The Fencing Master (13 page)

He accompanied her back to the living room, enjoying the light pressure of her hand on his arm, until she withdrew it in order to sit down on the old, worn leather sofa.

"You need a tonic. Perhaps a sip of brandy."

"Don't bother. I feel much better now."

Don Jaime insisted and walked over to a cupboard. He came back with a glass in his hand. "Please, drink a little of this. It's good for the blood."

She sipped a little of the brandy and grimaced. He opened the shutters and the window to let in more air and then sat down opposite her, at a safe distance. They remained for a while in silence. On the pretext that he was concerned about her, Don Jaime looked at her more insistently than he would have dared in normal circumstances. He stroked the place on his arm where she had rested her hand; he could still feel the pressure of it there. "Take another sip. It seems to be doing you good."

She nodded obediently. Then she gave him a grateful smile, resting the glass of cognac in her lap, though she had barely touched it. The color was beginning to return to her cheeks, and she indicated with a lift of her chin the objects filling the room.

"You know," she said in a low, confiding voice, "your house is just like you. Everything is so lovingly preserved that it exudes comfort and a feeling of safety. Here you seem to be safe from everything, as if time had stopped. These walls contain..."

"A whole life?"

She pretended to applaud, pleased that he had completed the sentence correctly. "Your life," she replied seductively.

Don Jaime got up and walked about the room, silently contemplating the objects she meant: the old diploma from the Paris Academy, the coat of arms carved in wood with the motto
TO ME
, a pair of antique dueling pistols in a glass case, the framed insignia of a lieutenant of the Royal Guard on a background of green velvet ... He gently ran his hand over the spines of the books lined up on the oak shelves. Señora de Otero was watching him intently, with her lips half-open, trying to capture the distant music of the objects surrounding the fencing master.

"It's a beautiful thing to refuse to forget," she said after a few moments.

He made a helpless gesture, implying that no one can choose his memories. "I'm not sure that
beautiful
is the right word," he said, indicating the walls covered with books. "Sometimes I feel as if I were in a cemetery. It's a very similar feeling, all symbols and silence." He considered what he had just said and smiled sadly. "The silence of all the ghosts that you've left behind you. Like Aeneas fleeing Troy."

"I know what you mean."

"You do? Yes, perhaps. I'm beginning to think that you really do."

"The ghosts of the people we could have been and weren't ... Isn't that what it is? The people we dreamed of being, until we were forced to wake from the dream." She was talking in a monotone, as if reciting from memory a lesson learned long ago. "The ghosts of those whom once we loved but never had, of those who loved us and whose hopes we destroyed out of malice, stupidity, or ignorance."

"Yes, I see you understand perfectly."

Her scar intensified the sarcasm of her smile. "And why shouldn't I? Or do you perhaps believe that only men have a Troy they left burning behind them?"

He sat looking at her, not knowing what to say. She had closed her eyes, listening to voices that only she could hear. Then she blinked, as if waking from a dream, and her eyes met those of the fencing master.

"Yet," she said, "there's no bitterness in you, Don Jaime, no rancor. I'd like to know where you get the strength to remain so intact, not falling on your knees and begging for mercy. You always have that look of the eternal foreigner about you, as if you were somehow absent. As if, in your determination to survive, you were storing up strength inside you, like a miser."

He shrugged. "It's not me," he said in a low voice, almost shyly. "It's my fifty-six years of life, with all the good and ill there was in them. As for you..." He stopped, unsure.

"As for me..." Her violet eyes had grown inexpressive, as if a veil covered them.

Don Jaime shook his head innocently, like a child. "You're very young. You're at the beginning of everything."

She raised her eyebrows and let out a mirthless laugh. "I don't even exist," she said.

Don Jaime stared at her, confused. She leaned forward to put the glass on the table. As she did so, he saw her strong, beautiful neck, bare beneath the mass of jet-black hair caught up at the nape. The last rays of sun were falling on the window that framed a rectangle of reddish clouds. The reflection of one of the panes flickered on the wall and was gone.

"It's odd," he murmured. "I always prided myself that, after a reasonable period of time spent crossing swords with a person, I somehow knew him. It's not difficult, just a question of exercising one's sense of touch. Everyone reveals who he is when he fences."

"Maybe," she murmured in a dull voice, absently.

He picked up a book at random; then, after holding it for a moment in his hands, he returned it to its place. "That isn't the case with you," he said. She seemed slowly to come back to herself; her eyes showed a flicker of interest.

"I'm serious," he said. "With you, Doña Adela, all I have seen is your vigor, your aggression. Your movements are unhurried and sure, too agile for a woman, too graceful for a man. You give off a feeling of magnetism, of contained, disciplined energy, and sometimes a dark, inexplicable anger, about whom or what I don't know. Perhaps the answer lies beneath the ashes of that Troy you appear to know so well."

She seemed to be thinking about his words. "Go on," she said.

He shrugged. "There's not much more to say. As you see, I am capable of observing all this, but I can't get to what lies behind it. I'm just an old fencing master with no pretensions to being a philosopher or a moralist."

"You're not doing badly for an old fencing master," remarked the young woman with a wry, indulgent smile. There was a kind of languid tremor beneath her smooth skin. Outside, the sky above the rooftops of Madrid was growing dark. A cat walked along the windowsill, sly and silent, glancing into the room that was beginning to fill with shadows, then continuing on its way.

She moved, and there was a rustle of skirts. "At the wrong time," she said thoughtfully and mysteriously, "on the wrong day ... in the wrong city." She leaned forward slightly and gave a fleeting smile. "A pity," she added.

Don Jaime looked at her, disoriented. Seeing his expression, the young woman gently opened her lips and then, with a gracious gesture, patted the space on the sofa by her side.

"Come and sit here, maestro."

From his place by the window, Don Jaime shook his head. The room was nearly dark, veiled in grays and shadows.

"Did you ever love anyone?" she asked. Her features were beginning to disappear in the darkness.

"Several people," he said in a melancholy voice.

"Several?" The young woman seemed surprised. "Ah, I see. No, maestro, I mean have you ever loved?"

In the west, the sky was rapidly growing dark. Don Jaime glanced at the unlit oil lamp. Adela de Otero did not seem troubled by the fading of the light.

"Once, in Paris. A long time ago."

"Was she beautiful?"

"Yes. As beautiful as ... you. Besides, Paris made her even more beautiful: the Latin Quarter, the fitting rooms of elegant shops on the Rue St. Germain, the dances in La Chaumière and Montparnasse..."

The memories came with a pang that made his stomach contract. He turned again to the lamp. "I think we should..."

"Who left whom, Don Jaime?"

He smiled sadly, conscious that she could no longer see his face. "It was rather more complicated than that. After four years, I forced her to choose. And she did."

The young woman was now a motionless shadow. "Was she married?"

"Yes, and you are a most intelligent young woman."

"What happened then?"

"I sold everything I had and came back to Spain. It was all a long time ago."

In the street, with pole and stick, someone was lighting the lamps. The feeble glow of gaslight came in through the open window. She got up from the sofa and walked through the darkness to his side. She stood there, next to the window.

"There's an English poet," she said in a low voice. "Lord Byron."

Don Jaime waited in silence. He could feel the warmth emanating from the young body at his side, almost brushing his own. His throat was dry, tight with the fear that she might hear his heart beating. Her voice was quiet, like a caress:

"The Devil speaks truth much oftener than he's deem'd, he hath an ignorant audience."

She drew closer to him. The glow from the street lit up the lower part of her face, her chin and mouth. There was a profound silence that seemed to last an eternity. Only when that silence became unbearable did she speak again: "There's always a story to tell." She spoke in such a low voice that Don Jaime had to guess at her words. She was so close that he could almost feel on his skin the delicate smell of rose water. He realized that he was beginning to lose his head and sought desperately for something that would anchor him in reality. He reached out his hand to the lamp and lit it with a match. The smoking flame trembled in his hands.

H
E
insisted on accompanying her to Calle Riaño. It was too late, he said, not daring to look her in the eye, to be out alone trying to find a carriage. So he put on a jacket, picked up his walking stick and top hat, and went down the stairs ahead of her. At the door he stopped and, after a brief hesitation that did not escape her, offered her his arm with all the icy courtesy he could muster. The young woman leaned on him and, as they walked along, turned now and then to glance at him with a look of concealed mockery. Don Jaime hired a calash whose driver was dozing, leaning against a lamppost, they got in, and Don Jaime gave the address. The carriage went down Calle Arenal, turning to the right when it reached the Palacio de Oriente. Don Jaime remained silent, his hands resting on the handle of his walking stick, vainly trying to keep his mind a blank. What might have happened did not happen, but he was not sure if he should congratulate himself or despise himself As for what Adela de Otero might be thinking at that moment he had absolutely no desire to know However one certainty floated in the air- that night at the end of a conversation that should have brought them closer something had been broken between them definitively and forever He did not know what but there was the unmistakable noise of pieces shattering to the ground about him The young woman would never forgive him for his cowardice—or for his resignation.

They drove in silence, each occupying a corner of the red-upholstered seat. Sometimes, when they passed beneath a lamppost, a fragment of light spilled into the carriage, allowing Don Jaime to catch a glimpse of his companion's profile, absorbed in the contemplation of the shadows filling the streets. He would have liked to say something to relieve the unease tormenting him, but he feared that he would only make matters worse. The whole thing was utterly absurd.

After a while, Señora de Otero turned to him. "I've been told, Don Jaime, that you have people of quality among your clientele. Is that right?"

"It is."

"People from the nobility too? I mean counts, dukes, and all that."

Don Jaime was relieved to embark on a topic of conversation completely different from that which had taken place in his house a while before. She was doubtless conscious that things might have gone too far. Perhaps, sensing his awkwardness, she was trying to break the ice after that embarrassing situation in which she too had played some part.

"Some, yes," he replied, "but not many, I confess. The days are long gone when a
maître d'armes
of some prestige could set himself up in Vienna or Saint Petersburg and be named captain of an imperial regiment. The nobility today have little interest in practicing my art."

"And who are the honorable exceptions?"

Don Jaime shrugged. "Two or three. The son of the Conde de Sueca, the Marqués de los Alumbres..."

"Luis de Ayala?"

He looked at her, making no attempt to conceal his surprise. "You know Don Luis?"

"I've heard people talk about him," she said with perfect indifference. "I've heard that he's one of the best swordsmen in Madrid."

He nodded, pleased. "He is."

"Better than me?" Now there was a note of interest in her voice.

He snorted, finding himself in a tight spot. "You have completely different styles."

Señora de Otero adopted a frivolous tone. "I would love to fence with him. They say he's a most interesting man."

"I'm afraid that's impossible."

"Why? I don't see what the difficulty is."

"Well, I mean..."

"I'd like to have a couple of bouts with him. Have you taught
him
the two-hundred-escudo thrust as well?"

Don Jaime shifted uneasily in his seat. He was worried by the fact that he was worried. "Your request, Doña Adela, is a little, urn, irregular," he said, frowning: "I don't know if the marquis..."

"Are you very close?"

"Well, he honors me with his friendship, if that's what you mean."

She took his arm with such girlish enthusiasm that Don Jaime found it hard to recognize the young woman who, only half an hour before, had been talking to him in the grave intimacy of his studio. "There's no problem, then!" she exclaimed, satisfied. "Tell him about me; tell him the truth, that I'm good with a foil, and I'm sure he'll want to meet me: after all, a woman who fences..."

Don Jaime stammered a few rather unconvincing excuses, but she resumed her assault. "By now, maestro, you must be aware that I know no one in Madrid, apart from you. I'm a woman, and I can't go knocking on doors with my foil beneath my arm."

"I should hope not!" Don Jaime's exclamation arose this time from his sense of decorum.

"You see? I would die of embarrassment."

"It's not just that. Don Luis de Ayala is very strict in matters of fencing. I don't know what he would think if a woman..."