“What tormented me,” said Robledo, “was the memory of all the times when I had been asked to have a drink in some café or other, and had not cared enough about what was set before me to drink it—beer, charged waters, iced drinks—and then I was stricken with remorse at the memory of certain parties I had been to, when I had passed by the buffet full of decanters and bottles without taking any of their contents, for I kept saying to myself, excited with fever as I was, and staggering along under the hard merciless sun, ‘If you had drunk all the beers, and all the soda waters, and all the iced drinks that were offered you and that you didn’t appreciate, you would now have inside of you a reserve store of liquids and you’d be able to stand this awful thirst much better!’ And this absurd idea tormented me like remorse for a crime, and at times I wanted to punch my own head for my stupidity in not having drunk everything that had once been within my reach so that I might have been prepared for that awful desert trip.
“Finally, with only two of our six horses still stumbling along beside us, we reached a well of fresh water. That was the most delicious drink of my whole life! And after all our long hard pull through that desert of death, we found nothing! The information I had been given, and to confirm which I had started off on this expedition, proved to be false.... But that’s the way you have to seek fortune now, for those of us who go to the new world are half a century late. All the rich lands, those easy to develop, have been taken up, and only those that are remote and inhospitable, are left—and often all that they offer is ruin and death.
“However,” Robledo continued, “men go right on coming to this corner of the globe. Hope lives here among us, and without hope life is intolerable. And just consider our own household for instance! Elena there, a Russian, Federico, Italian, Watson from the United States, I a Spaniard. And the people who come to see us are each of them of a different nationality. As I say, it’s the land of all!”
Little by little it became the custom of the most important personages of the settlement to call at the engineers’ house after supper. First to appear was Canterac, in a suit of military cut, and still more carefully brushed and polished than before the arrival of the Torre Biancas. Then came Moreno, betraying a certain nervous agitation at greeting his hostess, uttering a few stammerings instead of words, and almost biting off his tongue in the tenseness of his embarrassment. And last came Pirovani, displaying a new suit every other night, and always bringing his hostess a present.
Canterac used to laugh at him, asserting that if Pirovani was late it was because he had been polishing his watch charms, watch chain and cuff buttons, so as to dazzle the rest of the company.
One evening the Italian appeared in a startling suit just arrived from Bahia Blanca, bearing in his fat hand a bouquet of enormous roses.
“These were brought down to me today from Buenos Aires, señora marquesa, and I hasten to lay them at your feet!”
Canterac glared at the Italian with mock indignation, and murmured in a loud aside to Robledo,
“That’s a lie! These roses came by telegraph! Moreno, who knows everything, told me so, and this afternoon Pirovani sent a man to get them from the station. He had strict orders to gallop all the way!”
The housekeeper and the two little half-breeds cleared the table, and the living room, in spite of its rough wooden partitions, began to look suggestive of festivity, as the three callers grouped about Elena, offering her compliments and conversation, according to their talents. It was noticeable that they invariably repeated the word marquesa at every opportunity, as though they enjoyed being constantly reminded that they were in such distinguished company.