11
The Bombardment of Pamplona
“God keep you, frasquita!” breathed the Corregidor when, walking on tiptoe, he appeared suddenly under the shady roof of the trellis.
“Why, welcome, my Lord Corregidor!” she replied in the most natural tone, curtseying again and again. “Your Lordship here at such an hour! And in this heat too! Come, let your Lordship be seated. Here is a nice cool spot. Why didn’t your Lordship wait for the other gentlemen? All the chairs are already set out. This evening we are expecting my Lord Bishop in person. He promised my Lucas to come and try the first grapes from the vine. But how is your Lordship? And how is your lady wife?”
The Corregidor’s senses swam. The complete privacy in which this interview with Frasquita was taking place made it seem like a dream. Something told him to beware lest unwarily he should fall into some hidden trap.
All he said for answer was: “Oh, it isn’t all that early… It’s half-past three…”
At that moment the parrot began screeching.
“It’s a quarter past two!” Frasquita exclaimed, looking him full in the face. He fell silent like a criminal caught red-handed and unable to say a word for himself.
After a while he asked: “Lucas, is he asleep?”
It should be said that the Corregidor, like all people without teeth, had a loose and sibilant way of pronouncing words as if he were biting his lips.
“Of course!” replied Frasquita. “At this time of day he always has a nap wherever he happens to be when the fit takes him – yes, if it were on the edge of a precipice!”
“Well then, let him sleep on!” cried the Corregidor whose face had turned a shade or two paler. “And you, my dear Frasquita, listen to me. Hark now – come here! Sit down here – by my side! I have many things to say to you, m’dear.”
“I am sitting down,” Frasquita replied, clutching a low chair and planting it in front of the Corregidor and very close to his. Once seated, Frasquita threw one leg across the other, leant forwards, propped an elbow on the knee that was uppermost, and cradled her lovely, blooming face in one hand. In this posture, her head tilted slightly, a smile on her lips, all five dimples in play, and her serene eyes fixed on the Corregidor, she waited for him to speak. An observer might have been reminded of the city of Pamplona awaiting the bombardment.
The poor man made to speak, then stopped short, open-mouthed, spellbound by her supreme loveliness, her dazzling charm, and he told himself that this truly wonderful woman, with her alabaster colouring, her gorgeous figure, her radiantly smiling mouth, and her blue unfathomable eyes, could well have been a creation of Rubens.
“Frasquita!” after a long moment he murmured weakly, all the while showing on his withered features, where beads of sweat formed and dropped onto his hunched shoulders, an intense agony. “…Frasquita!”
“You repeat my name,” Frasquita said. “What is it?”
“The favour you are asking…” began the old man in a tone of infinite tenderness.
“The favour I am asking,” said Frasquita, “your Lordship already knows well what it is. It is that you nominate as Secretary to the City Corporation a nephew of mine in Estella… who can then leave that backwater where he has to do without so many of the good things he ought to have…”
“I told you, Frasquita, that is impossible. The present Secretary—”
“—is a thief, a drunkard, and a fool!”
“I know… but he has good backing among the Life Aldermen and I cannot nominate anyone else without the approval of the Corporation. If I do, I run the risk…”
“Risk! Risk! What risk would we not run for your Lordship? – all of us in this house down to the very cats!”
“Do you really think so much of me?” said his Lordship, broken-voiced.
“No, indeed, sir. Thinking anything of your Lordship is a waste of time.”
“Woman, don’t lordship me! Speak to me as an equal – as you would like. Tell me what you wish of me. Do!”
“Am I not telling you what I wish?”
“But…”
“No buts now! Bear in mind what a fine worthy young man my nephew is!”
“Well, you dearest Frasquita, are certainly a fine worthy woman!”
“You like me well enough?”
“Like you well enough? You’re a woman above all your sex.”
“Look! – there’s nothing false about this.” And she rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and showed the Corregidor the rest of her arm, which could have been a caryatid’s and was whiter than a lily.
“Like you well enough!” The Corregidor repeated with feeling. “Night and day at all hours and in all places my thoughts are only of you!”
“So! You do not care then for your lady wife!” Frasquita’s pretence of sympathy for the noble lady was so forced it would have made a dying man laugh. “How sad! My Lucas told me he had had the happiness of speaking to her when he went to mend the clock in your bedchamber, and she was very beautiful and kind, with the sweetest disposition!”
“An exaggeration!” muttered the Corregidor rather sourly.
“On the other hand, others have told me,” Frasquita went on, “that she has a very bad temper and you fear her like the devil…”
“Another exaggeration!” growled the Corregidor, the blood rushing to his face. “Both stories are exaggerations! The lady has her little whims, certainly, but it’s a far cry from that to making me afraid. I am the Corregidor!”
“Yes; but do you love her, or do you not?”
“Well, now… I love her a great deal, or rather used to love her before I knew you. But ever since I saw you I don’t know what has come into me. She too knows something’s amiss. It’s enough that now touching my wife’s face means no more to me than touching my own. D’you see? All my love and feeling for her has vanished. Whereas to touch your hand, your arm, your cheek, your waist, I’d give all I have and more!”
As he spoke the Corregidor tried to grasp the bared arm which Frasquita paraded before his eyes. She, however, without the slightest loss of composure, stretched forwards and touched his Lordship’s chest with a hand as calmly firm and irresistible as an elephant’s trunk, and pushed him over backwards, chair and all.
“Ave María Purísima!” she cried and laughed uncontrollably. “The chair must have been broken!”
“What’s happening below there?” From over their heads Tio Lucas suddenly thrust his homely face between two clusters in the ceiling of the vine-trellis. The Corregidor meanwhile lay on the ground, staring up in strange alarm at the other man. At that moment he could have served as model for the Devil overthrown by – I won’t say St Michael but another creature from Hell.
“What’s happening?” Frasquita quickly took up Lucas’s words. “Why, my Lord Corregidor tipped his chair too far back, overbalanced, and fell!”
“Jesús, María y José!” exclaimed the Miller. “Has your Lordship hurt yourself? Would you like a little water and vinegar?”
“There are no bones broken!” said the Corregidor, scrambling to his feet as best he could. And he added in a tone that Frasquita was able to hear, “You’ll pay for this!”
“Your Lordship saved my life!” Tio Lucas said, not budging from his position on top of the trellis. “Just fancy, wife! I was sitting up here admiring the grapes when I dropped off to sleep on a network of vine shoots and sticks with gaps between as big as my body. So if his Lordship’s tumble hadn’t woken me in the nick of time I should have fallen and broken my head on those flags down there.”
“Is that so, eh?” said the Corregidor. “Then, bless me, I’m glad of it. I declare I’m glad I took a tumble!… You’ll pay me for this!” The last sentence was in an undertone for Frasquita’s ear. It was given with a look of such concentrated fury that Frasquita felt uneasy. She could clearly see that the Corregidor had been apprehensive at first that the Miller had heard everything. But now, reassured that he had heard nothing – for the naturalness with which Lucas acted his part would have taken in the shrewdest eye – he was beginning to give a free run to his fury and think of ways of revenge.
“Here! Come down from there and help me brush down his Lordship! He’s smothered in dust.”
As Lucas climbed down she flicked at the Corregidor’s coat with her apron and whispered in his ear, “The poor man heard nothing. He was sleeping like a log.” Even more than her actual words, the fact that she spoke them in an undertone – an open assumption of collusion between them – had an almost magical effect upon him. “You sly thing! You naughty girl!” he babbled, his mouth watering, while he still outwardly assumed a grumbling tone.
“Your Lordship won’t bear me any malice?” Frasquita pleaded.
Severity appeared to be yielding such good results that the Corregidor made to give Frasquita a look of anger, but, meeting her disarming smile and the irresistible appeal of her divine eyes, he said in a small, tenderly caressing voice: “That rests with you, my love!”
Then Tio Lucas dropped down from the trellis.