Emilia Pardo Bazán - The Swan of Vilamorta

A sad and ugly story was told about Leocadia Otero. Although, without actually saying so, she had given it to be understood that she was a widow, it was whispered that she had never been married; that the puny Dominguito, the little cripple who was always sick, was born while she lived in the house of her uncle and guardian at Orense, after the death of her parents. What was certain was that her uncle had died shortly after the birth of the child, bequeathing to his niece a couple of fields and a house in Vilamorta, and Leocadia, after passing the necessary examinations, had obtained the village school and gone to settle in that town. She had lived in it now for more than thirteen years, observing the most exemplary conduct, watching day and night over Minguitos, and living with the utmost frugality in order to rebuild the dilapidated house, which she had finally succeeded in doing shortly before her meeting with Segundo. Leocadia was a woman of notably industrious habits; in her wardrobe she had always a good supply of linen, in her parlor bamboo furniture with a rug before the sofa, grapes, rice, and ham in her pantry, and carnations and sweet basil in her windows. Minguitos was always as neat as a new pin; she herself, when she raised the skirt of her habit of Dolores, of good merino, displayed underneath voluminous embroidered petticoats, stiff with starch. For all which reasons, notwithstanding her ugliness and her former history, the schoolmistress was not without suitors—a wealthy retired muleteer, and Cansin, the clothier. She rejected the suitors and continued living alone with Minguitos and Flores, her old servant, who now enjoyed in the house all the privileges of a grandmother.

The iniquitous wrong suffered by her in early youth had produced in Leocadia, absorbed as she was in her bitter recollections, a profound horror of marriage and an insatiable thirst for the romantic, the ideal, which is as a refreshing dew to the imagination and which satisfies the emotions. She had the superficial knowledge of a village schoolmistress—rudimentary, but sufficient to introduce exotic tastes into Vilamorta; that is to say, a taste for literature in its most accessible forms—novels and poetry. She devoted to reading the leisure hours of her monotonous and upright life. She read with faith, with enthusiasm, uncritically; she read believing and accepting everything, identifying herself with each one of the heroines, in turn, her heart echoing back the poet's sighs, the troubadour's songs, and the laments of the bard. Reading was her one vice, her secret happiness. When she requested her friends at Orense to renew her subscription to the library for her they laughed at her and nicknamed her the "Authoress." She an authoress! She only wished she were. If she could only give form to what she felt, to the world of fancy she carried in her mind! But this was impossible. Never would her brain succeed in producing, however hard she might squeeze it, even so much as a poor seguidilla. Poetry and sensibility were stored up in the folds and convolutions of her brain, as solar heat is stored up in the coal. What came to the surface was pure prose—housekeeping, economy, stews.

When she met Segundo, chance applied the lighted torch to the formidable train of feelings and dreams shut up in the soul of the schoolmistress. She had at last found a worthy employment for her amorous faculties, an outlet for her affections. Segundo was poetry incarnate. He represented for her all the graces, all the divine attributes of poetry—the flowers, the breeze, the nightingale, the dying light of day, the moon, the dark wood.

The fire burned with astounding rapidity. In its flames were consumed, first her honorable resolution to efface by the blamelessness of her conduct the stigma of the past, then her strong and deep maternal affection. Not for an instant did the thought present itself to Leocadia's mind that Segundo could ever be her husband; although both were free the difference in their ages and the intellectual superiority of the young poet placed an insurmountable barrier in the way of the aspirations of the schoolmistress. She fell in love as into an abyss, and looked neither before nor behind.

Segundo had had in Santiago, during his college days, youthful intrigues, adventures of a not very serious nature, such as few men escape between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, occasionally taking part, also, in what in that romantic epoch were called orgies. Notwithstanding all this, however, he was not vicious. The son of a hysterical mother, whose strength was exhausted by repeated lactations, and who at last succumbed to the debility induced by them, Segundo's spirit was much more exacting and insatiable than his body. He had inherited from his mother a melancholy temperament and innumerable prejudices, innumerable instinctive antipathies, innumerable superstitious practices. He had loved her, and he cherished her memory with veneration. And more tenacious even than his loving remembrance of his mother was the invincible antipathy he cherished for his father. It would not be true to say that the lawyer had been the murderer of his wife, and yet Segundo clearly divined the slow martyrdom endured by that fine nervous organization, and had always before his eyes, in his hours of gloom, the mean coffin in which the dead woman was interred, shrouded in the oldest sheet that was to be found.

Segundo's family consisted of his father, an aunt, advanced in years, two brothers, and three sisters. The lawyer García enjoyed the reputation of being wealthy—in reality this fortune was insignificant—a village fortune accumulated penny by penny, by usurious loans and innumerable sordid privations. His practice brought him in something, but ten mouths to feed and the professional education of three sons swallowed up not a little. The eldest of the boys, an officer in an infantry regiment, was stationed in the Philippine Islands, and, far from expecting any money from him, they were thankful if he did not ask for any. Segundo, the second in age as well as in name, had just been graduated—one lawyer more in Spain, where this fruit grows so abundantly. The youngest was studying at the Institute at Orense, with the intention of becoming an apothecary. The girls spent the days running about in the gardens and cornfields, half the time barefooted, not even attending Leocadia's school to save the slight expense that would be incurred in procuring the decent clothing which this would necessitate. As for the aunt—Misía Gáspara—she was the soul of the house, a narrow and sapless soul, a withered old woman, silent and ghost-like in appearance, still active, in spite of her sixty years, who, without ceasing to knit her stockings with fingers as yellow as the keys of an old harpsichord, sold barley in the granary, wine in the cellar, lent a dollar at fifty per cent. interest to the fruit-women and hucksters of the market, receiving their wares in payment, measured out the food, the light, and their clothing to her nieces, fattened a pig with affectionate solicitude, and was respected in Vilamorta for her ant-like abilities.

It was the lawyer's aspiration to transmit his practice and his office to Segundo. Only the boy gave no indication of an aptitude for stirring up law-suits and prosecutions. How had he achieved the miracle of passing with honor in the examinations without ever having opened a law-book during the whole term, and failing in attendance at the college whenever it rained or whenever the sun shone? Well, by means of an excellent memory and a good natural intelligence; learning by heart, when it was necessary, whole pages from the text-books, and remembering and reciting them with the same ease, if not with as much taste, as he recited the "Doloras" of Campoamor.

On Segundo's table lay, side by side, the works of Zorrilla and Espronceda, bad translations of Heine, books of verse of local poets, the "Lamas-Varela," or, Antidote to Idleness, and other volumes of a no less heterogeneous kind. Segundo was not an insatiable reader; he chose his reading according to the whim of the moment, and he read only what was in conformity with his tastes, thus acquiring a superficial culture of an imperfect and varied nature. Quick of apprehension, rather than thoughtful or studious, he had learned French without a teacher and almost by intuition, in order to read in the original the works of Musset, Lamartine, Proudhon, and Victor Hugo. His mind was like an uncultivated field in which grew here and there some rare and beautiful flower, some exotic plant; of the abstruse and positive sciences, of solid and serious learning, which is the nurse of mental vigor—the classics, the best literature, the severe teachings of history—he knew nothing; and in exchange, by a singular phenomenon of intellectual relationship, he identified himself with the romantic movement of the second third of the century, and in a remote corner of Galicia lived again the psychological life of dead and gone generations. So does some venerable academician, over-leaping the nineteen centuries of our era, delight himself now with what delighted Horace and live platonically enamored of Lydia.