Section 7

“You are Esteban or Manuel. You helped me once with some unloading. I am Captain Al- varado.”
“Yes,” said Esteban.
“How are you?”
Esteban muttered something.
“Т am looking for some strong fellows to go on my next trip with me.” Pause. “Would you like to come?” Longer pause. “England. And Russia. . . . Hard work. Good wages. ... A long way from Peru.—Well?”
Apparently Esteban had not been listening. He sat with his eyes on the table. At last the
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Captain raised his voice, as to a deaf person:
“Т said: Do you want to go on my next trip with me. 2 e
“Yes, ГП go,” answered Esteban suddenly.
“Fine. That’s fine. I want your brother, too, of course.”
“No.”
“What’s the matter? Wouldn’t he want to come?’
Esteban mumbled something, looking away. Then half rising, he said: “I got to go now. I’ve got to see somebody about something.”
“Let me see your brother myself. Where is he?”
“... dead,” said Esteban.
“Oh, I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Yes,” said Esteban. “I got to go.”
“Hmm.— Which are you? What’s your name?”
“Esteban.”
“When did Manuel die?”
“Oh, justa .. . just a few weeks. He hit his
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ESTEBAN knee against something and... just a few weeks ago.”
They both kept their eyes on the floor.
“How old are you, Esteban?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Well, that’s settled then, you’re coming with me?”
Eyes”
“You may not be used to the cold.”
“Yes, I’m used to it.—I’ve got to go now. I got to go in the city and see somebody about some- thing.”
“Well, Esteban. Come back here for supper and we’ll talk about the trip. Come back and have some wine with me, see. Will you?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Go with God.”
“Go with God.”
They had supper together and it was arranged that they were to start for Lima the next morning.
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The Captain got him very drunk. At first they poured and drank and poured and drank in si- lence. Then the Captain began to talk about ships and their courses. He asked Esteban questions about tackle and about the guide-stars. Then Es- teban began to talk about other things, and to talk very loudly:
“On the ship you must give me something to do all the time. ГИ do anything, anything. РП climb up high and fix ropes; and ГИ watch all night,— because, you know, I don’t sleep well anyway. And, Captain Alvarado, on the ship you must pre- tend that you don’t know me. Pretend that you hate me the most, So that you’ll always give me things to do. I can’t sit still and write at a table any more.—And don’t tell the other men about met. J thal is about 22
“I hear you went into a burning house, Este- ban, and pulled someone out.”
“Yes. I didn’t get burned or anything. You know,” cried Esteban, leaning across the table,
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“you’re not allowed to kill yourself; you know you’re not allowed. Everybody knows that. But if you jump into a burning house to save somebody, that wouldn’t be killing yourself. And if you be- came a matador and the bull caught you that wouldn’t be killing yourself. Only you mustn’t put yourself in the bull’s way on purpose. Did you ever notice that animals never kill themselves, even when they’re sure to lose? They never jump ` into a river or anything, even when they're sure to lose. Some people say that horses run into bon- fires. Is that true?”
“No, I don't think that's true.”
“T don’t think it's true. We had a dog once. Well, I mustn’t think of that.—Captain Alvarado, do you know Madre María del Pilar?”
{Мез
“Т want to give her a present before I go away. Captain Alvarado, I want you to give me all my wages before I start—I won't need any money anywhere—and I want to buy her a present now.
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The present isn’t from me only. She was... was...” Here Esteban wished to say his brother’s name, but was unable to. Instead he con- tinued in a lower voice: “She had a kind of a
. she had a serious loss, once. She said so. I don’t know who it was, and I want to give her a present. Women can’t bear that kind of a thing like we can.”
The Captain promised him that they would choose something in the morning. Esteban talked about it at great length. At last the Captain saw him slip under the table, and himself, rising up, went out into the square before the inn. He looked at the line of the Andes and at the streams of stars crowding forever across the sky. And there was that wraith hanging in mid-air and smiling at him, the wraith with the silvery voice that said for the thousandth time: “Don’t be gone long. But ГП be a big girl when you get back.” Then he went within and carried Esteban to his room and sat looking at him for a long while.
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The next morning he was waiting at the bot- tom of the stairs when Esteban appeared:
“We're starting when you're ready,” said the Captain.
The strange glitter had returned to the boy's eyes. He blurted out: “No, I'm not coming. 1'm not coming after all.”
“Aie! Esteban! But you have promised me that you would come.”
“Its impossible. I can't come with you,” and he turned back up the stairs.
“Come here a moment, Esteban, just a mo- ment.”
“T can't come with you. I can’t leave Peru.”
“T want to tell you something.”
Esteban came down to the foot of the stairs.
“How about that present for Madre Maria del Pilar?” asked the Captain in a low voice. Esteban was silent, looking over the mountains. “You aren’t going to take that present away from her? It might mean a lot to her . . . you know.”
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“All right,” murmured Esteban, as though much impressed.
“Yes. Besides the ocean’s better than Peru. You know Lima and Cuzco and the road. You have nothing more to know about them. You see it’s the ocean you want. Besides on the boat you’ll have something to do every minute. ГП see to that. Go and get your things and we’ll start.”
Esteban was trying to make a decision. It had always been Manuel who had made the decisions and even Manuel had never been forced to make as great a one as this. Esteban went slowly up- stairs. The Captain waited for him and waited so long that presently he ventured half the way up the stairs and listened. At first there was silence; then a series of noises that his imagination was able to identify at once. Esteban had scraped away the plaster about a beam and was adjusting a rope about it. The Captain stood on the stairs trem- bling: “Perhaps it’s best,” he said to himself, “Perhaps I should leave him alone. Perhaps it’s
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ESTEBAN the only thing possible for him.” Then on hearing another sound he flung himself against the door, fell into the room and caught the boy. “Go away,” cried Esteban. “Let me be. Don’t come in now.”
Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. “T am alone, alone, alone” he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes.”
They started for Lima. When they reached the bridge of San Luis Rey, the Captain descended to the stream below in order to supervise the pas- sage of some merchandise, but Esteban crossed by the bridge and fell with it.
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PART FOUR:
UNCLE PIO
PART FOUR: UNCLE PIO
N one of her letters (the XXIXth) the Mar- quesa de Montemayor tries to describe the impression that Uncle Pio “our aged Har-
lequin” made upon her: “I have been sitting all morning on the green balcony making you a pair of slippers, my soul,” she tells her daughter. “As the golden wire did not take up my whole atten- tion I was able to follow the activity of a coterie of ants in the wall beside me. Somewhere behind the partition they were patiently destroying my house. Every three minutes a Little workman would appear between two boards and drop a grain of wood upon the floor below. Then he would wave his antennae at me and back busily into his mysterious corridor. In the meantime various brothers and sisters of his were trotting 143
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY back and forth on a certain highway, stopping to massage one another’s heads, or if the messages they bore were of first importance, refusing an- grily to massage or to be massaged. And at once I thought of Uncle Pio. Why? Where else but with him had I seen that very gesture with which he arrests a passing abbé or a courtier’s valet, and whispers, his lips laid against his victims ear? And surely enough, before noon I saw him hurry by on one of those mysterious errands of his. As I am the idlest and silliest of women I sent Pepita to get me a piece of nougat which I placed on the ant's highway. Similarly I sent word to the Café Pizarro asking them to send Uncle Pio to see me if he dropped in before sun- set, I shall give him that old bent salad fork with the turquoise in it, and he will bring me a copy of the new ballad that everyone is singing about the d—q—a of Ol—v—s. My child, you
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UNCLE PIO shall have the best of everything, and you shall have it first.”
And in the next letter: “My dear, Uncle Pio is the most delightful man in the world, your husband excepted. He is the second most delight- ful man in the world. His conversation is enchant- ing. If he weren’t so disreputable I should make him my secretary. He could write all my leiters for me and generations would rise up and call me witty. Alas, however, he is so moth-eaten by disease and bad company, that I shall have to leave him to his underworld. He is not only like an ant, he is like a soiled pack of cards. And I doubt whether the whole Pacific could wash him sweet and fragrant again. But what divine Span- ish he speaks and what exquisite things he says in it! That’s what one gets by hanging around a theatre and hearing nothing but the conversa- tion of Calderén. Alas, what is the matter with
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY this world, my soul, that it should treat such a being so ill! His eyes are as sad as those of a cow that has been separated from its tenth calf.”
You should know first that this Uncle Pio was Camila Perichole’s maid. He was also her singing-master, her coiffeur, her masseur, her reader, her errand-boy, her banker; rumor added: her father. For example, he taught her her parts. There was a whisper around town that Camila could read and write. The compliment was un- founded; Uncle Pio did her reading and writing for her. At the height of the season the company put on two or three new plays a week, and as each one contained a long and flowery part for the Perichole the mere task of memorization was not a trifle.
Peru had passed within fifty years from a frontier state to a state in renaissance. Its interest in music and the theatre was intense. Lima cele-
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brated its feast days by hearing a Mass of Tomás Luis da Victoria in the morning and the glittering poetry of Calderon in the evening. It is true that the Limeans were given to interpolating trivial songs into the most exquisite comedies and some lachrymose effects into the austerest music; but at least they never submitted to the boredom of a misplaced veneration. If they had disliked heroic comedy the Limeans would not have hesitated to remain at home; and if they had been deaf to polyphony nothing would have prevented their going to an earlier service. When the Archbishop returned from a short trip to Spain, all Lima kept asking: “What has he brought?” The news finally spread abroad that he had returned with tomes of masses and motets by Palestrina, Morales and Vittoria, as well as thirty-five plays by Tirso de Molina and Ruiz de Alarcon and Moreto. There was a civic féte in his honor. The choir- boys’ school and the green room of the Comedia were swamped with the gifts of vegetables and 147
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY wheat. All the world was eager to nourish the in- terpreters of so much beauty.
This was the theatre in which Camila Peri- chole gradually made her reputation. So rich was the repertory and so dependable the prompt- er’s box that few plays were given more than four times a season. The manager had the whole flowering of the 17th Century Spanish drama to draw upon, including many that are now lost to us. The Perichole had appeared in a hundred plays of Lope de Vega alone. There were many admirable actresses in Lima during these years, but none better. The citizens were too far away from the theatres of Spain to realize that she was the best in the Spanish world. They kept sighing for a glimpse of the stars of Madrid whom they had never seen and to whom they assigned vague new excellences. Only one person knew for cer- tain that the Perichole was a great performer and that was her tutor Uncle Pio.
Uncle Pio came of a good Castilian house, il-
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UNCLE PIO
legitimately. At the age of ten he ran away to Madrid from his father’s hacienda and was pur- sued without diligence. He lived ever after by his wits. He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer—a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon. From ten to fifteen he distributed handbills for merchants, held horses, and ran confidential errands. From fifteen to twenty he trained bears and snakes for travelling circuses; he cooked, and mixed punches; he hung about the entries of the more expensive taverns and whispered in- formations into the travellers’ ears—sometimes nothing more dubious than that a certain noble house was reduced to selling its plate and could thus dispense with the commission of a silver- smith. He was attached to all the theatres in town 151
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and could applaud like ten. He spread slanders at so much a slander. He sold rumors about crops and about the value of land. From twenty to thirty his services came to be recognized in very high circles—he was sent out by the government to inspirit some half-hearted rebellions in the mountains, so that the government could presently arrive and whole-heartedly crush them. His dis- cretion was so profound that the French party used him even when they knew that the Austrian party used him also. He had long interviews with the Princesse des Ursins, but he came and went by the back stairs. During this phase he was no longer obliged to arrange gentlemen’s pleasures, nor to plant little harvests of calumny.
He never did one thing for more than two weeks at a time even when enormous gains seemed likely to follow upon it. He could have become a circus manager, a theatrical director, a dealer in antiquities, an importer of Italian silks, a secretary in the Palace or the Cathedral, a dealer
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in provisions for the army, a speculator in houses and farms, a merchant in dissipations and pleas- ures. But there seemed to have been written into his personality, through some accident or early admiration of his childhood, a reluctance to own anything, to be tied down, to be held to a long engagement. It was this that prevented his thiev- ing, for example. He had stolen several times, but the gains had not been sufficient to offset his dread of being locked up; he had sufficient in- genuity to escape on the field itself all the police in the world, but nothing could protect him against the talebearing of his enemies. Similarly he had been reduced for a time to making investi- gations for the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims led off in hoods he felt that he might be involving himself in an institution whose movements were not evenly predictable.
As he approached twenty, Uncle Pio came to see quite clearly that his life had three aims. There was first this need of independence, cast
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY into a curious pattern, namely: the desire to be varied, secret and omniscient. He was willing to renounce the dignities of public life, if in secret he might feel that he looked down upon men from a great distance, knowing more about them than they knew themselves; and with a knowledge which occasionally passed into action and ren- dered him an agent in the affairs of states and persons. In the second place he wanted to be al- ways near beautiful women, of whom he was always in the best and worst sense the worshipper. To be near them was as necessary to him as breathing. His reverence for beauty and charm was there for anyone to see and to laugh at, and the ladies of the theatre and the court and the houses of pleasure loved his connoisseurship. They tormented him and insulted him and asked his advice and were singularly comforted by his absurd devotion. He suffered greatly their rages and their meannesses and their confiding tears; all he asked was to be accepted casually, to be 154