency of speech was abandoning him. As he advanced in years he grew more like his ancestors. He began to acquire the seriousness of the Mirandas, and from an amiable rake he became a man of weight. Perhaps certain obstinate ailments, the protest of the liver against the unhealthy life—by turns sedentary, by turns full of feverish excitement—so long led by Aurelio, were not without their part in this metamorphosis. Therefore, profiting by his sojourn in Leon and by the knowledge and singular skill of Velez de Rada, he devoted himself to the work of repairing the breaches made in his shattered organization; and the methodical life and the increasing gravity of his manners and appearance, which had been prejudicial to him in the capital, betraying the fact that he was becoming a useless and worn-out instrument, served him as a passport with the timid Leonese villagers, winning for him their sympathy and the reputation of being a person of credit and responsibility.

Miranda was in the habit of making an occasional trip to Madrid by way of diversion, and on one of these trips he had met, not long since, the Don —— of Señor Joaquin, whom we shall call Colmenar, through respect for his incognito—furious, at the moment, with a Don —— who took pleasure in thwarting all his plans and in nullifying his appointments. There was no means of coming to an understanding with this demon of a man, who persisted in cutting and mowing down the flourishing field of the Colmenarist adherents. Miranda, at the time in question, was in imminent danger of losing his position, and the words of the leader made him jump from his seat on the luxurious divan. “It is just as I say,” continued Colmenar; “it is enough that I should have an interest in a man’s retaining his place for him to get him out of it. It is to be counted upon to a certainty. And there is no means of escaping it. He strikes without pity.”