IN AUGUST, 1936, there washed up on the Caribbean littoral of Tinieblas the wreckage of a Spanish operetta company, a restless, zestless group who traipsed the provinces of Spain and the less cultured regions of America giving zarzuelas and Castilian versions of The Merry Widow and The Count of Luxembourg. The impresario, a certain Lépido Perron,53 who besides handling business matters sang bass baritone and managed things backstage, possessed great gifts of stubbornness and self-deception. He thought his shows surpassed the most entrancing spectacles of Paris or New York, and he argued with such pitiless insistence that he was able to extract more than his company was worth from theater owners. The ladies of the company used as much make up off the stage as on, showed a great deal of leg and bosom, distilled a pungent promise of sophisticated sin. They drew the burghers and sometimes furnished the more generous of them horizontal as well as vertical diversions. The men wore permanent sneers, tight-fitting double-breasted suits, and high-heeled pointytoed elastic-sided ankle boots; their hands were dazzled with cheap rings, their hair was slicked down to a carbon-paper gloss. They were as adept at casual theft as at extorting from the ladies (either by pain or pleasure) a portion of the burghers’ generosity. In short, the troupe survived, or did until General Francisco Franco raised the Morocco Tercio and sent the Spanish people tripping out to civil war.
The company was in Honduras at the time, in San Pedro Sula to be exact, banana country. The tenor had sung so many heroic roles that he had come to think himself a man of courage. He embarked at once for Spain to fight for the republic, taking his leading lady, the baritone’s wife, along. The baritone drank himself out of voice, and the company’s repertoire was thus reduced to a zarzuela called La Gran Via, in which Perron could sing the lead. As a firm capitalist (if more in aspiration than reality) he sided with General Franco and quarreled with the mezzo, a spirited catalana whose brothers were anarcho-syndicalists. On stage one night they took to hissing insults at each other until his face came so to infuriate her that she slapped it violently three times and then exited in tears through an archway painted on the backdrop, taking the set with her. The audience demanded its money; the theater owner sued for his receipts and huge imaginary damages; Perron found his properties attached and his company enmired in a swamp of writs. Idleness wreaked further injury. The most accomplished dancer accepted an offer of concubinage from the manager of a fruit plantation. Some members of the chorus became involved in a café discussion, voiced insufficient joy over the communist coup in Barcelona, and were set upon by banana workers and badly beaten. As a result of this incident all members of the company were hailed into police headquarters and interrogated as possible extremist agitators. A routine search of their hotel rooms revealed among the second lead’s belongings a quantity of silverware from the home of the Spanish Vice-Consul, their only friend in town. Thus dispatched of costumes, properties, and his best artists, bayed at by lawyers and policemen, robbed of all hope of comfort from his consulate, Perron gathered a remnant of his company about him and decamped in secret to Puerto Cortés, where they took deck passage on the first ship that was sailing. After two days and nights of rain and seasickness, they landed at Bastidas.
There the disintegration of the company continued. Two of the men found and snatched a chance to work their way to Argentina on a Swedish tramp. A third established himself as business manager for two of the ladies, who, as the most sprightly pair of mounts along that coast, raised their passage back to Europe in a few months. Meantime Perron and the two remaining ladies made their way over to Ciudad Tinieblas, where they were engaged for a pittance at the Jacaranda.
Lépido Perron was a year or two under fifty, short-legged, thick-jowled, and barrel-chested. His eyebrows bushed temple to temple without a break; his hair shagged dankly to his collar; his ears and nostrils were luxuriantly tufted. He had tiny, narrow-set black eyes and a very few ideas, all of them false, which he held with unshakable conviction. He believed, for example, that he was, an artistic and commercial genius, that Stalin was a Jew and Christ a Spaniard, and that women ought best be classed among the animals because they lacked immortal souls. He was vain, truculent, and boastful, at best a minus seven on the Fuertes Scale (see note 12).
The women he appeared with at the Jacaranda—and he appeared excessively, belching his numbers earnestly while strutting back and forth about the stage—were, in order of seniority, his mistress and his wife. The former, a sevillana possibly part gypsy who called herself Natalia de Triana, was about ten years younger than Perron, short and heavy-breasted. In the right lighting she achieved a kind of whorish elegance which she considered beauty. Her voice was alto and (to middle-aged provincials well along in drink) seductive. It seemed to promise—and the promise was fulfilled to those with coin to test it—an appetite for vice. She had been with Perron for twenty years, was In all ways his temperamental equal, and loathed him as intensely as he detested her, although (perhaps because) each was incurably dependent on the other for the indulgence of certain particularly swinish habits.
Perron’s wife, Rosario, was something else entirely: she was lovely, honest, and eighteen. Her loveliness was head-turning, breath-taking, traffic-stopping—heart-breaking ultimately, for she seemed to every man who saw her the incarnation of his private dream of woman. Her legs were long and graceful, her body slim and voluptuous. Her dark hair tumbled softly past her shoulders; her brilliant eyes laughed easily; her warm mouth asked no rouge. Her walk broadcast such sensuality that café mashers, louts who pissed their days away leering at every nubile female who went by and hissing out degrading invitations, gaped hang-jawed and mute until she passed, while their unguided robot hands continued to spoon sugar into gummy cups or pour wine into overflowing glasses. Ice-hearted womanizers blew all self-control over Rosario and often finished permanently maimed. Don Horacio Ladilla, for example, was the acknowledged master cocksman of Tinieblas, a man who boasted with conviction that he consumed more women than he did cigars and who, more or less as a hobby, built and stocked the richest brothel in the continent and kept it closed on Tuesdays for his private delectation. He offered Rosario de Perron two thousand inchados, an unheard-of sum, for one hour of her charms, and when she told him she did not make love for money, cried like a punished child. She took pity on him and went the next afternoon to the suite he kept at the Hotel Excelsior, but the sight of her naked struck him impotent, an affliction he had never known before and which she treated with such tenderness and gaiety that from then on he was capable of manhood only by casting her image on the screen of his closed eyelids and calling all his paramours Rosario.
Unlike so many truly striking women, Rosario neither feared her power over men nor let it turn her cruel or conceited, and yet a different class of men from Don Horacio, wiser men, better bred, romantics, if you like, who kept a chivalrous regard for womankind, found in her their princesse lointaine and, although much allured by her and certainly not frightened of her husband, revered her spiritually and were content to take a passive pleasure in her freshness and her love of life. Dr. Alonso Gusano, whom Rosario consulted on her first day in Ciudad Tinieblas, went every evening to the Jacaranda and entertained her with great opulence between her numbers, but when a waggish friend asked if he’d not been putting his examination table to a double use, Gusano, who besides being a respected surgeon was a fairly decent amateur violinist, replied frankly and a little sadly that, professional ethics aside, he had no more right to make love to Rosario than he did to play Auer’s Stradivarius. She marked men deeply, and they wondered what she was doing married to Perron, where he had found her, how he’d captured her, and why she stayed with him.
Perron had bought her outright for a hundred Ticamalan pesos when she was ten years old. This was in November, 1927, during his company’s first tour of Central America. There was a piece then in their repertoire with a child’s part, and Perron would cast it locally. He would announce an opportunity for a gifted little girl to perform on the same stage with internationally acclaimed artists. Then he’d hold an audition, choose a kid, and pay her parents with a pair of tickets. And since families tend to be large and loyal in our part of the world, he’d like as not sell a good dozen more to relatives. The system had drawbacks, though. The brats were trouble to rehearse since he could neither beat nor curse them, and it was a rare one who could last her quarter hour on the stage without bumbling a line or stumbling against the set or fumbling in her nose while someone was singing. So when the theater porter in Puerto Guineo offered him Rosario, whom he would have in his control and who was so talented that he expected he would make his fortune on her, Perron decided to give up renting kids and buy instead.
She wasn’t the porter’s child; she didn’t even know her parents. She’d had a foster mother who one afternoon left her at the theater for a silent-movie matinee and never came back. In continuing along the street, the woman had the misfortune to pass a cantina at the precise moment when two citizens, the best of buddies actually, who had been drinking rum together all day long, tried to annihilate each other with their pistols and succeeded only in making Rosario an orphan for the second time. The porter’s wife took her in, and after two years of watching films and vaudeville every day Rosario could mimic Clara Bow and Chaplin, sing all the hit boleros from Havana, tell risqué stories, juggle fruit, and do flamenco heel-stomp. Perron caught her act—done in the alleyway beside the theater for an audience of urchins —and was impressed. The porter was tired of feeding an extra mouth, and when the company left town, Rosario went with it.
She took to the roving life with ease, became the mascot of the company, but never made Perron rich. There was a kind of casualness in her that stepped between her talent and its commercial exploitation. It was not that she lacked energy. She made their travels bright with wisecracks, pranks, and ad-lib entertainments, aped members of the troupe, burlesqued this one’s delivery of a song and that one’s style of dancing, put out hilarious, mock-innocent commentary on their ever-shifting amorous entanglements, but no matter how Perron might howl at her, she loafed during rehearsals and often gave only the minimum on stage. She preferred life to art and refused to act like a professional—a refusal that, in due course, she extended to her love life.
Perron initiated her himself when she was fourteen, responding to the only moral imperative he recognized—i.e., he might as well, since if he didn’t someone else would. Rosario experienced no trauma. Much the reverse; she was pleased by the sensation and by the docility that overcame Perron, temporarily, to be sure, but regularly whenever the operation was repeated. She soon learned it could be even more fun with other men, but unlike the other ladies of the company, she neither asked nor accepted payment. When, on her return from her first assignation, Perron, in the tradition of the troupe, slapped her about and then demanded his cut, she explained as to an infant that since she’d picked the man herself and enjoyed him thoroughly, money hadn’t figured in the episode. When Perron realized at last that she was telling him the truth, he concluded she was feeble-minded and undertook to prostitute her himself. Rosario not only balked but threatened so vehemently to set the law on him that he took the precaution of marrying her, a step that infuriated la Triana and with which Rosario went along out of good nature. It cost her nothing and calmed the impresario. In the same spirit she went to bed with him from time to time and permitted him illusions of possession. That is, she lied whenever she made love with someone else, cooking up the most blasphemous protestations of chastity and smiling sweetly while he gulped them like communion wafers. There was no dishonesty in this. The lies she put out to excuse her absences were too outrageous to constitute deception. Like all good women, Rosario tried to please men where she could, and so she furnished Perron the necessary equipment to deceive himself. Meantime she stayed with the company because staying was as easy as leaving, did at all times exactly as she pleased, had many lovers, both platonic and otherwise, to whom she gave affection, tenderness, and joy, but never chanced to fall in love54 herself. In fact, except for what she’d seen in others, she knew no more of love than León Fuertes did. Then, five or six nights after she and la Triana and Perron began performing at the Jacaranda, León came in to sing.
Since love is nowhere studied systematically—and it’s the only universal human pastime that is not—no data are available on the incidence of mutual true first love at first sight. One feels, however, such occurrences are rare. Love is a common enough form of monomania—an intense and narrow enfocation of the mind upon a particular object, usually human, and the consequent formation of a psychological (and, sometimes, physical) dependence which binds one to the object forcefully and leads one to invest the object with a great importance, even more importance than one gives oneself. But since one can (and often does) contract love repeatedly, first love (the primary affliction) is less common. As love often develops gradually—e.g., a benign growth of gratitude metastasizes from the pelvis to the brain and runs malignant—love at first sight, where one is seized with the condition instantaneously upon eye contact with the object, figures to be of a higher order of improbability. True love is the disease in its acute form. Here the obsession is profound, pronounced, and (relatively) proof against the eroding effects of space and time and the distractions55 posed by other potential objects. All the pathologists of love concur in true love’s rarity. Finally, mutual love involves two individuals in a reflected and reverberating dymania, the object of an obsession being simultaneously possessed of a more or less equally severe obsession for the subject of the first. It is a very unicorn in the bestiary of emotions. Nonetheless, as soon as León shooed Perron down from the stage and mounted there himself with his musicians, he saw Rosario, who sat ringside with Dr. Gusano, and she saw him, and each felt instantly, acutely, for the first time, and relative to the other that absurd confusion of joy and sorrow, peace and longing, languor and excitement, possessiveness and generosity, liberty and bondage which the English language eloquently links with loss of balance: they fell in love. And since both León and Rosario were willful, brave, proud, confident, and free, they at once abandoned themselves to their love, so that from the onset there was no arresting its course or alleviating its symptoms.
Parapsychology is now a recognized science, but it as yet provides no firm statistics on the incidence of two-way extrasensory perception. Here again, however, we may assume improbability, for such perception is not truly extra sensory at all but rather hangs upon a sense all humans have but which few own to or employ. Reading another’s thoughts is seen as freakish; ergo, it must be rare. For two people to read each other’s must be rarer. Nonetheless, the moment their eyes met—eyes singularly alike in color, depth, and brilliance—Rosario and León, neither of whom had ever telepathed before, knew one another’s thoughts, not as vague hints but as if each were whispering his mind into the other’s ear. León was, for example, specifically aware that the unknown, delicious female at his feet wanted to suck his lip almost until it bled, whereas Rosario realized that Le6n, whose name Dr. Gusano had just told her, craved to repay that favor in more meridional regions. A microsecond later each knew the other knew, both blushed, yet neither looked away. Instead each offered free and full assurance that he would that same night and for all nights to come be at the other’s disposition for the calming of all wants and cravings. Then, happy to have this problem solved so speedily and simply, they smiled.
With that Rosario became aware that León wished to sing a song for her, and León was at once in mind of a popular paso doble whose lyric he had never really known until that moment, so he held up his hands to the audience, which was growing impatient as well as larger, with people beating on their tables and others hurrying in off the street, and spoke over his shoulder to his musicians, who strummed up an introduction, and began to sing, first to the audience in general and then directly to Rosario. During the verse, which told in superdramatic Spanish fashion of a bullfighter who sees a lady in the crowd and straight off offers her his cape, his heart, et cetera, he received from Rosario, who was watching him with great pride and tenderness, a number of messages: the suggestion that he try an Andalusian accent (lisped z’s and c’s, slurred d’s, dropped s’s), the news that she would like to share the stage with him (he wished he’d thought of that himself), and the plan for a joint number. He agreed to all, of course, sang the chorus as if she were the only person in the room, and in the four-measure break before the second verse, bowed to her and helped her to the stage with an exaggerated gallantry which they both laughed at inwardly while holding very stern Iberian frowns. Then Rosario danced, body and face immobile, heels and castanets aclatter, and León sang, posturing like a bullfighter and drawing her past him back and forth with his spread hand, until the song closed with her whirling at the far end of the stage, her long dress flowered out above her knees, and him half turned toward her, back arched, chin lifted, hand above his head. The audience suffered hysterics of applause.
God, that was corny! thought León happily as they both bowed.
Don’t be a snob. They loved it; so did you. How you milked the applause!
And you? Showing off your legs!
Ha! The great macho! One more chorus and you’d think you were doing a real bullfight.
There’s going to be a real enough goring for somebody later on tonight
Oh, darling, I can hardly wait!
Me either.
They waited for more than an hour, though, playing with their talents and with the marvelous commeddling of their minds, which was so natural they scarcely were surprised at it, singing song after song as though they’d been rehearsing all their lives, while the public beat their palms raw with applauding, and Perron alternately ground his teeth at being so upstaged or licked his chops at all the money he would make presenting the show56 in Europe, and Dr. Alonso Gusano decided be had never seen so perfectly matched a couple—they even looked alike—or so touching a tableau of young romance. Then León bent down to a ringside table and got the key to his friend Gustavo Oruga’s garçonnière, and stood up and shouted that in honor of Doña Rosario’s art, his friend Juanchi Tábano, son of the most excellent former President of the Republic, was buying drinks for all the house, and in the resulting uproar he and Rosario slipped out the performers’ door into the salt-breezed night. Their hearts and minds were joined; it remained only to connect their bodies.
The flat Gustavo Oruga kept as a trysting place was on the top of a slim concrete cube his father, Don Constantino Oruga, bad put up in 1934 and given to him for his twenty-first birthday. This was an admirable location, for as a noted gynecologist had his consulting rooms on the third floor, a lady could afford to be seen entering or leaving the building. (It’s hard to say, in fact, who benefited more from the arrangement, Gustavo, who had a grand time horning all his married friends, or the doctor, whose practice waxed impressively.) Besides, since there was no taller structure at that time within five hundred miles, one could make love alfresco on the terrace without fear of being seen, except by passing birds. The penthouse was comfortably furnished, stocked with food and drink, and cared for by a stone-blind chola woman. León and Rosario remained there twenty-seven days and nights, naked from the time they entered till the time they left, unheedful of the knocks of lovelorn matrons.
They made love in every room of the apartment: in the bedroom, naturally, and in the dining room and sala, and in Oruga’s office, Rosario sitting, heels spread, among the rent receipts inside the roll-top desk while León stood before her, and in the kitchen, and back in the blind chola woman’s room while she was doing market. They made love in the twin Otán armchairs, whose uncured cowhide backs were seared with the double-O brand of Oruga’s uncle’s ranch, and on the dining table (made in Bengal and sold by Casa Singh on Avenida Jorge Washington), from beneath whose plate-glass top carved Hindu deities observed them, and in the white-fringed Venezuelan hammock that hung across a corner of the sala. They made love on the terrace, reclining on the wheeled rattan chaise longue, or nested in a mound of sofa pillows, or perched like sparrows on the four-foot-high, two-foot-wide parapet whose outer edge dropped seven storeys sheer down to the street, or standing so that each enjoyed a panoramic view over the other’s shoulder of the sea or jungled hills, or kneeling among the fronds and blossoms of Oruga’s roof garden while warm rain beat on León’s bobbing bum and lightening flashed about them. They made love in all the ways dreamed up or stumbled into since the dawn of man and, at length, devised a new way to make love wherein they lay apart, eyes closed and voices mute, exchanging telepathic fantasied caresses, until their bodies melted and their blended minds flowed up among the stars.
Their first embrace stopped every timepiece in the building, then set them running backward, with the result that since the event took place at midnight, tenants could read the time correctly using mirrors. At the same hour the checkgirl at the Jacaranda noticed a wisp of smoke curl up from Lépido Perron’s cordovan briefcase, and when (thirty-six hours later at Civil Guard Headquarters) he drew from this same case the scrolled certificate (issued by the Republic of Costaguana) which proved his marriage to Rosario, he found it baked to an illegible, dun-colored ash, which crumbled in the ceiling fan’s slow breath and blew away. Some few days later, at Perron’s cabled supplication, a clerk in Chuchaganga went to the register for 1933 to make a copy: the pertinent page was charred away to dust; Rosario’s marriage was, effectively, annulled.
Throughout the quarter during that whole month people experienced a randiness uncommon even in Tinieblas. Men who kept youthful and demanding mistresses found themselves, late at night, embracing their own wives with ardor. Board-breasted ancient spinsters, lace-shawled for mass, made eyes at passing workmen. Wasted ex-libertines arose from decades of lank detumescence and leaped their servant girls. Marriages glaciered in scorn for years thawed and blossomed. Since upper-class parents were too busy swiving to surveil their daughters properly, an entire generation of the Tinieblan ruling class was married hastily, and in July, 1937, the obstetricians of the city worked night and day delivering what everybody claimed were seven-month babies.
Oruga’s roof plants, gorged with the echoed energy of love, flourished prodigiously and thrust thick, leafy stalks against the penthouse. By month’s end, Rosario and León could no longer see out through the windows, and when they left, Oruga had to bring a peon from his uncle’s ranch to hack the vegetation down with his machete. More and most marvelous, Rosario and León began receiving sense impressions from each other’s bodies, until each felt that he was now outfitted with a twin set of procreative organs. For them the gulf between the sexes, the abyss which Rebeca twice had leaped, closed up. Each became male and female equally and, therefore, whole.
The wholeness conferred by love endowed León with new traits of character. Rosario noted in him, for example, a womanly (though not effeminate) softness of heart which no one, he included, had observed before. All month long their thoughts flowed on a single circuit, so that when León recalled his childhood, Rosario trudged the alleys of La Cuenca with him, and she was touched by his maternal tenderness for little Pepe, for Rebeca, for Florencio Merluza—a feeling foreign to the street beast who provided for himself and his dependents only by never showing anyone a shred of pity. If it was in him then, he squelched it; more likely, it was engendered by his love and felt retroactively. Similarly, Rosario found in León a compassion for Dr. Grillo and Bisagra, which those two gentlemen would certainly have been amazed at. Often she woke long after midnight, when the heat had lifted and the moist breath of sea and of savannas hung about the room, and held his sleeping head and shared his dream, and in such dreams his benefactors might emerge and he return their love. León himself was startled by these sentiments. Perhaps he was a little scared of them, as though, while they were safe to savor in Rosario’s arms, they were a dangerous indulgence in the world beyond. Nonetheless, through the remainder of his life he showed from time to time a female nature strange (if not outlandish) in a Latin man of action. He was a stern father when the occasion asked it, but suffered, I think, more than we children did when he punished us. He led the coup, which drove Alejandro Sancudo, a despot and a maniac to boot, from the presidency in 1952, but spoke out alone for leniency at the dictator’s trial. In war he killed, but he pitied also. His love for Rosario furnished a balancing dimension.
This wholeness … Who has not known57 that glimpse of déjà vu wherein a person or a place, though newly-met, appears familiar?—although instead of learning from such flashbacks to a previous existence (or such flash-forwards to a future one) most people sweep them under the carpet of coincidence. From their first moment in each other’s arms Rosario and León felt they’d been joined before, felt that they were, in fact, the severed halves of one sole life, separate for years, now reunited. Yet while they judged this insight honest, they did not query it for further news. They were too busy living as whole human beings to wonder how or why they managed it, or to ask questions, or to probe the past, or to seek out a meaning.
Perron, meantime, enjoyed no similar peace but rather scrambled about like a roach in a paper bag, seeking to square Rosario’s elopement with his marvelous opinion of himself. By midday after she cut out with León, all Ciudad Tinieblas was blabbing cheerfully about them, and that night a group of León’s pals greeted Perron’s first song with chorused yelps of “Cuckold!” until his head bowed helplessly under the weight of his enormous antlers. Even his great powers of self-deception were for the moment inadequate to soothe this bruise to his vanity, so, after the charming Spanish fashion, he arrogated to himself the right to do Rosario (and León too, provided that he caught him with his back turned) frightful injury. At the same time his greed remained tickled by the thought of León and Rosario’s packing the Paris music halls while he raked in the cash, and so he seized on the idea of forcing them to sign a long-term—no, a lifetime contract to him. Thus haunted by mixed visions of revenge and riches, he went to the police, took from his case the bill of sale for Rosario which he’d had the Puerto Guineo theater porter put his “x” on almost nine years before, and demanded that his chattel be returned and the thief punished. The duty officer informed him that the Republic of Tinieblas was a civilized country and did not recognize the institution of human slavery. But, Perron said, Rosario was his wife—and an attendant sergeant, who was a fan of León’s and a patriot as well, snickered something about Tinieblan sausage being tastier than the Spanish brands. Perron thereupon plucked out a small and rather fragile Toledo-work snap-knife (a gift from la Triana, who’d fished it from the unoccupied trousers of a gentleman friend) and waving it in large and frenzied arcs, stomped toward the door, where he was subdued and disarmed. Then, gathering his dignity, he asked to know what was Tinieblas’s claim to being civilized when its public force scoffed at the sanctity of the home and then denied a husband lawful right to butcher his adulterous wife and geld her lover. Touched by the justice of this view, the duty officer, who was a family man himself, chastised the sergeant and advised Perron that if he would swear out complaints against Rosario (for adultery) and León (for alienation of affection, not for theft), the Civil Guard would apprehend them and place them at the instruction of the public prosecutor. Would the señor please have the kindness to show his certificate of marriage …
Fifteen days later Perron was back, handcuffed, gripped by two guardias (who dodged to stay out of range of foam-flecked canines), and charged in such a manner that the duty officer pondered whether to send him to prison, which was at hand and nearly empty, or to the overcrowded lunatic asylum in Otán. The disappearance of the official record of his marriage, coming on top of the desintegration of his own certificate, had provoked in him a Copernican effort of creative imagination, and he had—at 4:16 A.M. on 17th October—realized that a rival impresario, a man of immense wealth and powerful connections whose shrewd familiars scouted all the nightclubs of the world for unknown talent, had, through his agents here and down in Costaguana, kidnapped Rosario and expunged all record of her marriage and now held her captive until such a time as he could book her along with León (who, no doubt, had long been in his pay) in London or New York. Perron, then, like King Richard Lionheart’s loyal minstrel, had begun erring round the town in the dead hours after midnight, crooning a song he and Rosario had sung in an old show. She would, he was convinced, once she had heard him, sing her part back, and when he knew her whereabouts, he’d rescue her. After three nights of being pelted with old shoes and rotten fruit, he was admonished by a guardia on duty near the home of Colonel Genaro Culata to stop his drunken howling, and sore offended by this insult to his art, he cursed then kicked then clawed then bit the copper. That he was neither crippled on the spot nor beaten cockeyed after his arrest—which would be getting off lightly these days for such comportment—shows something of how much the Guardia Civil has since changed. In the end it was decided to deport him, and he was put aboard a ship bound through the Panama for Cádiz. There seemed, therefore, no obstacle at all to León’s and Rosario’s love when, after four weeks of unaccustomed abstinence, Gustavo Oruga went to plead for the return of his love nest.
León and Rosario were about ready to emerge—it was not that their ardor had cooled—not hardly!—but that León wished to solemnize their love with Rebeca’s blessing. But, as in the case of Héloïse and Abélard, a yearning after sacraments undid them. When Rebeca looked up from her mending and saw Rosario, wan from four weeks of love and smiling shyly, her blood froze and she drove her needle through her palm and never felt it. Before she fainted, Rebeca thought she had been snatched through space and time and stood again before a mirror in a Vienna Bahnhofplatz hotel in 1904: Rosario was the image of the young Rebeca.
When they had lifted Rebeca to her bed and laved her face with tepid water, after Rosario bid loosed her bodice and León had crushed a vial of spirits of ammonia near her nose, then came the questions León hadn’t asked during his four-week idyll and, when, some answers had been driven out, solutions to such diverse mysteries as Rosario’s uncanny likeness to the young Rebeca, the wanderings of a Chinese servant girl and certain missing children, and the presentiment León and Rosario shared that they’d been joined before. These revelations, coming four weeks too late, had the depressing savor of a good-news bad-news joke. In fact, not even in the works of Aeschylus could one find a more pathetic recognition scene or a less joyful family reunion than was played in Rebeca’s room that day. There were roars, of course, moanings and self-assaults. Rosario raked her lovely checks all bloody with her nails. León knocked his forehead on the iron bedpost. Rebeca beat her breast. We Fuertes are a histrionic breed.
Had León and Rosario not loved each other truly, the denouement might have turned out less tragic. But they did love and, therefore, acted in what each thought was the other’s interest. That night León stepped off a chair in Dr. Grillo’s attic with a noose around his neck, but the inch-thick Manila hemp parted as though axed, and he suffered no more than a turned ankle. He then tried to blow his brains out with a Colt revolver he had taken from Nacho Hormiga one night when the latter was drunk and liable to commit some folly, but all six chambers misfired. Next he took poison but couldn’t keep it on his stomach long enough. He was on his way to Oruga’s penthouse to jump off when an acquaintance stopped him and announced that Rosario, my aunt Rosario,58 had gone to the back row of the Teatro Trópico, drunk off a bottle of insecticide, and died convulsing. With this León realized that he was not destined to know the felicity of suicide. The next day he left Tinieblas.