The Fencing Master (3 page)

T
HE
Progreso was less a café than an antonym: half a dozen chipped marble-topped tables, ancient chairs, a creaking wooden floor, dusty curtains, and dim lighting. The old manager, Fausto, was dozing by the kitchen door, from behind which came the agreeable aroma of coffee boiling in a pot. A scrawny, rheumy-eyed cat slunk sulkily beneath the tables, hunting for hypothetical mice. In winter, the place smelled constantly of mold, and there were large yellow stains on the wallpaper. In this atmosphere, the customers almost always kept their coats on, a manifest reproach to the decrepit iron stove glowing feebly in one corner.

In the summer it was different. The Café Progreso was an oasis of shade and coolness in the Madrid heat, as if it preserved within its walls and behind the thick curtains the sovereign cold that lodged there during winter days. That was why Don Jaime's modest discussion group installed itself there each afternoon, as soon as the summer rigors began.

"You're twisting my words, Don Lucas—as usual."

Agapito Cárceles looked like the defrocked priest that he in fact was. When he argued, he pointed his index finger skyward as if calling on heaven as his witness, a habit acquired during the brief period when—by some act of inexplicable negligence, which the bishop and his diocese still regretted—the ecclesiastical authorities had given Cárceles permission to harangue the faithful from the pulpit. He scraped an existence by sponging off acquaintances or writing fiery, radical articles in newspapers with small circulations under the pseudonym Masked Patriot, which made him the frequent butt of his colleagues' jokes. He proclaimed himself a republican and a federalist; he recited antimonarchical poems penned by himself and full of the most dreadful rhymes; he announced to all and sundry that Narváez had been a tyrant, Espartero a coward, and that he didn't quite trust Serrano and Prim; he would quote in Latin for no apparent reason, and was always mentioning Rousseau, whom he had never actually read. His two bêtes noires were the clergy and the monarchy and he believed ardently that the two most important contributions to the history of humanity had been the printing press and the guillotine.

Don Lucas Rioseco was drumming his fingers on the table; he was visibly irritated. He kept fiddling with his mustache and saying, "Hm, hm," staring at the stains on the ceiling as if hoping to find in them sufficient patience to continue listening to his colleague's excesses.

"It's all quite clear," Cárceles was declaring. "Rousseau answered the question about whether man is naturally good or evil. And his reasoning, gentlemen, is overwhelming. Overwhelming, Don Lucas, and it's time you admitted it. All men are good, therefore they should be free. All men are free, therefore they should be equal. And here's the best part: all men are equal,
ergo
they are sovereign. Yes, that's right. Out of the natural goodness of man comes freedom, equality, and national sovereignty. Everything else"—he brought his fist down hard on the table—"is nonsense."

"But, my dear friend, there are evil men too," said Don Lucas mischievously, as if he had just caught Cárceles in his own trap.

The journalist gave a disdainful, Olympian smile. "Of course. Who can doubt it? One has only to think of Narváez, who must be rotting in hell at this very moment, of González Bravo and his gang, of the court ... of any of the traditional obstacles. Fine. To take care of them, the French Revolution came up with a most ingenious device: a knife that goes up and down. That's how you get rid of obstacles, traditional and otherwise. And for the free, equal, sovereign people there is the light of reason and progress."

Don Lucas was indignant. He was a gentleman, getting on to sixty, from a good family that had fallen on hard times, a bit of a snob with a reputation for misanthropy, and a widower with no children and no fortune. Everyone knew that he had not seen any real money since the reign of the late Fernando VII and that he lived on a tiny income and thanks largely to the charity of some kind neighbors. He was, nevertheless, very careful about keeping up appearances. His few suits of clothes were always meticulously ironed, and no one among his
acquaintances could but admire the elegance with which he tied his one tie and kept his tortoiseshell monocle firmly lodged in his left eye. He held reactionary views, defining himself as a monarchist, a Catholic, and, above all, a man of honor. He was always at daggers drawn with Agapito Cárceles.

Besides Don Jaime, the other people present were Marcelino Romero, a piano teacher in a school for young ladies, and Antonio Carreño, a civil servant. Romero was an insignificant creature, tubercular, sensitive, and melancholy. His hopes of making a name for himself in the field of music had long since been reduced to teaching twenty or so young ladies from good society how to hammer out a reasonable tune on the piano. As for Carreño, he was a man of few words, a scrawny individual with red hair, a very neat copper-colored beard, and a rather austere expression. He pretended to be both a conspirator and a Mason, although he was neither.

Don Lucas was tweaking his mustache, yellow with nicotine, and giving Cárceles a withering look.

"You have, for the nth time," he said scathingly, "made your usual destructive analysis of the state of the nation. No one asked you for it, but we've had to put up with it. Fine. Doubtless tomorrow we will see it published in one of those libelous revolutionary rags that give your views a place in their propagandizing pages. Well, listen, my friend Cárceles. I, also for the nth time, say no. I refuse to go on listening to your arguments. Your solution to everything is a massacre. You'd make a fine minister of the interior. Remember what your beloved populace did in 1834. Eighty monks murdered by the rabble stirred up by conscienceless demagogues."

"Eighty, you say?" Cárceles enjoyed baiting Don Lucas, as he did every day. "That seems rather on the low side to me. And I know what Fm talking about. Indeed I do. I know what the priesthood is like from the inside. What with the clergy and the Bourbons, there's not an honest man who can endure this country of ours."

"You, of course, would apply your usual solutions."

"I have only one: for priests and Bourbons, gunpowder and the gun. Fausto, bring us some more toast. Don Lucas is paying."

"Oh, no, you don't." The worthy old man leaned back in his seat, his thumbs in his vest pockets, his monocle proudly fixed in position. "I buy toast only for my friends and only when Fm in funds, which is not the case today. But on no account would I buy anything for a treacherous fanatic like yourself."

"I would rather be a treacherous fanatic, as you call me, than spend my life shouting, 'Long live oppression.'"

The other members of the group felt it was time to mediate. Don Jaime called for calm, gentlemen, while he stirred his coffee with his spoon. Romero pulled himself from his melancholy daydreams to plead for moderation, and tried, without success, to bring the conversation around to music.

"Don't change the subject," said Cárceles.

"I'm not," protested Romero. "Music has a social content too, you know. It creates equality in the sphere of the arts, it breaks down frontiers, it brings people together..."

"The only music this gentleman enjoys is the battle hymn of the Liberals."

"Now don't start, Don Lucas."

The cat thought it spotted a mouse and lunged past their legs after it. Carreño had dipped his finger in his glass of water and was drawing a mysterious sign on the worn marble tabletop. "So-and-so's in Valencia and you-know-who is in Valladolid. They say that Topete in Cádiz has received emissaries, but who knows. And Prim will be here any day now. This time there's really going to be trouble." And, keeping details to an enigmatic minimum, he started describing the plot of the moment, which—he had it on good authority, gentlemen—was being hatched, he was reliably informed, thanks to certain confidences vouchsafed to him by the relevant people in his lodge, whose names he preferred not to reveal. That the plot he mentioned was, like a half-dozen others, public knowledge did not diminish his enthusiasm one iota. In a low voice, looking furtively about, using hints and taking other precautions, Carreño set out the details of the enterprise, in which (I trust in your discretion, gentlemen) he was pretty much up to his neck. The lodges—he referred to the lodges as others spoke of their relatives—were on the move. You could forget Carlos VII; besides, without old Cabrera, Montemolín's nephew would never measure up Alfonso was dismissed out of hand—no more Bourbons. Perhaps a foreign prince, a constitutional monarchy and all that, although they said Prim preferred the queen's brother-in-law Montpensier And if not that then there was our friend Cárceles's great hope the glorious republic.

"The glorious federal republic," added the journalist, giving Don Lucas a baleful look. "Just so that the toadies around here know what's what."

Don Lucas flared at the gibe. He was an easy target. "That's right, that's right," he exclaimed with a dismayed snort. "Federal, democratic, anticlerical, freethinking, plebeian, and swinish. Everyone equal and a guillotine in the Puerta del Sol, with Don Agapito working the machinery. No congress, absolutely not. Popular assemblies in Cuatro Caminos, in Ventas, in Vallecas, in Carabanchel ... That's what Señor Cárceles's cohorts want. We are the Africa of Europe."

Fausto arrived with the toast. Don Jaime dunked his thoughtfully in his coffee. The interminable polemics in which his colleagues engaged bored him enormously, but their company was no better or worse than any other. The couple of hours that he spent there each afternoon helped him salve his loneliness a little. For all their defects, their grumbling, and their bad-tempered ranting about every other living being, at least they gave one another the chance to give vent to their respective frustrations. Within that limited circle, each member found in the others the tacit consolation that his own failure was not an isolated fact but a thing shared in greater or lesser measure by them all. That above all was what bound them together, keeping them faithful to their daily meetings. Despite their frequent disputes, their political differences, their disparate moods, the five felt a complex solidarity that, had it ever been expressed openly, would have been hotly denied by all of them but that might be likened to the huddling together for warmth of solitary creatures.

Don Jaime looked around him and met the grave, gentle eyes of the music teacher. Marcelino Romero was nearly forty and had spent the last couple of years tormented by an impossible love for the honest woman to whose daughter he had taught the rudiments of music. The teacher-pupil relationship had ended months ago, but the poor man still walked each day beneath a certain balcony in Calle Hortaleza, stoically nursing a hopeless, unrequited love.

The fencing master smiled at Romero sympathetically; the music teacher responded distractedly, doubtless absorbed in his inner torments. It seemed to Don Jaime that you could find in the memory of every man the bittersweet shadow of a woman. He had just such a shadow in his own memory, but that was all a long time ago.

The post office clock struck seven. The cat had still not found a mouse to eat, and Agapito Cárceles was reciting an anonymous poem dedicated to the late Narváez. His attempts to appropriate authorship to himself met with the mocking skepticism of his fellows.

If perchance you are traveling the road to old Loja
and a hat Andahman you happen to find...

Don Lucas was yawning ostentatiously, more to annoy his friend than for any other reason. Two good-looking women passed in the street outside and glanced in without stopping. All the men present bowed courteously, apart from Cárceles, who was too busy declaiming:

May you pause on your way, O gentle pilgrim,
for be sure that—thank heaven—there lies in this earth
a bald-headed hero with luxurious tastes
who for years governed Spain in Algerian style.

A street vendor was walking by, selling lollipops from Havana; he kept turning around to scare off a pair of shirtless little boys who were trailing him, greedily eyeing his merchandise. A group of students came into the café for a drink. They were carrying newspapers and animatedly discussing the Civil Guard's latest exploits; they referred to them jokingly as the Uncivil Guard. Some stopped, amused, to listen to Cárceles reciting his funeral elegy to Narváez:

A soldier he was, though no battles he fought,
but he never retreated from making his fortune,
and he made of his lechery a goddess divine,
thus twixt greed and foul lust he at last found his death.
If you want to do something to remember him by,
pick up the hat and spit in it hard,
say a prayer for the dead, and then shit on his grave.

The young men cheered Cárceles, and he bowed, moved by his impromptu audience's approval. There were a few shouts of "Long live democracy," and the journalist was invited to a round of drinks. Don Lucas twiddled his mustache, fuming with righteous indignation. The cat curled about his feet, sleepy and pathetic, as if wanting to bring him some paltry consolation.

T
HE
clash of foils echoed through the gallery.

"Watch that distance. That's it, good. In quarte. Good. In tierce. Good. Prime. Good. Now two in prime, that's it. Keep calm. Go back covering, that's it. Be careful now. Over the sword arm. To me. Don't worry, do it again. To me. Force me to parry in prime twice. That's it. Steady! Avoid. That's it. Now on your outside line. Lunge. Good. Touché. Excellent, Don Álvaro."

Jaime Astarloa put the foil under his left arm, took off his mask, and paused to catch his breath. Álvaro Salanova was rubbing his wrists; his cracked adolescent voice emerged from behind the metal mesh covering his face.

"How did I do, maestro?"

Don Jaime smiled approvingly. "Pretty good, sir, pretty good," he said. He indicated the foil that the young man was holding in his right hand. "But you're still too ready to let your opponent get control of the foible. If you find yourself in that position again, don't hesitate to break the distance and take a step back."