“I’ll be like that soon.”
Her face darkened as though the shadow of her last hours had passed over it. She lowered her eyes, as she added,
“And then, death.”
Robledo kept silence. He had quietly taken his bill-fold from one of his pockets and was counting something under the table. She, meanwhile, went on murmuring the thoughts that normally she would have kept to herself.
“Perhaps some one will put a few lines in the papers, announcing the death of the so-called ‘marquesa,’ and perhaps half a dozen people in the whole world will remember me, perhaps not even so many. And meanwhile I shall stay at the bottom of the river, forever. And what shall I have amounted to?”
Robledo picked up one of her hands and under cover of the table pressed a roll of bills into it. She guessed at once what it was.
“I oughtn’t to take it,” she protested. “I take money only from those who don’t know me....”
But she nervously tucked the bank notes into her blouse; and as she did so her eyes, which had suddenly brightened, gave the lie to the tone of resigned dignity with which she offered excuses for accepting the gift.
But now Robledo was looking at her pityingly. The once fair Elena.... What a pathetic sight! She had swept over the southern seas like a great albatross, proud of its snowy plumage and the strength of its wings, plunging down with merciless voracity on the prey it glimpses between the waves, strong with the belief that the universe has been created solely to be devoured by it; she had been a majestic, proud Atlantic eagle, salt from the wide sweeps of the ocean, possessing the tough-fleshed elasticity of the carnivores.... But the acid of the years had dissolved the proud illusion all youth possesses of its immortality; and the eagle that had so many times haughtily planed upward into the infinite blue, was now obliged to feed on the ocean’s offal as the tide brought it in to the shore. And when cold and darkness drove it towards the light, its failing wings bruised themselves against the glass guarding the fire. Weary, it had gone in search of the window that sent out into the night the warm glow of the hospitable hearth; and it had encountered the lens of the lighthouse, hard and unfeeling as any wall, made to withstand the fury of tempests. And in one of these encounters it would fall with wings incurably broken, and the sea below, the surging sea of life, would bear away its body on its tides, with an indifference as complete as that with which it had earlier borne away the relentless creature’s victims....
And then Robledo found himself considering his friends and himself as well, as though they too were animals. Oxen they were, well-fed, tranquil and good, like the cattle out in the pastures irrigated by the colony ditches, fat and plain like them, oppressed with wellbeing. They possessed the virtues characteristic of all those whose maintenance is assured, and who, safe from all risk, need never injure others in order to live. And thus they would continue placidly, without violent pleasures, but also without pain, to the last hour....