Jav. (approaching still nearer). I give you my word....
Berm. (All surround him.) We all promise you solemnly——
Laz. It is useless—don’t trouble yourselves. Besides I neither believe anybody, nor trust in anybody. I don’t trust myself, and I am always observing myself whether perchance—in short, I understand myself: then how should I trust you? You perceive that that’s asking too much. And enough, enough—I have said no.
Berm. As you please, Lazarus.
Laz. Moreover, sitting up is delightful. What a sky! what a night, what a river! Just now we were downstairs in the drawing-room that looks on to the garden, my mother, my father, Carmen, the doctor, I—(counting on his fingers) and Paca likewise. All seated, all resting, and somewhat sleepy, excepting Paca. In an angle a lamp: the doors on a level with the outside: the sky in the distance: the garden with its twining plants and its rose trees making itself a portion of the saloon, as if to bear us company: the penetrating perfumes of the lemon flower, and the freshness of the river impregnating the atmosphere: little insects of all colours, a few butterflies among them, as if engendered by the air, came from without, attracted by the lamp, and fluttered between the light and the gloom, as ideas revolve within me now; and Paca too was fluttering amidst us all. (A pause.) What, you are laughing? (To Javier.)
Jav. I am not laughing.
Laz. Yes; you laugh because I said that Paca was fluttering between my father, my mother, Carmen and myself. Well, I maintain it: is it only butterflies that flutter about? Flies and gad-flies flutter as well. And so, as I lay there with eyes half closed, Paca, with her black dress and her black mantle with its fringe, seemed to me an enormous fly. She fluttered ponderously from my father to my mother—serving my father with sherry and my mother with iced water—and between Carmen and myself, to worry me with questions, and to fix a flower in Carmen’s hair, rustling against us both with her mantle and its fringes, as a fly rustles with its dark and hairy wings. She is a kind woman but I felt a repugnance, a loathing, and a chill, and I came up to stand and breathe on yonder balcony.
Jav. And to contemplate the stars.
Laz. One, no more than one. And such extravagant ideas! But we apprentices of poetry are thus. You are right, Bermudez, extravagant—very—very—. I was thinking of Paca, I was gazing at the star, and I felt an insane, ridiculous, but unconquerable desire. It was to seize one of my foils, to run it through the gad-fly with her fringed mantle, as one runs an insect through with a pin, and to burn her at the light of that most beautiful star. Like what? The putrescence of humanity which is consumed and purified in heavenly flames. You don’t understand me, Don Timoteo?
Tim. Well, I don’t think there is much to understand—and even though a man may not be a genius——