Camila was about thirty when she left the stage, and it required five years for her to achieve her place in society. She gradually became almost stout, though her head seemed to grow more beautiful every year. She took to overdressing, and the floors of the drawing-rooms reflected a veritable tower of jewels and scarves and plumes. Her face and hands were covered with a bluish powder against which she drew an irritable mouth in scarlet and orange. The almost distraught fury of her temper was varied by the unnatural sweetness of her address in the company of the dowagers. In the earliest stages of her progress upward she had intimated to Uncle Pio that he was not to be seen with her in public, but finally she became impatient even of his discreeter visits. She conducted the interviews with formality and evasion. Her eyes never crossed his, and she angled for pretexts to quarrel with him. Still he ventured out once a month to try her patience, and when the call had become impossible he would climb the stairs and finish the hour among her children.
One day he arrived at her villa in the hills and, through her maid, begged for an opportunity to talk with her. He was told that she would see him in the French gardens a little before sunset. He had come up from Lima on a strange sentimental impulse. Like all solitary persons he had invested friendship with a divine glamour: he imagined that the people he passed on the street laughing together and embracing when they parted, the people who dined together with so many smiles—you will scarcely believe me, but he imagined that they were extracting from all that congeniality great store of satisfaction. So that suddenly he was filled with the excitement of seeing her again, of being called “Uncle Pio,” and of reviving for a moment the trust and humour of their long vagabondage.
The French Gardens were at the southern end of the town. Behind them rose the higher Andes and before them there was a parapet overlooking a deep valley and overlooking wave after wave of hills that stretched toward the Pacific. It was the hour when bats fly low and the smaller animals play recklessly underfoot. A few solitaries lingered about the gardens, gazing dreamily into the sky that was being gradually emptied of its colour, or leaned upon the balustrade and looked down into the valley, noting in which village a dog was barking. It was the hour when the father returns home from the fields and plays for a moment in the yard with the dog that jumps upon him, holding his muzzle closed or throwing him upon his back. The young girls look about for the first star to fix a wish upon it, and the boys grow restless for supper. Even the busiest mother stands for a moment idle-handed, smiling at her dear and exasperating family.
Uncle Pio stood against one of the chipped marble benches and watched Camila coming towards him:
“I am late,” she said. “I am sorry. What is it you wish to say to me?”
“Camila—” he began.
“My name is Doña Micaela.”
“I do not wish to offend you, Doña Micaela, but when you let me call you Camila for twenty years, I should think—”
“Oh, do as you like. Do as you like.”
“Camila, promise me that you will listen to me. Promise me that you will not run away at my first sentence.”
At once she burst out with unexpected passion: “Uncle Pio, listen to me. You are mad if you think you can make me return to the theatre. I look back at the theatre with horror. Understand that. The theatre! The theatre, indeed! The daily payment of insults in that filthy place. Understand that you are wasting your time.”
He answered gently: “I would not have you come back if you are happy with these new friends.”
“You don’t like my new friends, then?” she answered quickly. “Whom do you offer me in their stead?”
“Camila, I only remember …”
“I will not be criticized. I don’t want any advice. It will be cold in a moment, I must go back to my house. Just give me up, that’s all. Just put me out of your mind.”
“Dear Camila, don’t be angry. Let me talk to you. Just suffer me for ten minutes.”
He did not understand why she was weeping. He did not know what to say. He talked at random: “You never even come to see the theatre, and they all notice it. The audiences are falling away now, too. They only put on the Old Comedy twice a week; all the other nights there are these new farces in prose. All is dull and childish and indecent. No one can speak Spanish any more. No one can even walk correctly any more. On Corpus Christi Day they gave Belshazzar’s Feast where you were so wonderful. Now it was shameful.”
There was a pause. A beautiful procession of clouds, like a flock of sheep, was straying up from the sea, slipping up the valleys between the hills. Camila suddenly touched his knee, and her face was like her face twenty years before. “Forgive me, Uncle Pio, for being so bad. Jaime was ill this afternoon. There’s nothing one can do. He lies there, so white and … so surprised. One must just think of other things. Uncle Pio, it would be no good if I went back to the theatre. The audiences come for the prose farces. We were foolish to try and keep alive the Old Comedy. Let people read the old plays in books if they choose to. It is not worth
