From beyond the wall comes a small whinny, then the jingle of spurs and the sound of departing hoofs. Sister Pilar starts violently.
ACT II
SCENE I
A room in Trotaconventos’s house. The walls are hung with bunches of dried herbs and stags’ antlers. On a table stands a big alembic surrounded by snakes and lizards preserved in bottles, and porcupines’ quills. Trotaconventos is darning a gorget and talking to Don Salomon. The beginning of this scene is happening simultaneously with the last part of the previous one.
Trotaconventos: A fig for a father’s love! To seek for it is, as the proverb has it, to seek pears on an elm tree.
Don Salomon: Pardon me, oh pearl of wisdom. Our Law has shown that a mother’s love is as dross to a father’s. In the book called Genesis we are told that when there was the flood of water in the time of Noah, the fathers fled with their sons to the mountains, and bore them on their heads that the waters might not reach them, while the mothers took thought only of their own safety, and climbed up on the shoulders of their sons. And at the siege of Jerusalem....
Trotaconventos: Oh, a pox on you and your devil’s lore! It is proverbs and songs that catch truth on the wing, and they tell ever of a mother’s love. Would you have me believe in your love to Pepita and Juanito when I saw new hopes and schemes spring up as quickly in your heart as the flowers on Isabel’s grave.... I never yet have met a man who could mourn the dead; for them ’tis but the drawing of a rotten molar, a moment’s sharp pain, and then albeit their gums may ache a day, they will already be rejoicing in the ease and freedom won by its removal.
Don Salomon: There was once a young caliph, and though he had many and great possessions, the only one he valued a fig was one of his young wives. She died, and night descended on the soul of the caliph. One evening her spirit came to him, as firm and tangible as had been her body, and after much sweet and refreshing discourse between them, beneath which his grief melted like dew, she told him that he might at will evoke her presence, but that each time he did so he would forfeit a year of life.... He invoked her the next night, and the next, and the next ... but he was close on eighty when he died.
Trotaconventos (triumphantly): Just so! The caliph was a man; you do but confirm my words.
Don Salomon: Well, let us consider, then, your love to your children. First, there was Isabel, and next, that exceeding handsome damsel, Sister Assumcion ... nay, nay, it is vain protesting; the whole town knows she was a cunning brat that all your forty summers and draughts and chirurgy were powerless to keep out of the world ... well, these two maids, both lusty and vegetal, and made for the bearing of fine children, what must you do but have them both professed in one of these nunneries ... nunneries! Your ballads tell of a Moorish king who was wont to exact a yearly tribute of sixty virgins from your race; what of your God who exacts more like a thousand?