“Aie! Esteban! But you have promised me that you would come.”
“It’s impossible. I can’t come with you,” and he turned back up the stairs.
“Come here a moment, Esteban, just a moment.”
“I can’t come with you. I can’t leave Peru.”
“I want to tell you something.”
Esteban came down to the foot of the stairs.
“How about that present for Madre María 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.”
“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. I’ll 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 upstairs. 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 trembling. “Perhaps it’s best,” he said to himself. “Perhaps I should leave him alone. Perhaps it’s 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. “I 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 passage of some merchandise, but Esteban crossed by the bridge and fell with it.
Part Four
Uncle Pio; Don Jaime
In one of her letters (the XXIX) the Marquesa de Montemayor tries to describe the impression that Uncle Pio, “our aged Harlequin,” 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 attention 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 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 angrily 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 victim’s 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 sunset. 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 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 delightful man in the world. His conversation is enchanting. If he weren’t so disreputable I should make him my secretary. He could write all my letters 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 Spanish he speaks and what exquisite things he says in it! That’s what one gets by hanging around a theatre and hearing nothing hut the conversation of Calderón. Alas! what is the matter with 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,
