They travelled a great deal, seeking new taverns, for the highest attribute of a café singer will always be her novelty. They went to Mexico, their odd clothes wrapped up in the selfsame shawl. They slept on beaches, they were whipped at Panama, and shipwrecked on some tiny Pacific islands plastered with the droppings of birds. They tramped through jungles delicately picking their way among snakes and beetles. They sold themselves out as harvesters in a hard season. Nothing in the world was very surprising to them.
Then began an even harder course of training for the girl, a regimen that resembled more the preparation for an acrobat. The instruction was a little complicated by the fact that her rise to favor was very rapid; and there was some danger that the applause she received would make her content with her work too soon. Uncle Pio never exactly beat her, but he resorted to a sarcasm that had terrors of its own.
At the close of a performance Camila would return to her dressing room to find Uncle Pio whistling nonchalantly in one corner. She would divine his attitude at once and cry angrily:
“Now what is it? Mother of God, Mother of God, what is it now?”
“Nothing, little pearl. My little Camila of Camilas, nothing.”
“There was something you didn’t like. Ugly faultfinding thing that you are. Come on now, what was it? Look, I’m ready.”
“No, little fish. Adorable morning star, I suppose you did as well as you could.”
The suggestion that she was a limited artist and that certain felicities would be forever closed to her never failed to make Camila frantic. She would burst into tears: “I wish I had never known you. You poison my whole life. You just think I did badly. It pleases you to pretend that I was bad. All right then, be quiet.”
Uncle Pio went on whistling.
“The fact is I know I was weak tonight and don’t need you to tell me so. So there. Now go away. I don’t want to see you around. It’s hard enough to play that part without coming back and finding you this way.”
Suddenly Uncle Pio would lean forward and ask with angry intensity: “Why did you take that speech to the prisoner so fast?”
More tears from the Perichole: “Oh God, let me die in peace! One day you tell me to go faster, and another to go slower. Anyway I shall be crazy in a year or two and then it won’t matter.”
More whistling.
“Besides the audience applauded as never before. Do you hear me? As never before. There! Too fast or too slow is nothing to them. They wept. I was divine. That’s all I care for. Now be silent. Be silent.”
He was absolutely silent.
“You may comb my hair, but if you say another word I shall never play again. You can find some other girl, that’s all.”
Thereupon he would comb her hair soothingly for ten minutes, pretending not to notice the sobs that were shaking her exhausted body. At last she would turn quickly and catching one of his hands would kiss it frantically: “Uncle Pio, was I so bad? Was I a disgrace to you? Was it so awful that you left the theatre?”
After a long pause Uncle Pio would admit judiciously: “You were good in the scene on the ship.”
“But I’ve been better, Uncle Pio. You remember the night you came back from Cuzco? …”
“You were pretty good at the close.”
“Was I?”
“But my flower, my pearl, what was the matter in the speech to the prisoner?”
Here the Perichole would fling her face and arms upon the table amid the pomades, caught up into a tremendous fit of weeping. Only perfection would do, only perfection. And that had never come.
Then beginning in a low voice Uncle Pio would talk for an hour, analysing the play, entering into a world of finesse in matters of voice and gesture and tempo, and often until dawn they would remain there declaiming to one another the lordly conversation of Calderón.
Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderón had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.
With the passing of time Camila lost some of this absorption in her art. A certain intermittent contempt for acting made her negligent. It was due to the poverty of interest in women’s roles throughout Spanish classical drama. At a time when the playwrights grouped about the courts of England and France (a little later, of Venice) were enriching the parts of women with studies in wit, charm, passion and hysteria, the dramatists of Spain kept their eyes on their heroes, on gentlemen torn between the conflicting claims of honour or,
