When I lifted my face it was perfectly dark. I opened the door of my mother’s room, and my spurs echoed dismally in that cold spot, smelling of the grave. Then a new pang of grief led me to hurry to the oratory. I was going to ask God for her back again. I was going to look for her where I had held her in my arms, where my lips had rested upon her forehead for the first time. The moon had risen, and its light, entering in through the half-opened lattice, showed all I should find—the funeral drapings on the table where her coffin had rested!
I saw a light in my mother’s room; Juan Ángel had just placed a candle on the table. I took it up, motioning to him not to follow me, and went to María’s room. A trace of her perfume was there. Her crucifix was still on the table, withered flowers at its foot. I opened the closet; it exhaled the loved fragrance. My hands and lips were pressed to those garments which I knew so well. I drew out the drawer of which Emma had told me; the precious box was in it. A cry escaped me, and a shadow fell upon my eyes as those braids, which still seemed to know my kisses, unrolled in my hands.
An hour later—My God! thou knowest it all! I had run through the garden calling her, asking her of the trees that had sheltered us, and of the waste whose echoes could only give me back her name. At the edge of the ravine, lined with rosebushes, in whose jagged bottom lay the mist and thundered the river, a criminal idea for a moment dried my tears and cooled my brow.
A person hidden from me by the rosebushes spoke my name. It was Tránsito. As she came up to me she stood for a few moments in amazement; she must have been frightened at my face. The bitter reply I made to her, when she besought me to leave that spot, revealed to her, perhaps, the disgust with life which I then felt. The poor girl began to cry, and urged me no more for a moment; but soon she got fresh courage and said, with hesitation, in the grieving voice of a complaining slave, “Don’t you want to see Braulio either, nor even my child?”
“Don’t cry, Tránsito, and forgive me.” I said. “Where are they?”
She took my hand, and led me to the corridor, where her husband was waiting for me. After I had embraced Braulio, Tránsito laid on my knees a pretty baby, six months old, and kneeling at my feet, smiled in pleasure to see me caress her little boy.
LVIII
Never to be forgotten is that last night passed in the home where I spent the years of my childhood and the happy days of my youth. As a bird driven by the hurricane out upon the parched plains tries in vain to direct its flight towards the shade of its native woods, so my buffeted soul goes in the hours of sleep to wander about what was once the home of my parents. Leafy orange-trees, graceful willows, that grew up together with me, how old you must have grown! María’s roses and lilies, who will love them? Odors of the luxuriant garden, I shall never breathe you again! Whispering winds, murmurous river—I shall hear them no more!
Midnight found me watching in my room. Everything was as I had left it. On the table was the package of letters which she had returned to me on her death. I opened it. Those lines written by me when I was so far from thinking they would be my last words to her; those sheets which had been pressed to her bosom, I unfolded and read, one after the other. Looking among María’s letters for the answer to each one I had written her, I put together that dialogue of deathless love, inspired by hope, and broken off by death.
Holding in my hands María’s braids, I lay down upon the sofa on which Emma had heard her last messages. The clock struck two. It was the same that had measured the hours of that sorrowful night before I went away; it was fitting that it should do the same for the last night I passed in the dwelling of my ancestors.
I dreamed that María was my wife. That pure dream had been, and was to continue, the only delight of my soul. She wore a filmy white dress, and an apron as blue as if it had been made of a piece of the sky—the same which I had so often helped her fill with flowers. She carefully pushed open the door of my room, and, trying not to make the least rustling with her garments, kneeled down on the rug at the foot of the sofa. Then she looked at me, half smiling, as if she feared my sleep might be feigned, and touched my forehead with lips as soft as the velvet of a Páez iris. Less fearful now that I was deceiving her, she let me drink in for a moment her warm and fragrant breath. Still seated on the rug, she took my hand and pressed it to her cheek. She leaned her head upon my breast and …
A cry—it was mine—broke off that dream. The lamp had burned out. The cold morning wind came in through the window. My numb hands were clasping her hair, the only reality of my dream.
LIX
That afternoon I set out on my return to the city, intending to pass by the cemetery where was María’s grave. Juan Ángel and Braulio had gone on ahead to wait for me there, and José, his wife, and his daughters
