Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

"They are also beginning to consider me as an enemy," continued the woman. "They do not say so, because it is a common thing with us to hide our thoughts; but I suspect the coldness that is surrounding me…. The doctor knows that I love you the same as before, in spite of the wrath that she feels against you. The others are talking of your 'treason' and I protest because I cannot stand such a lie…. Why are you a traitor?… You are not one of our clan. You are a father who longs to avenge himself. We are the real traitors:—I, who entangled you in the fatal adventure,—they, who pushed me toward you, in order to take advantage of your services."

Their life in Naples surged up in her memory and she felt it necessary to explain her acts.

"You have not been able to understand me. You are ignorant of the truth…. When I met you on the road to Paestum, you were a souvenir of my past, a fragment of my youth, of the time in which I knew the doctor only vaguely, and was not yet compromised in the service of 'information.'… From the very beginning your love and enthusiasm made an impression upon me. You represented an interesting diversion with your Spanish gallantry, waiting for me outside the hotel in order to besiege me with your promises and vows. I was greatly bored during the enforced waiting at Naples. You also found yourself obliged to wait, and sought in me an agreeable recreation…. One day I came to understand that you truly were interesting me greatly, as no other man had ever interested me…. I suspected that I was going to fall in love with you."

"It's a lie!… It's a lie," murmured Ferragut spitefully.

"Say what you will, but that was the way of it. We love according to the place and the moment. If we had met on some other occasion, we might have seen each other for a few hours, no more, each following his own road without further consideration. We belong to different worlds…. But we were mobilized in the same country, oppressed by the tedium of waiting, and what had to be … was. I am telling you the entire truth: if you could know what it has cost me to avoid you!…

"In the mornings, on arising in the room in my hotel, my first motion was to look through the curtains in order to convince myself that you were waiting for me in the street. 'There is my devoted: there is my sweetheart!' Perhaps you had slept badly thinking about me, while I was feeling my soul reborn within me, the soul of a girl of twenty, enthusiastic and artless…. My first impulse was to come down and join you, going with you along the gulf shores like two lovers out of a novel. Then reflection would come to my rescue. My past would come tumbling into my mind like an old bell fallen from its tower. I had forgotten that past, and its recurrence deafened me with its overwhelming jangle vibrating with memories. 'Poor man!… Into what a world of compromises and entanglements I am going to involve him!… No! No!' And I fled from you with the cunning of a mischievous schoolgirl, coming out from the hotel when you had gone off for a few moments, at other times doubling a corner at the very instant that you turned your eyes away…. I only permitted myself to approach coldly and ironically when it was impossible to avoid meeting you…. And afterwards, in the doctor's house, I used to talk about you, every instant, laughing with her over these romantic gallantries."

Ferragut was listening gloomily, but with growing concentration. He foresaw the explanation of many hitherto incomprehensible acts. A curtain was going to be withdrawn from the past showing everything behind it in a new light.

"The doctor would laugh, but in spite of my jesting she would assure me just the same: 'You are in love with this man; this Don José interests you. Be careful, Carmen!' And the queer thing was that she did not take amiss my infatuation, especially when you consider that she was the enemy of every passion that could not be made directly subservient to our work…. She told the truth; I was in love. I recognized it the morning the overwhelming desire to go to the Aquarium took possession of me. I had passed many days without seeing you: I was living outside of the hotel in the doctor's house in order not to encounter my inamorato. And that morning I got up very sad, with one fixed thought: 'Poor captain!… Let us give him a little happiness.' I was sick that day…. Sick because of you! Now I understood it all. We saw each other in the Aquarium and it was I who kissed you at the same time that I was longing for the extermination of all men…. Of all men except you!"

She made a brief pause, raising her eyes toward him, in order to take in the effect of her words.

"You remember our luncheon in the restaurant of Vomero; you remember how I begged you to go away, leaving me to my fate. I had a foreboding of the future. I foresaw that it was going to be fatal for you. How could I join a direct and frank life like yours to my existence as an adventuress, mixed up in so many unconfessable compromises?… But I was in love with you. I wished to save you by leaving you, and at the same time I was afraid of not seeing you again. The night that you irritated me with the fury of your desires and I stupidly defended myself, as though it were an outrage, concentrating on your person the hatred which all men inspire in me,—that night, alone in my bed, I wept. I wept at the thought that I had lost you forever and at the same time I felt satisfied with myself because thus I was freeing you from my baleful influence…. Then von Kramer came. We were in need of a boat and a man. The doctor spoke, proud of her penetration which had made her suspect in you an available asset. They gave me orders to go in search of you, to regain the mastery over your self-control. My first impulse was to refuse, thinking of your future. But the sacrifice was sweet; selfishness directs our actions … and I sought you! You know the rest."