The Dead Command

"I think," said Pepet, "that the Ironworker is less valiant than they say; and what is your opinion about it, Don Jaime?"

When it was growing late, and Margalida had talked with each of her suitors, her father, who was dozing in a corner, would break into a loud yawn. The man of the fields seemed to divine the passing of time even when asleep. "Half past nine! Bedtime! Bòna nit!" And all the youths, after this hint, would leave the house, their footsteps and their whinnying swallowed up by darkness.

Pepet, as he spoke of these reunions, in which he rubbed elbows with brave men, wearers of deadly weapons, again bethought him of his grandfather's knife. When would Don Jaime speak to his father about this family treasure? Since he had put off asking he must not forget his promise to present him another knife. What could a man like himself do, lacking such a companion? Where could he present himself?

"Don't worry," said Febrer. "One of these days I'll go to town. You may count on the gift."

One morning Jaime started for Iviza, eager for a fresh experience, and to renew and vary his impressions in a less rural atmosphere. Iviza seemed to him now like a great city, even to him who had traveled over all Europe. The houses in a row, the red brick sidewalks, the balconies with Persian blinds, he admired them all with the simplicity of a savage from the interior of a desert who arrives at a trading station on the coast. He paused before the shops, examining the goods exposed with the same enjoyment with which he used to contemplate the luxurious display windows on the boulevards or on Regent Street.

The jewelry shop of a Chueta held his attention a long while. He admired the filigree buttons with a stone in the center, the hollow gold chains made for the peasant girls, who deemed these objects the most perfect and marvelous works created by the art of man. Suppose he should go in and buy a dozen of those buttons! What a surprise for the girl of Can Mallorquí when he should present them to her for the decoration of her sleeves! Surely she would accept them from him, a grave gentleman upon whom she looked with filial respect. Detestable respect! That confounded gravity of his that hampered him like a crushing burden! But the scion of the Febrers, the descendant of opulent merchants and heroic navigators, was forced to resist, thinking of the money stowed away in his girdle. Probably he did not possess enough to make the purchase.

In another store he acquired a knife for Pepet, the largest and heaviest he could find, an absurd weapon, capable of making him forget the relic of his glorious grandfather.

At noon, Febrer, bored by objectless strolling through the ward of the Marina, and along the steep, narrow streets of the ancient Royal Fortress, entered a small inn, the only one in the city, situated near the port. There he met the customary patrons. In the vestibule a few youths dressed in peasant style, with military caps, soldiers of the garrison who served as orderlies; within the dining-room, subaltern officers of a batallion of light infantry, young lieutenants who were smoking with a bored mien and gazing through the windows at the immense blue expanse like prisoners of the sea. During the meal they lamented their bad luck at having their youth wasted by being chained to this rock. They spoke of Majorca as a place of joy; they recalled the provinces on the mainland, of which many of them were sons, as paradises to which they were eager to return. Women! It was a longing, a desire which made their voices quaver and brought a glow of madness into their eyes. The chaste Ivizan virtue, the exclusive islander, suspicious of foreigners, weighed upon them like the chain of an insufferable prison. There was no trifling with love here; no time was wasted; either hostile indifference or honest courting with a view to speedy marriage. Words and smiles led straight to matrimony; association with young girls was only possible for the purpose of the formation of a new household; and these lusty youths, gay, abounding in vitality, suffered a tantalizing torment discussing the most beautiful girls of the island, admiring them, yet living apart from them, in spite of moving in narrow limits which forced them to continual meetings. Their dearest hope was to get leave of absence, so that they might live a few days in Majorca or on the Peninsula, far from the cold-hearted and virtuous isle, which accepted the foreigner only as a husband.

Women! Those young bloods talked of nothing else, and seated at the long table, Febrer silently seconded their words and lamentations. Women! The irresistible tendency which binds us to them is the only thing that remains after the moral upheavals which change one's life; the only thing which remains standing among the ghosts of other illusions destroyed by the cataclysm. Febrer felt the same disgust as did the soldiers, the impression of being locked up in a prison of privations, surrounded by the sea as if it were a moat. Just now the island capital impressed him as a town of irresistible monotony, with its señoritas guarded in suspicious and monastic isolation. His mind reverted to the country as to a place of liberty, with its simple souled and natural women, restrained only by a defensive instinct like that of primitive females.

He left the city that same afternoon. Nothing remained of the optimism of a few hours before. The streets of the Marina were nauseating; an infectious odor escaped from the houses; in the arroyo buzzed swarms of insects, rising from the pools at the sound of the footsteps of a passerby. The recollection of the hills near his tower, perfumed by sylvan plants and by the salty odor of the sea, seemed to smile in his memory with idyllic sweetness.

A peasant's cart took him to the vicinity of San José, and after leaving it he started for the mountain, passing between the pine trees bent and twisted by the storms. The sky was overcast, the atmosphere warm and heavy. From time to time big drops fell, but before the clouds could settle into rain a gust of wind seemed to sweep them toward the horizon.

Near a charcoal burner's cabin Jaime saw two women walking rapidly among the pines. They were Margalida and her mother, coming from Cubells, a hermitage situated upon a hill on the coast, near a spring, which gave a vivid green to the abrupt cliffs, and nurtured oranges and palms in the shelter of the rocks.

Jaime overtook the two women, and next he saw Pepet spring out of the bushes where he had been walking outside the path, stone in hand, pursuing a bird whose cries had attracted his attention. They continued the journey to Can Mallorquí together, and, without realizing how it happened Febrer found himself in advance, walking by Margalida's side, while Pèp's wife trudged along behind with slow step, leaning on her son's arm.

The mother was ill; an obscure illness, which caused the doctor on his rare visits, to shrug his shoulders, and which excited the ambition of the island healers. They had been to make a promise to the Virgin of Cubells, and had left on her altar two fluted candles purchased in the city.

While Margalida talked in a sad voice of the old woman's aches and pains, the egoism of vigorous youth spurred her on with nervous haste until her cheeks became suffused with color, and her eyes betrayed a certain impatience. This was courting day. They must reach Can Mallorquí in time to prepare an early supper for the family before the suitors should arrive.

Febrer was admiring her with his serious eyes. He marveled now at the stupidity which had caused him to think of Margalida for all these months as a child, as an undeveloped creature, without realizing her graces. He remembered with scorn those señoritas of the city for whom the soldiers in the fonda sighed. Again he thought of the courting of Margalida with an annoyance resembling jealousy. Must this girl fall a prey to one of those dusky-faced barbarians who would subject her to slavery of the soil like a beast?

"Margalida!" he murmured, as if about to say something important. "Margalida!"

But he spoke no more. The old-time rake felt his instincts of libertinism aroused by the perfume exhaled by this woman, an indefinable perfume of flesh fresh and virginal, which he thought he inhaled, like a connoisseur, more with the imagination than through sense of smell. At the same time—a strange thing for him!—he experienced a timidity which deprived him of speech; a timidity like that he had felt in his early youth when, far from the easy conquests on his estate in Majorca, he ventured to address himself to worldly-wise women on the Continent. Was it not an unworthy act for him to speak of love to this girl whom he had considered a child and who respected him as if he were her father?

"Margalida! Margalida!"

After these exclamations, which aroused the girl's curiosity, making her raise her eyes to fix them questioningly on his, he at last began to speak, asking her about the progress of the courting. Had she decided on anyone? Who was to be the lucky man? The Ironworker? the Minstrel?

She lowered her eyes again, in her confusion picking up a corner of her apron and raising it to her bosom. She did not know. She hesitated and lisped like a child in her bashfulness. She did not wish to marry—neither the Minstrel or the Ironworker, nor anybody. She had acquiesced in the courting because all girls did the same when they reached a certain age. Besides (here she flushed vividly), it gave her a kind of satisfaction to humiliate her friends, who were raging with envy on seeing the great number of her suitors. She was grateful to the youths who came from great distances to see her, but as for loving one of them—or marrying–

She had slackened her pace as she spoke. Pèp's wife and his son passed on unconsciously, and as the two were left alone in the path, they at last stopped, without realizing what they were doing.

"Margalida! Almond Blossom!"

To the devil with shyness! Febrer felt arrogant and masterful as in his better days. Why this fear? A peasant girl! A child!

He spoke with a firm accent, trying to fascinate her with the impassioned fixedness of her eyes, drawing near her, as if to caress her with the music of his words. And how about him? What did Margalida think of him? What if he should present himself to Pèp some day, telling him that he wished to marry his daughter?

"You!" exclaimed the girl. "You, Don Jaime!"

She raised her eyes fearlessly, laughing at the absurdity—the señor was accustomed to fooling her with his jests. Her father said that the Febrers were all as serious as judges, but ever in a good humor. He was jesting at her expense again, as he had done when he had told about his clay sweetheart up there in his tower who had been waiting for him a thousand years.

But when her glance met Febrer's, seeing his pale face, tense with emotion, she turned white also. He seemed a different man; she saw a Don Jaime she had never known before. Instinctively, impelled by fear, she took a step backward. She remained on the defensive, leaning against the slender trunk of a small tree, which grew beside the path, its tiny sickly colored leaves almost loosened by the autumn wind.

She could still smile—a forced smile, pretending to believe it one of the señor's jokes.

"No," replied Febrer with energy, "I am speaking seriously. Tell me, Margalida, Almond Blossom, what if I should become one of your lovers; and if I should come to the courting, what would you answer me?"

She shrunk back against the yielding tree trunk, making herself smaller, as if she would escape those ardent eyes. Her instinctive backward step shook the flexible tree and a shower of yellow leaves, like flakes of amber, fell roundabout her, clinging to her hair. Pale, her lips compressed and blue, she murmured words scarcely more audible than a gentle sigh. Her eyes, enlarged and deep, bore the agonized expression of the humble of spirit who think many things, but who find no words to express them. He, the heir of the Febrers, a gran señor, to marry a peasant girl? Was he crazy?

"No; I am not a great señor; I am an unfortunate creature. You are richer than I, who am living off your charity. Your father wishes your husband to be a man who shall cultivate his lands. Will you marry me, Margalida? Do you love me, Almond Blossom?"

With bowed head, avoiding a glance that seemed to burn her, she continued speaking without listening to him. Madness! It could not be true! The señor to say such things! He must be dreaming!

Suddenly she felt on one of her hands a light, caressing touch. She looked at him again. She saw an unfamiliar face that thrilled her. She experienced a sensation of grave danger—the nervous start which gives a warning. Her knees shook, they contracted as if she were about to faint with fear.

"Do you think me too old?" he murmured in a supplicating voice. "Can you never come to love me?"

The voice was sweet and caressing, but those eyes seemed to devour her! That pale face, like that of men who kill! She longed to speak, to protest at his last words. She had never thought of Don Jaime's age; he was something superior, like the saints, who grow in beauty with the years. But fear held her silent. She freed herself from the caressing hand, she felt moved by the prodigious rebound of her nerves, as if her life were in danger, and she fled from Febrer as if he were an assassin.

"Heaven help me!"

Murmuring this supplication she sprang away, and began to run with the agility of the country girl, disappearing round a turn in the path.

Jaime did not follow her. He stood motionless in the solitude of the pine forest, erect in the pathway, unconscious of his surroundings, like the hero of a legend subjected to an enchantment. Then he passed a hand over his face, as if awakening from a dream, collecting his thoughts. His audacious words stung him with remorse, Margalida's alarm, the terrified flight which had terminated the interview. How stupid of him! It was the result of his going to the city; the return to civilized life which, had upset his bachelor calm, arousing passions of long ago; the conversation of the young soldiers, who lived with their thoughts ever fixed on women. But no; he did not repent what he had done. It was important for Margalida to know what he had so often vaguely thought in the isolation of his tower.

He continued slowly along his way to avoid meeting the family from Can Mallorquí. Margalida had joined her mother and brother. He saw them from a rise of ground, when they were journeying through the valley in the direction of the farmhouse.

Febrer changed his route, avoiding Can Mallorquí. He directed his steps toward the Pirate's Tower, but when he gained it he passed on, not stopping until he reached the sea.

The rock-bound coast, which seemed to overhang the waters, was broken by their incessant lashing for century upon century. The waves, like furious blue bulls, charged, frothing with anger, against the rock, wearing deep caverns, which were prolonged upward in the form of vertical cracks. This age-long battle was destroying the coast, shattering its stony armor, scale by scale. Colossal wall-like fragments loosened. They first separated by forming an imperceptible crevice which grew and grew with the passing of centuries. The natural wall leaned for years and years above the waves, which beat furiously at its base, until it would lose its balance some stormy night and topple like the rampart of a besieged citadel, crumbling into blocks, peopling the sea with new reefs soon to be covered with slimy vegetation, while the winding passages would seethe with foam and sparkle with the metallic gleam of fish.

Febrer seated himself on the edge of a great projecting rock, a ledge loosened from the coast that inclined boldly over the reefs. His fatalism impelled him to sit there. Would that the inevitable catastrophe might take place at that moment, and that his body, dragged down by the collapsing rock, might disappear in the bottom of the sea, having for its sarcophagus this mass, equal to the pyramid of a Pharaoh! What had he to look forward to in life?

Before sinking out of sight the setting sun peeped through an opening of stormy sky lying between riven clouds. It was a gory sphere, a wafer of purple which lightened the immensity of the sea with a fiery glare. The dark masses closing in the horizon were fringed with scarlet. A restless triangle of flames spread over the dark green waters. The foam turned red and the coast looked for an instant like molten lava.

In the glow of this stormy light Jaime contemplated the fluctuation of the waters at his feet, hurling their boisterous swirls into the hollows of the rock, roaring and writhing, frothing with anger in the winding passages between the reefs. In the depths of this greenish mass, illuminated by the setting sun with transparencies of opal, he saw strange vegetation growing on the rocks, diminutive forests among whose clinging fronds moved animals of fantastic form, nervous and swift or torpid and sedentary, with hard carapaces, gray and pinkish, bristling with defenses, armed with tentacles, with lances and with horns, making war among themselves and persecuting the weaker creatures which passed like white exhalations, flashing like crystal in the rapidity of their flight.

Febrer felt belittled by the solitude. Faith in his human importance destroyed, he considered himself no bigger than one of those tiny creatures swarming about in the vegetation of the submarine abyss—perhaps even smaller. Those animals were armed for life, they could sustain themselves by their own strength, never knowing the discouragement, the humiliations and the sorrows which afflicted him. The grandeur of the sea, unconscious of man, cruel and implacable in its anger, overwhelmed Febrer, arousing in his memory an endless chain of ideas which were perhaps new, but which he accepted as vague reminiscences of a former existence, as something which he had thought before, he knew not where nor when.

A thrill of respect, of instinctive devotion, swept over him, making him forget the event of a short time before, submerging him in religious contemplation. The sea! He thought, he knew not why, of the most remote ancestors of humanity, of primitive man, miserable, scarcely emerged from original animalism, tormented and repelled on every side by a nature hostile in its exhuberance, as a young and vigorous body conquers or throws off the parasites which endeavor to live at the cost of its organism. On the shore of the sea, in the presence of the divine mystery, green and immense, man should experience his most restful moments. The earliest gods sprung from the bosom of the waters; contemplating the fluctuation of the waves, and soothed by their murmur, man should feel that within him is born something new and powerful—a soul. The sea! The mysterious organisms which people it also live, as do those of the land, subjected to the tyranny of fear, immovable in their primitive existence, repeating themselves throughout the centuries as if ever the same entity. There also do the dead command! The strong pursue the weak, and are in their turn devoured by others more powerful, as in the times of their remote progenitors, when the waters were yet warm from the formation of the globe—ever the same, repeating themselves throughout hundreds of millions of years. A monster of prehistoric ages who might return to swim in these waters would find on all sides, in the dark chasms, and along the coasts, the same life and the identical struggles as in his youth. The animal of combat with his green carapace, armed with curving claws and with forceps for torture, implacable warrior of the dark submarine caverns, has never united with the graceful fish, swift and weak, which trails its rose and silver tunic through the transparent waters. His destiny is to devour, to be strong, and, if he should find himself disarmed, his defenses broken, to give himself up to misfortune without protest and to perish. Death is preferable to abdicating one's primal rights, the noble fatality of birth. For the strong of the land or of the sea there is no satisfaction nor life outside one's own sphere; they are slaves of their own greatness; birth brings them misfortunes as well as honors, and it will ever be the same! The dead are the only ones who rule the living. The first beings who initiated a plan for living wrought with their acts the cage in which succeeding generations must be imprisoned.

The tranquil mollusks which he now saw in the depths of the waters, clinging to the rocks like dark buttons, seemed to him divine beings who guard the mystery of creation in their stupid quiet. He imagined them great and imposing like those monsters worshipped by savages for their impassivity, and in whose rigidity they believe they divine the majesty of the gods. Febrer recalled his jests of other times, on nights of feasting, seated before a plate of fresh oysters, in the fashionable Parisian restaurants. His elegant companions thought him mad as they listened to the nonsensical ideas aroused by wine, the sight of the shell fish and the recollection of certain fragmentary reading in his youth. "We're going to eat our grandfathers like the merry cannibals that we are." The oyster is one of the primitive manifestations of life on the planet—one of the earlier forms of organic matter, still resting, uncertain and aimless in its evolution in the immensity of the waters. The sympathetic and slandered monkey only has the importance of a first cousin who has failed to make a career for himself, of an unfortunate and absurd relative whom one leaves outside the door, feigning ignorance of his family name, denying him a welcome. The mollusk is the venerable grandfather, the chief of the house, the creator of the dynasty, the ancestor crowned with a nobility of millions of centuries. These thoughts came back to Febrer's mind now with the vividness of indisputable truths.

Humanity is faithful to its sources. Nobody denies the traditions of those venerable ancestors who seemed to be asleep in the immense catacomb of the sea. Man thinks himself free because he can move from one side of the planet to the other; because his organism is mounted upon two agile and articulate columns which permit of his springing over the ground by the mechanism of walking—but, it is an error! One more of many illusions which deceptively gladden our lives, making us bearers of its misery and its triviality! Febrer was convinced that we are all born shut in between two valves of prejudices, of scruple, and of pride, an inheritance from those who proceeded us, and although man stirs about, he never manages to tear himself from the same rock to which his predecessors clung and vegetated. Activity, incidents of life, independence of character, all are illusions, the vanity of the mollusk which dreams while adhering to the rock, and imagines he is swimming through all the seas on the globe, while his valves continue fastened to the stone!

All creatures are as those who have gone before, and as those yet to come. They change in shape, but the soul remains stationary and immutable like that of those rudimentary beings, eternal witnesses of the first palpitation of life on the planet, which seemed to be sleeping the heaviest of sleeps; and thus will it ever be. Vain are great efforts to free oneself from this fatal environment, from the heritage of fear, from the circle in which we are forced to move, until at last comes death. Then other animals like ourselves appear, and begin whirling around the same circle, imagining themselves free because ever before their footsteps they have new space in which to run.

"The dead command!" Jaime once more declared to himself. It seemed impossible that men do not realize this great truth; that they dwell in eternal night, believing that they make new things in the glow of illusions which rise daily, as rises the great deception of the sun to accompany us through the infinite, which is dark, but which seems to us blue and radiant with light.

When Febrer thought this, the sun had already set. The sea was almost black, the sky a leaden gray, and in the fog on the horizon the lightning quivered and flashed. Jaime felt on his face and on his hands the moist kiss of drops of rain. A storm was about to break which perhaps would last throughout the night. The lightning flashes were coming nearer, a distant crashing was heard, as if two hostile fleets were cannonading beyond the curtain of fog on the horizon, and approaching each other behind its screen. The sheet of quiet water, glossy as crystal between reefs and coast, began to tremble with the widening undulations of the raindrops.