Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

"The doctor believes that you ought to remain. Let your boat go with its hideous old faun, who is nothing but a drawback. You are to remain here, on land…. You will be able to do us a great favor…. You know you will; you will remain?… What happiness!"

Ferragut's destiny was to obey this idolized and dominating voice…. And the following morning Toni saw him approaching the vessel with an air of command which admitted no opposition. The Mare Nostrum must set forth at once for Barcelona. He would entrust the command to his mate. He would join it just as soon as he could finish certain affairs that were detaining him in Naples.

Toni opened his eyes with a gesture of surprise. He wished to respond, but stood with his mouth open, not venturing to speak a single word…. This was his captain, and he was not going to permit any objections to his orders.

"Very well," he said finally. "I only ask you that you return as soon as possible to take up your command…. Do not forget what we are losing while the boat is tied up."

A few days after the departure of the steamer Ulysses radically changed his method of living.

Freya no longer wished to continue lodging in the hotel. Attacked by a sudden modesty, the curiosity and smiles of the tourists and servants were annoying her. Besides, she wished to enjoy complete liberty in her love affairs. Her friend, who was like a mother to her, would facilitate her desire. The two would live in her house.

Ferragut was greatly surprised to discover the extreme size of the apartment occupied by the doctor. Beyond her salon there was an endless number of rooms, somewhat dismantled and without furniture, a labyrinth of partitioned walls and passageways, in which the captain was always getting lost, and having to appeal to Freya for aid; all the doors of the stair-landings that appeared unrelated to the green screen of the office were so many other exits from the same dwelling.

The lovers were lodged in the extreme end, as though living in a separate house. One of the doors was for them only. They occupied a grand salon, rich in moldings and gildings and poor in furniture. Three armchairs, an old divan, a table littered with papers, toilet articles and eatables, and a rather narrow couch in one of the corners, were all the conveniences of this new establishment.

In the street it was hot, and yet they were shivering with cold in this magnificent room into which the sun's rays had never penetrated. Ulysses attempted to make a fire on a hearth of colored marble, big as a monument, but he had to desist half-suffocated by the smoke. In order to reach the doctor's apartment they had to pass through a row of numberless connecting rooms, long since abandoned.

They lived as newly-wed people, in an amorous solitude, commenting with childish hilarity on the defects of their quarters and the thousand little inconveniences of material existence. Freya would prepare breakfast on a small alcohol stove, defending herself from her lover, who believed himself more skilled than she in culinary affairs. A sailor knows something of everything.

The mere suggestion of hunting a servant for their most common needs irritated the German maiden.

"Never!… Perhaps she might be a spy!"

And the word "spy" on her lips took on an expression of immense scorn.

The doctor was absent on frequent trips and Karl the employee in the study, was the one who received visitors. Sometimes he would pass through the row of deserted rooms in order to ask some information of Freya, and she would follow him out, deserting her lover for a few moments.

Left to himself, Ulysses would suddenly realize the dual nature of his personality. Then the man he was before that meeting in Pompeii would assert himself, and he would see his vessel and his home in Barcelona.

"What have you got yourself into?" he would ask himself remorsefully.

"How is all this affair ever going to turn out?…"

But at the sound of her footsteps in the next room, on perceiving the atmospheric wave produced by the displacement of her adorable body, this second person would fold itself back and a dark curtain would fall over his memory, leaving visible only the actual reality.

With the beatific smile of an opium-smoker, he would accept the impetuous caress of her lips, the entwining of her arms, strangling him like marble boas.

"Ulysses, my master!… The moments that separate me from you weigh upon me like centuries!"

He, on the other hand, had lost all notion of time. The days were all confused in his mind, and he had to keep asking in order to realize their passing. After a week passed in the doctor's home, he would sometimes suppose that the sweet sequestration had been but forty-eight hours long, at others that nearly a month had flitted by.

They went out very little. The mornings slipped away insensibly between the late awakening and preparations for a breakfast made by themselves. If it was necessary to go after some eatable forgotten the day before, it was she who took charge of the expedition, wishing to keep him from all contact with outside life.

The afternoons were afternoons of the harem, passed upon the divan or stretched on the floor. In a low voice she would croon Oriental songs, incomprehensible and mysterious. Suddenly she would spring up impetuously like a spring that is unwound, like a serpent that uncoils itself, and would begin to dance, almost without moving her feet, waving her lithe limbs…. And he would smile with stupefied infatuation, extending a right hand toward an Arabian tabaret, covered with bottles.

Freya took even greater care of the supply of liquor than of things to eat. The sailor was half-drunk, but with a drunkenness wisely tempered that never went beyond the rose-colored period. But he was so happy!…

They dined outside the house. Sometimes their excursions were at midday and they would go to the restaurants of Posilipo or Vomero, the very places that he had known when he was a hopeless suppliant, and which saw him now with her hanging on his arm, with a proud air of possession. If nightfall surprised them, they would hastily betake themselves to a café in the interior of the city, a beer-garden whose proprietor always spoke to Freya in German in a low voice.

Whenever the doctor was in Naples she would seat herself at their table, with the air of a good mother who is receiving her daughter and son-in-law. Her scrutinizing glasses appeared to be searching Ferragut's very soul, as though doubtful of his fidelity. Then she would become more affectionate in the course of these banquets, composed of cold meats with a great abundance of drinks, in the German style. For her, love was the most beautiful thing in existence, and she could not look upon these two enamored ones without a mist of emotion blurring the crystals of her second eyes.

"Ah, Captain!… How much she loves you!… Do not disappoint her; obey her in every respect…. She adores you."

Frequently she returned from her trips in evident bad humor. Ulysses surmised that she had been in Rome. At other times she would appear very gay, with an ironic and tedious gayety. "The mandolin-strummers appear to be coming to their senses. Germany is constantly receiving more support from their ranks. In Rome the 'German propaganda' is distributed among millions."

One night emotion overcame her rugged sensibilities. She had brought back from her trip a portrait which she pressed lovingly against her vast bosom before showing it.

"Look at it," she said to the two. "It is the hero whose name brings tears of enthusiasm to all Germans…. What an honor for our family!"

Pride made her hasty, snatching the photograph from Freya's hand in order to pass it on to Ulysses. He saw a naval official rather mature, surrounded by a numerous family. Two children with long blonde hair were seated on his knees. Five youngsters, chubby and tow-headed, appeared at his feet with crossed legs, lined up in the order of their ages. Near his shoulder extended a double line of brawny young girls with coronal braids imitating the coiffures of empresses and grand duchesses…. Behind these, proudly erect, was his virtuous and prolific companion, aged by too continuous maternity.

Ferragut contemplated this patriotic warrior very deliberately. He had the face of a kindly person with clear eyes and grayish, pointed beard. He almost inspired a tender compassion by his overwhelming duties as a father.

Meanwhile the doctor's voice was chanting the glories of her relative.

"A hero!… Our gracious Kaiser has decorated him with the Iron Cross.

They have given him honorary citizenship in various capitals…. May God punish England!"

And she extolled this patriarch's unheard-of exploit. He was the commandant of the submarine that had torpedoed one of the greatest English transatlantic steamers. Out of the twelve hundred passengers from New York more than eight hundred were drowned…. Women and children had gone down in the general destruction.

Freya, more quick-witted than the doctor, read Ulysses' thoughts in his eyes…. He was now surveying with astonishment the photograph of this official surrounded with his biblical progeny, like a good-natured burgher. And a man who appeared so complacent had committed such butchery without encountering any danger whatever!—hidden in the water with his eye glued to the periscope, he had coldly ordered the sending of a torpedo against this floating and defenseless city?…

"Such is war," said Freya.

"Of course it is war!" retorted the doctor as if offended at the propitiatory tone of her friend. "And it is our right also. They blockade us, and they wish our women and children to die of hunger, and so we kill theirs."

The captain felt obliged to protest, in spite of the hidden nudges and gestures of his mistress. The doctor had many times told him that, thanks to her organization, Germany could never know hunger, and that she could exist years and years on the consumption of her own product.

"That is so," replied the dame, "but war has to make itself ferocious, implacable, in order that it may not last so long. It is our human duty to terrify the enemy with a cruelty beyond what they are able to imagine."

The sailor slept badly that night, evidently greatly troubled. Freya guessed the presence of something beyond the influence of her caresses. The following day his pensive reserve continued and she, well knowing the cause, tried to dissipate it with her words….

The torpedoing of defenseless steamers was only made on the coast of England. They had to cut short, cost what it might, the source of supplies for that hated island.

"In the Mediterranean nothing of that kind will ever occur. I can assure you of that…. The submarines will attack battleships only."

And, as if fearing a reappearance of Ulysses' scruples, she redoubled her seductions on their afternoons of voluptuous imprisonment. She was constantly devising new fascinations, that her lover might never be surfeited. He, on his part, came to believe that he was living with several women at the same time, like an Oriental personage. Freya upon multiplying her charms, had to do no more than to swing around on herself, showing a new facet of her past existence.

The sentiment of jealousy, the bitterness of not having been the first and only one, rejuvenated the sailor's passion, alleviating the tedium of satiety, yet at the same time giving to her caresses an acrid, desperate and attractive relish due to his enforced fraternity with unknown predecessors.

Desisting from her enchantments, she came and went through the salon, sure of her beauty, proud of her firm and superb physique, which had not yielded in the slightest degree to the passing of the years. A couple of colored shawls served as her transparent clothing. Waving them as rainbow shafts around her marble-white body, she used to interpret the priestess dances to the terrible Siva that she had learned in Java.

Suddenly the chill of the room would begin biting in awaking her from her tropical dream. With a final bound, she sought refuge in his arms.

"Oh, my beloved Argonaut!… My shark!"

She threw herself on the sailor's breast, stroking his beard, and pushing him so as to edge in on the divan which was too narrow for the two.

She guessed at once the cause of his furrowed brow, the listlessness with which he responded to her caresses, the gloomy fire that was smouldering in his eyes. The exotic dance had made him recall her past and in order to regain her sway over him, subjecting him in sweet passivity, she sprang up from the divan, running about the room.

"What shall I give to my bad little man, in order to make him smile a bit?… What shall I do in order to make him forget his wrong ideas?…"

Perfumes were her pet fad. As she herself used to say, it was possible for her to do without eating but never without the richest and most expensive essences. In that scantily furnished room, like the interior of an army and navy supply store, the cut glass flasks with gold and nickel stoppers, protruded among the clothing and papers, and stood up in the corners denouncing the forgetfulness of their enchanting breath.

"Take it! Take it!"

And she sprinkled the precious perfumes as though they were water on Ferragut's hair, over his curled beard, advising the sailor to close his eyes in order not to be blinded by this crazy baptism.

Anointed and fragrant as an Asiatic despot, the strong Ulysses would sometimes revolt against this effeminateness. At others, he would accept it with the delight of a new pleasure.

Suddenly a window-shutter would seem to swing open in his imagination, and, passing by this luminous square, he would see the melancholy Cinta, his son Esteban, the bridge of his vessel and Toni at the helm.

"Forget!" cried the voice of his evil counselor, blotting out the vision. "Enjoy the present!… There is plenty of time to go in search of them."

And again he would sink himself in his refined and artificial luxurious state with the selfishness of the satrap who, after ordering various cruelties, locks himself in his harem.

The very finest linens, scattered by chance, enveloped his body or served as cushions. They were her lingerie, stray petals of her beauty, that still kept the warmth and perfume of her body. If Ferragut needed any object belonging to him, he had to hunt for it through sheaves of skirts, silk petticoats, white negligees, perfumes and portraits, all scattered over the furniture or tossed in the corners. When Freya, tired of dancing in the center of the salon, was not curling herself up in his arms she took delight in opening a box of sandalwood. In this she used to keep all her jewels, taking them out again and again with a nervous restlessness, as though she feared they might have evaporated in their enclosure. Her lover had to listen to the gravest explanations accompanying the display of her treasures.

"Kiss it," she said, offering him the string of pearls almost always on her neck.

These grains of moonlight splendor were to her little living beings, little creatures that she needed in contact with her skin. She was impregnated with the essence of all that she wore; she drank their life.

"They have slept upon me so many nights," she would murmur, contemplating them amorously. "This light amber tone I have given them with the warmth of my body."

They were no longer a piece of jewelry, they formed a part of her organism. They might grow pale and die if they were to pass many days forgotten in the depths of her casket.

After that she kept on ransacking the perfumed jewel-box for all the gems that were her great pride,—earrings and finger-rings of great price, mixed with other exotic jewels of bizarre form and slight value, picked up on her voyages.

"Look carefully at this," she said gravely to Ferragut, while she rubbed against her bare arm an enormous diamond in one of her rings.

Warmed by the friction, the precious stone became converted into a magnet. A bit of paper placed a few inches away was attracted to it with an irresistible fluttering.

She then rubbed one of the barbaric imitation-jewels of thick cut glass, and the scrap of paper remained motionless without the slightest evidence of attraction.

Satisfied with these experiments, she replaced her treasures in the casket and set herself to beguiling the passing monotony, again devoting herself to Ulysses.

These long imprisonments in an atmosphere charged with perfumes, Oriental tobaccos, and feminine seduction were gradually disordering Ferragut's mind. Besides this, he was drinking heavily in order to give new vigor to his organism which was beginning to break down under the excesses of his voluptuous seclusion. At the slightest sign of weariness, Freya would fall upon him with her dominating lips. If she freed herself from his embraces, it was to offer him a glass full of the strongest liquor.

When the spell of intoxication overcame him, weighing down his eyes, he always recalled the same dream. In his maudlin siestas, satiated and happy, there would always reappear another Freya who was not Freya, but Doña Constanza, the Empress of Byzantium. He could see her dressed as a peasant girl, just as she was portrayed in the picture in the church of Valencia, and at the same time completely undressed, like the other houri, who was dancing in the salon.

This double image, which disappeared and reappeared capriciously with the arbitrariness of dreams, was always telling him the same thing. Freya was Doña Constanza perpetuated across the centuries, taking on a new form. She was born of the union of a German and an Italian, just like this other one…. But the chaste empress was now smiling in her nudeness, satisfied with being simply Freya. Marital infidelity, persecution and poverty had been the result of her first existence when she was tranquil and virtuous.

"Now I know the truth," Doña Constanza would say with a sweetly immodest smile. "Only love exists; all the rest is illusion. Kiss me, Ferragut!… I have returned to life in order to recompense you. You gave me the first of your childish affection; you longed for me before you became a man."

And her kiss was like that of the spy—an absorbing kiss throughout his entire person, making him awake…. Upon opening his eyes he saw Freya with her mouth close to his.

"Arise, my sea-wolf!… It is already night. We are going to dine."

Outside the house, Ulysses would breathe in the twilight breeze and look at the first stars that were beginning to sparkle above the roofs. He felt the fresh delight and trembling limbs of the odalisque coming out of retreat.

The dinner finished, they would stroll through the darkest street or the promenades along the shore, avoiding the people. One night they stopped in the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, near the bench that had witnessed their struggle when returning from Posilipo.

"You wished to kill me, you little rascal!… You threatened me with your revolver, my bandit!…"

Ulysses protested. What a way to remember things! But she refuted his correction with a bold and lying authority.

"It was you!… It way you! I say so, and that is enough. You must become accustomed to accepting whatever I may affirm."

In the beer garden, where they used to dine almost every night—an imitation medieval saloon, with paneled beams made by machinery, plaster walls imitating oak, and neo-Gothic crystals—the proprietor used to exhibit as a great curiosity a jar of grotesque little figures among the porcelain steins that adorned the brackets of the pedestals.

Ferragut recognized it immediately; it was an ancient Peruvian jar.

"Yes, it is a huaca," she said. "I have been in that, too…. We were engaged in manufacturing antiques."

Freya misunderstood the gesture that her lover made. She thought that he was astonished at the audacity of this manufacture of souvenirs. "Germany is great; nothing can resist the adaptive powers of her industries…."

And her eyes burned with a proud light as she enumerated these exploits of false historical resurrection. They had filled museums and private collections with Egyptian and Phoenician statuettes recently reproduced. Then, on German soil, they had manufactured Peruvian antiquities in order to sell them to the tourists who visit the ancient realm of the Incas. Some of the inhabitants received wages for disinterring these things opportunely with a great deal of publicity. Now the fad of the moment was the black art, and collectors were hunting horrible wooden idols carved by tribes in the interior of Africa.

But what had really impressed Ferragut was the plural which she had employed in speaking of such industries. Who had fabricated these Peruvian antiquities?… Was it her husband, the sage?…

"No," replied Freya tranquilly. "It was another one—an artist from Munich. He had hardly any talent for painting, but great intelligence in business matters. We returned from Peru with the mummy of an Inca which we exhibited in almost all the museums of Europe without finding a purchaser. Bad business! We had to keep the Inca in our room in the hotel, and …"

Ferragut was not interested in the wanderings of the poor Indian monarch, snatched from the repose of his tomb…. One more! Each of Freya's confidences evoked a new predecessor from the haze of her past.

Coming out of the beer-garden, the captain stalked along with a gloomy aspect. She, on the other hand, was laughing at her memories surveying across the years, with a flattering optimism, this far-away adventure of her Bohemian days, and growing very merry on recalling the remains of the Inca on his passage from hotel to hotel.

Suddenly Ulysses' wrath blazed forth…. The Dutch, officer, the natural history sage, the singer who killed himself in one shot and now the fabricator of antiquities…. How many more men had there been in her existence? How many were there still to be told of? Why had she not brought them all out at once?…

Freya was astounded at his abrupt violence. The sailor's wrath was terrifying. Then she laughed, leaning heavily on his arm, and putting her face close to his.

"You are jealous!… My shark is jealous! Go on talking. You don't know how much I like to hear you. Complain away!… Beat me!… It's the first time that I've seen a jealous man. Ah, you Southerners!… Meridionals!… With good reason the women adore you."

And she was telling the truth. She was experiencing a new sensation before this manly wrath, provoked by amorous indignation. Ulysses appeared to her a very different man from all the others she had known in her former life,—cold, compliant and selfish.

"My Ferragut!… My Mediterranean hero! How I love you! Come … come…. I must reward you!"

They were in a central street, near the corner of a sloping little alley with stairs. She pushed him toward it, and at the first step in the narrow and dark passageway embraced him, turning her back on the movement and light in the great street, in order to kiss him with that kiss which always made the captain's knees tremble.

Although his temper was soothed, he continued complaining during the rest of the stroll. How many had preceded him?… He must know. He wished to know, no matter how horrible the knowledge might be. It was the delight of the jealous who persist in scratching open the wound.

"I want to know you," he repeated. "I ought to know you, since you belong to me. I have the right!…"

This right recalled with childish obstinacy made Freya smile dolorously. Long centuries of experience appeared to peep out from the melancholy curl of her lips. In her gleamed the wisdom of the woman, more cautious and foresighted than that of the man, since love was her only preoccupation.

"Why do you wish to know?" she asked discouragingly. "How much further could you go on that?… Would you perchance be any happier when you did know?…"

She was silent for some steps and then said as though disclosing a secret:

"In order to love, it is not necessary for us to know one another. Quite the contrary. A little bit of mystery keeps up the illusion and dispells monotony…. He who wishes to know is never happy."

She continued talking. Truth perhaps was a good thing in other phases of existence, but it was fatal to love. It was too strong, too crude. Love was like certain women, beautiful as goddesses under a discreet and artificial light, but horrible as monsters under the burning splendors of the sun.