“Wait! wait! I cannot go faster than the music. I relate things as they happened. Then listen well to this. Then suddenly, without anybody giving command, more than a thousand instruments commenced playing at once. There were flutes, trumpets, and violins big as Golondrina. What an uproar! It was enough to assemble together all the blind in Spain. There is something more wonderful still: without knowing how or why, a kind of garden which was in front of us disappeared suddenly; and, the devil mixing in it without doubt, replaced the garden by the stairs of a palace covered with a magnificent carpet. Then I saw a woman admirably dressed; she was covered with more velvet, silk, gold, and jewels than the Virgin of Rosaire. ‘It is Isabella the Second,’ said I to myself. No, my people, it was not the queen. Do you know who it was? Neither more nor less than the Gaviota, the wicked Gaviota, who went about among us with naked legs and feet. Yes, the devil had thus taken her, and made her a princess. I was stunned, when, at a moment when no one thought of it, a gentleman, very well dressed, came forward. He was in a frightful rage! What fury! He rolled his eyes! ‘Caramba!’ thought I, ‘I would not be in this Gaviota’s skin.’ That which astonished me the most was that both recited their anger in singing. ‘Good!’ said I, ‘it is perhaps the usage among people of high rank.’ Nevertheless, I did not understand a word of what they were saying. All that I could discover was, that the gentleman was a general of Don Carlos, that the Gaviota said he was her father, and that he would not recognize her as his daughter, although she supplicated him on her knees. ‘That’s well done!’ I cried at this impudence.”
“Why did you mix yourself up with it?” asked the old woman.
“Because that I knew her, and that I could prove it. Do you not know that he who is silent approves? But it appears that where I was it is forbidden to speak the truth, because my neighbor, an employé of the police, said to me, ‘Will you hold your tongue, my friend!’ ‘I have no desire to do so,’ I replied, and I made my cry ring to the roof, ‘This man is not her father.’ ‘Are you mad, or do you come from another world?’ said the policeman to me. ‘I am not the one, nor do I come from the other, insolent,’ I replied. ‘I know better than you, and I come from Villamar, where her legitimate father resides, her true father, the old Pedro Santalo.’ ‘You are an imbecile,’ replied the policeman. I kicked, and was about to inflict on him a blow, when Nicholas caught my arm in time, and led me away to take a drink. ‘I have understood it all,’ I said to Nicholas; ‘this general is he whom this cursed Gaviota wishes to have for her father. I have heard talk of many villanous things, of murders, thefts, piracies, but I have never yet heard spoken of one who would deny her father.’ Nicholas held his sides in laughing: at Madrid such indignities affright no one. When we re-entered, it is believed that the general had ordered the Gaviota to take off that beautiful attire, for she was entirely dressed in white, and appeared overwhelmed with sadness. She began to sing, and accompanied herself on an immense guitar which she had placed immediately before her on the floor, and which she pinched with her two hands. (Of what is she not capable, this Gaviota?) But here comes the interesting part. Suddenly there appeared a Moor.”
“A Moor?”
“But what a Moor! blacker and more cruel than Mohammed himself. He held in his hand a poniard, large as a sabre.”
“Jesus, Maria!” cried Maria and Dolores.
“I demanded of Nicholas who was this proud Moor, and he told me that he is called Telo. To make a finish of my story, the Moor said to the Gaviota that he was about to kill her.”
“Holy Virgin!” exclaimed the old woman, “it was the public executioner!”
“I do not know if it was the executioner or a paid assassin,” replied Momo; “but of this I am sure, that he seized her by her hair, and stabbed her several times with the poniard. I saw it with my own eyes, those eyes which will one day be in the land of death, and I can affirm it.”
Momo placed his two fingers on his two eyes with such rigorous force, that it seemed as if they would start from their sockets.