The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)

The Prince smiled at Atilio's imitation of the words and gestures of the two ladies.

"Clorinda is an American," Castro continued, "but from South America, from a little Republic where her grandfathers and great-grandfathers were Presidents, and fighters, and fathers of their country. Her title of 'Generala' has a certain basis. Over there in her native land they admire her for her beauty and for the great sensation she is supposed to have caused in Europe. At a distance, you see, everything is changed and seems much greater. Her picture is public property, and figures on every package of coffee, and every advertising prospectus in the country. She is a national beauty; and when she gets old, there will always be a spot in the world where she will be considered eternally youthful. She got married in Paris to a young Frenchman, a dreamer, rather ill with tuberculosis. That was the very reason why the 'Generala' loved him. If she had married a strong, fiery sort of man, they would have killed each other in a few days. She is a widow now. I don't think she is very rich; the war must have diminished her income, but she has enough to live comfortably. I even imagine she must suffer fewer hardships than does the Delille woman. She is an exceedingly well-balanced person."

He remained silent for a moment.

"But she has such queer ideas! She is so used to dominating! I met her in Biarritz some years ago. I have seen her here often in the gaming rooms; we have bowed to each other and had a few conversations which did not amount to much. When a woman is placing her stakes she doesn't allow compliments that might distract her attention. To-day is the first time that I have talked with her at any length. Do you know what she asked me, the very first thing? Why I wasn't in the war. It didn't make any difference when I told her that I'm neutral, and that the war doesn't interest me. 'If I were a man, I would be a soldier,' she said. And if you had only seen the look she gave when she said it!"

Lubimoff smiled a bit scornfully at the woman's words.

"In her opinion," Castro went on saying, "every man ought to work at something, produce something, be a hero. She adored her poor husband, gentle as a sick lamb, because he painted a few pale, washed-out pictures, and had been rewarded in some slight degree at various expositions. Men like you and me, in her eyes, are a variety of 'supers' hired to give life to the drawing-rooms, casinos, and bathing resorts, to keep the conversation going, and be nice to the ladies; but we don't interest her. She told me so this afternoon once again."

"Does her opinion bother you?" asked the Prince.

Atilio paused for a moment, as though to weigh his words before replying.

"Yes, it does bother me," he resolutely answered at last. "Why should I deny it? That woman interests me. When I don't see her, I forget all about her. Months and years have gone by without my giving her a thought. But as soon as I meet her she dominates me… I want her. I know I can't come up to you in such matters, but I've had successful love affairs too. But she is so different from the others! Besides, there's the joy in conquering, the need of dominating, that you find at the bottom of all our amorous desires! Every time we talk together, and she makes quite evident, with her bird-like voice and her smile of compassion, the distance that separates us, I come away sad, or rather, discouraged, as though I had to climb a great height, of which I would never reach the top, no matter how hard I tried. To-day I ought to be happy; it has been months since I've had an afternoon like this. I've played, and look … look! Seventeen thousand francs!"

He had taken from his inner pocket a bundle of blue bank-notes, throwing it on the table with a certain fury.

"I succeeded in winning as high as twenty-six thousand. If there is anything in the saying, 'Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,' I was as lucky as a despairing lover or a deceived husband. And yet, I'm not happy."

The Prince smiled again, as though a self-evident truth had just been completely demonstrated. Woman! That Clorinda, that devil of a "Generala," was a real "woman." With a few short minutes of conversation only, she had turned Castro topsy-turvy, and perhaps would end by breaking up the peaceful life – without exciting pleasures but without desperate sorrows as well – that the guests at Villa Sirena were leading.

"And you, Atilio," he said in a reproachful voice, "are moved by that smooth-voiced virago. You believe in love like a school-boy."

Castro replied in a cold, aggressive tone. The Prince might say whatever he liked about him; but to call her a virago!.. What right had he? Nevertheless he hid the real cause of his annoyance, pretending to be hurt by the allusion to his credulity.

"I don't believe in anything; I'm more skeptical than you perhaps. I know that everything about us is false, and conventional – all a matter of lies that we accept because they are necessary to us for the moment. You love music and painting as though they were something divine and eternal. Very well; if the structure of our ears were to be modified a little, the symphonies of Beethoven would be a regular din; if the functioning of our retinas were to change, we would have to burn all the famous pictures, because they would seem like so many canvases dirtied by a child's play; if our brains were to be modified, all the poets and thinkers would become childish idiots for us. No, I don't believe in anything," he insisted angrily. "In order to live and understand one another, we have to agree upon a high and a low, a left and a right; but even that is a lie, since we live in the infinite which has no limits. Everything we consider fundamental is simply a matter of lines that have been laid down on the canvas of life to mark off our various conceptions."

The Prince shrugged his shoulders, giving him a look of surprise. Why all this, apropos of a woman?

"Everything is a lie," Castro went on; "but that is no reason why I should live like a stone or a tree. I need sweet falsehoods to sing my mind to sleep until the hour of my death. Illusions are a lie, but I want them near me; hope is another lie, but I want it to walk before me. I don't believe in love, since I don't believe in anything. Everything you say against it I have known for years; but should I give it a kick if it comes my way, and wants to go with me? Do you know any dream that fills the emptiness of our lives better – even though it lasts only a short time?"

Michael greeted his friend's enthusiasm with a sardonic gesture.

"Do you know why I look younger than I am?" Atilio continued, more and more excitedly. "Do you know I shall be young when others of my own age have become old men? I pretend to be ironical. As a matter of fact I'm a skeptic. But I have a secret, the secret of eternal youth, which I keep to myself. Let me tell you what it is. I have discovered that the greatest wisdom in life, the most important thing, is to 'while away the time'; and I fill the emptiness that every man carries inside him with an orchestra; the orchestra of my illusions. The great thing is that it play all the time, that the music rack never be empty; once one piece is played, another must take its place. At times it is a symphony of love. Mine have been beautiful but brief. For that reason I have replaced them with another which is endless – that of ambition and the desire for gain, whose orbits are infinite like those of the stars in the heavens, and like the possible combinations of cards. I gamble. In the whirl of the roulette wheel I see a castle that may be mine, a more sumptuous castle than any in existence; a finer yacht than the one you used to have; endless fêtes. Through a pack of cards I can contemplate things more magnificent than were dreamed of by the Persian story-tellers. Its suites are so many piles of precious gems. Most of the time I lose, and the orchestra plays an accompaniment on muted strings, with a funeral march of wondrous wild sadness and beauty; but after a few measures, the march becomes a hymn of triumph, the dawning of a new day, the resurrection of hope."

And now there was a look of pity in the eyes of the Prince. "He is mad," it seemed to say.

"This afternoon," Castro continued, "my orchestra made me acquainted with a new symphony, something I had never heard before. While I was winning money I did not think a single time about myself, nor about palaces, nor yachts, nor parties. I was thinking only of the 'Generala,' and thinking of her with real hate, wanting to get revenge. I wanted to win a hundred thousand francs – who knows, I may win it to-morrow – and spend the whole hundred thousand on a pearl necklace, on leaving the Casino, and send it to her anonymously with something like this: 'As a tribute of dislike from a worthless, miserable man.'"

A burst of laughter from the Prince woke the Colonel with a start. As a good early riser, the latter had gone to sleep in his chair. Observing that His Excellency was not paying any attention to him, he slipped out of the Hall, as though he had something of more importance to attend to than the conversation of the two friends who seemed to ignore his presence.

"But what do you find in love?" Michael asked. "For I think you know what love really is. All the illusions of adolescence, and all the idealism of poetry, are merely winding paths which lead to the same, the only goal; the physical act. And aren't you tired of that? Aren't you never daunted by the monotony of it?"

There was a certain gloomy intonation in the Prince's voice, as though he were lamenting over the ruin of all his own life. He had met hundreds of women of the sort that cause a sudden burst of mute desire as they pass. Feminine resistance was something unknown to him. More than that: women had sought him, coming half-way of their own free will, pursuing him with no regard for the conventions and modesty, obliging him, as a matter of masculine pride, to overtax his powers with a prodigality that made pleasure almost painful. And they were all alike! He understood the mirage of illusion in the things that one admires from afar, and has no hope of obtaining. It is our curiosity for what is hidden, the desire which is aroused by an obstacle, the inner fancies inspired by clothes, ornaments, everything which covers the feminine body, giving to its sameness the charm of a mystery which is ever renewed. As for him, alas, it was as though they all went nude. Nothing could stimulate his interest; it was all too familiar.

"Besides," and here his voice grew quieter, "I wouldn't confess it to any one else; but love and women make me think of the miserableness of human life, the inevitable end, death. Since I've been freed from their false seductions, I feel gayer, more sure of myself; I enjoy more frankly the passing moment. I don't want to talk to you about the shame of those bodies which we claim to be divine. Women are less wholesome than men. It was Nature's will. But that isn't what makes me flee from them."

He was silent for a moment, but then added shortly after:

"Whenever I am near a woman I can't help but see the image of death. When I caress her silky hair, I suddenly seem to feel a smooth, hard yellow skull, like those one sees protruding from the ground in abandoned cemeteries. A kiss on her mouth, or a nibble at her chin, rouses in me a vision of the bony jaw with its teeth, not so different from those of the anthropoids in the museums. Those eyes will fade; that nose with its graceful curves and rosy quivering nostrils will dissolve likewise; the only solid and permanent parts are the black sockets, and the grotesque grin of the skull, with its flattened nose. Those swelling breasts are nothing more than false padding to hide the ghastly cage of the ribs; those legs, which seem to us such wonderful columns, are stringy flesh and water that will waste away, leaving bare two long calcareous pipe-stems. We imagine we are adoring supreme beauty, and we are embracing a skeleton. The image of death fills us with horror, and every woman carries one within her, and compels us to worship it."

Now it was Castro's turn to gaze in astonishment. His eyes, fixed on the Prince, seemed to say: "He is mad."

"The trouble with you, Michael, is that you've over-enjoyed," he said after a long pause. "You make me think of the people who, when they sit down to the table, hide their lack of appetite with nausea. The most succulent meat for them suggests the horrors of the slaughter house. Bread reminds them of the hands that kneaded it, and wine calls up a picture of feet reeking with juice in the vintage-troughs. But just let their senses awaken, and their physical needs reassert themselves, and they see everything in a different light, as though the sun had just risen, and they find an indescribable charm in the very things that disgusted them. What difference is it to me if a woman has a skeleton inside? I have one too, and that doesn't prevent me from taking a great deal of joy in the pleasures of life, and considering love as the most interesting of all those pleasures."

Castro laughed with affectionate compassion as he looked at his friend.

"Let me say it again, you are satiated; you have the lack of appetite and the gloomy vision of a person suffering from a painful indigestion. You are still too young for this debility to last. You will recover. Your appetite will come back. I hope you won't find the table set exactly as in the past, that you will be swept off your feet by some obstacle, in other words, that unrequital will make you suffer; and then … well, just wait till then!"

CHAPTER V

DON MARCOS had never seen the Prince so vexed as he was that morning, when he announced that the Duchess de Delille was waiting for him down-stairs in the hall.

"You should have told her I'd gone out; any sort of a pretext – a lunch at Nice… There must be some understanding between you. You certainly look out for your Infanta!"

The Colonel, flushed with emotion, made an effort to reply to these accusations. If the Duchess had now suddenly presented herself, it was perhaps because he had refused to take any of her messages for the Prince.

As the latter went down to the hall, he ran straight into Alicia, who was standing close to a window, and looking at the gardens and the sea. Her back was towards him, just as he had seen her coming out of the concert. When she turned her head, Michael thought to himself that he would surely never have recognized her had he met her anywhere else. She was a beautiful woman, but scarcely like the person he had seen that last time in the "study" on the Avenue du Bois, with its weird oriental nick-nacks and unwholesome perfumes. Several years of her life had passed away since then, and yet she seemed fresher, and younger. Her eyes had lost the veiled disturbing fire, that made them look larger, and gave them a fixed, unnatural stare. The dull, sickly whiteness of her skin had taken on color from the sun and the open air. Her airy, undulating litheness had become less willowy, giving her person the calm tranquillity of bodies that are beginning to crystallize in their definitive form.

The Prince, interrupted by Alicia's smiling glance, was unable to continue his scrutiny. It seemed from her quiet easy manner as though she had been there in that very place only the day before. Moreover, Michael suddenly began to wonder how he should start the conversation. Should he talk English or French? Should he speak informally as before?.. She put an end to his hesitation, speaking familiarly in Spanish, just as when they were children.

"How hard it is to get in touch with you! Practically impossible," Alicia said as she sat down, after shaking hands with him. "So I decided to pay you this visit. It isn't exactly proper for a lady to call on a person with such a terrible reputation as you have; but I'm not the first one who has come here. There have been lots of others!"

She laughed teasingly as she said this. Immediately she became serious, and said timidly:

"I came here on business – a money matter."

Not wanting to take up such a subject at once, she talked about the obstacles which had obliged her to come unannounced to Villa Sirena. The Prince could have absolute confidence in the fidelity with which his "chamberlain" carried out his orders. This Colonel was a nice fellow, but there was no approaching him, any more than a ferocious dog, when some one tries to make him disobey his master. She had vainly asked him to announce her visit; and he had even refused to accept her card for his Prince.

"I might have written you; but I was afraid you wouldn't reply, or would simply tell me to deal with your agent in Paris. It has been such a long time since we've seen each other! Our friendship has been so intermittent! So that is why I finally decided last night to come and surprise you in your den, with the hope that you wouldn't show me the door."

Michael smiled, making a gesture of indignant denial.

"I came about my debt … the loans your mother made me some time ago. I didn't know how much they amounted to. Your agent now says they are over four hundred thousand francs. It must be so, if he maintains it. At times when I was in straits I asked for something, and the Princess, who was such a great lady, kept giving and giving, without either of us paying any attention to the amounts. Now I see how tremendously generous she must have been."

This was surprising news for Lubimoff. Then he gradually recalled that when his mother died she had left a long memorandum of all the loans she had made, and that Alicia's name figured among the debtors. But he had left the papers in the hands of his administrator, without thinking any more about the matter.

He immediately understood the reason for Alicia's visit. His agent had wanted to raise some money, and owing to the lack of funds from Russia, he was raising all he could in the West: credits … advances made to friends or dependents, guaranty deposits, and even the loans made by the Princess, which, according to his express orders, were not to be demanded except in case of strict necessity.

The general pressure of circumstances had reached Alicia. For the last four months the Lubimoff estate had been sending her letter after letter, demanding the payment of her enormous debt. Already the agent's last note had become threatening because of her silence. It notified her that action would be brought against her in court. The estate was holding many of her letters thanking the Princess for the latter's generosity. Besides, all the money had been paid by checks cashed by the Duchess herself.

"Your administrator is certainly an insolent fellow. The other day I saw you in the Casino, – I saw you from behind as you were running away from people. You frightened me: I imagined then that you had changed, that you were very different from the man I knew, and that we would never come to an understanding. Later I thought you mustn't be quite so terrible as you seem … and I came."

Michael, remaining silent, seemed to be saying something with his eyes, which were fixed on Alicia. Well, why had she come? What was it she wished to propose to him?

She smiled with an expression of cynical amusement.

"I came to tell you that I can't pay now – and perhaps never; to beg you to wait, I don't know how long, and to ask you to see that that disagreeable fellow who is managing your estate doesn't annoy me with his insolence."

And as the Prince made no move, she continued,

"I'm ruined."

"So am I," said Michael. "We're all ruined. The munition makers are the only people with any money now."

"Oh! You ruined!" Alicia protested. "With you it is simply a question of being hard pressed for the moment. Things in Russia will be straightened out some time or other. Besides, you are Prince Lubimoff, the famous millionaire. If I had your name, who would refuse me a loan?"

Suddenly she lost the audacious smile which she had worked up for the interview. Her eyes grew darker; the corners of her mouth drooped.

"I am really ruined. Look."

She pointed to the triangle of bare flesh visible at the throat of her low cut dress. A pearl necklace rested on her white bosom. Michael, as she insisted, finally looked at the pearls. False, scandalously false; all the luster gone, opaque and yellow as drops of wax. He knew something about pearls; he had given away so many necklaces! Then Alicia showed him her hands. Two artistically made finger rings, but without any jewels, and of slight intrinsic value, were all that adorned her fingers.

"This is a last year's dress," she added in a mournful voice, as though confessing something most shameful. "They won't trust me any more in Paris. I owe so much! Nothing but the hat is new. What woman, no matter how poor she might feel, wouldn't buy a hat! It is the most conspicuous thing about one, – something that changes all the time; and must be looked after at all costs. Luckily, on account of the war, they are not using plumes… I'm poor, Michael, poorer than any woman you ever knew."

"And your mother?"

The Prince asked this instinctively, without thinking. A moment later he suspected that he had read, some years before, he didn't know where, perhaps while he was roving the seas, the news of the death of Doña Mercedes. He was not sure; but her daughter removed all doubt.

"Poor señora! Let's not talk about her."

But nevertheless Alicia did talk, but only to lament her mother's devout prodigality. She had given millions for the construction of an enormous hospital in Spain, on the advice of her Aragonese chaplain, the astronomer of the Champs-Élysées. Marble was used in the construction for the mere masonry; the garden fence was forged by a celebrated Parisian artist who devoted himself to molding bronze statues for drawing-rooms. But when the vicar left, tired of such generosity, the monster building remained unfinished, and the precious fence lay on the ground in pieces, like so much old iron. Later, the "Monsignor" directed the worthy lady's funds into other channels. It was necessary to spread the faith by means of the "good book," and a new publishing house arose in Paris, which was most extraordinary and unheard of. Packages of books were stored on mahogany shelves, and the leaves were folded on lacquer tables.

"The priests got everything that belonged to me," Alicia continued. "At times they egged mamma on to the most absurd outlays of money just for the sake of collecting commissions from the contractors. From numerous belfries in both hemispheres chimes rang thanks to Doña Mercedes. One entire bell foundry was kept going just on mamma's gifts. Besides, she was often carried away by a sort of loving weakness for all the saints who were not especially famous.

"In her last years she devoted herself to 'launching' saints. Every one in the calendar who was little known, or of some unusual name, aroused in her the desire to repair a great injustice. She had their lives written, churches dedicated to them; and corresponded with the high dignitaries of Rome to push many a dead man, who had waited centuries in vain for the hour when he should become a Saint."

Lubimoff finally began to laugh at the resentful tone in which Alicia spoke of her mother's mystic pleasures. Doña Mercedes was a great one! And finally she began to laugh likewise.

"In that way all our income, which was enormous, was spent. She should have left me a real fortune, unencumbered, in the bank. A lady that spent so little on herself! And nevertheless, I had to pay out huge sums for all the orders she had contracted before her death. You can be sure the Monsignor and the rest of them are much richer than I."

"How about your mines? And your lands in Mexico?"

The Duchess repeated the same gesture of despair. It was as though they did not exist! She was poor, absolutely poor.

"You say you are ruined, and you haven't suffered from the money shortage for more than the last two years, perhaps less. I haven't seen a cent of my fortune for some time before the war. Every one is talking about Russia, and Bolshevism, because it is something that concerns the Old World directly. But how about Mexico, and the situation there which goes back to the time when Europe was at peace?"

Her lands had been lost as though they were so much personal property, that could be transported and hidden. An agrarian revolution, the echoes of which had scarcely reached the Old Continent, had swallowed them up, suppressing all traces of her former property rights. The half-breeds had divided them to suit themselves, to work them, or leave them more unproductive than before. To whom could she appeal, if these lands were in provinces that were constantly changing hands, and the Mexican government had no authority over them?