The Fencing Master (12 page)

"Never. I have spent my whole life trying to preserve a certain idea of myself, and that is all. You have to cling to a set of values that do not depreciate with time. Everything else is the fashion of the moment, fleeting, mutable. In a word, nonsense."

The marquis looked at him hard. The light tone of their discussion had vanished. "Don Jaime, your kingdom is not of this world. And I say that with the greatest respect, with all the respect I bear you. I have long felt honored by your friendship, and yet I am still surprised every day by this peculiar obsession of yours with duty, a duty that is not dogmatic, religious, or moral. It is—and this is what is so unusual these days, when everything can be bought—a duty to yourself, imposed by your own will. Do you know what that means?"

Don Jaime gave a stubborn frown. The new direction the conversation was taking made him feel even more uncomfortable than had the previous one. "I neither know nor care, Excellency."

"That is exactly what is so extraordinary about you, maestro, that you neither know nor care. Shall I tell you something? Sometimes I wonder if in this poor Spain of ours the roles have not been sadly switched, and if nobility does not, by rights, belong to you instead of to many of my acquaintances, including myself."

"Please, Don Luis..."

"No, let me speak. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, bought the title because he grew rich trading with England during the war against Napoleon. Everyone knows that. The real nobility, the old nobility, was won not by importing contraband English cloth but by brave deeds with a sword. Am I right or not? And you're not going to tell me, dear maestro, that you, with a sword in your hand, are worth less than any of them. Or less than myself."

Don Jaime looked up and fixed Luis de Ayala with his gray eyes. "With a sword in my hand, Don Luis, I am worth as much as any man."

A breath of warm air shook the branches of the willows. The marquis looked back at the stone angel and clicked his tongue, as if he had gone too far. "Anyway, you're wrong to isolate yourself, Don Jaime. Allow me, as a friend, to tell you that. There's no profit in virtue, I can assure you, or any fun either. For heaven's sake, don't imagine that I would presume to give a man your age a sermon. I just mean that it's thrilling to look out into the street and see what's happening around you. Especially in historic times such as these. Have you heard the latest?"

"The latest what?"

"The latest plot?"

"It's not really my forte. Do you mean the generals who were arrested?"

"No, that's old news. I'm talking about the agreement reached between the Progressives and the Liberal Union that has just been uncovered. You could see it coming, but they've completely abandoned their stance as the legal opposition and have decided to support the military revolution. Their program is now to depose the queen and offer the throne to Montpensier, who has committed the modest amount of three million reales to the enterprise. Deeply hurt, Isabel has apparently decided to exile her sister and her brother-in-law to Portugal. As for Serrano, Dulce, Zabala, and the others, they have been deported to the Canary Islands. The supporters of Montpensier are now working on Prim, to see if they can get him to give Montpensier his blessing as candidate for the throne, but our brave Catalan soldier is not saying a word. And that's how things stand."

"A fine mess!"

"You can say that again. That's why it's so exciting to follow the details from the sidelines, as I do. What can I say? When it comes to politics and women, you have to taste all the sauces, but you must never let either one or the other give you indigestion. That is my philosophy, and here I am; I enjoy life and its surprises while they last. And afterward, who cares! I disguise myself in a peasant's hat and cloak and wander past the stalls during the festival of San Isidro with the same scientific curiosity I felt during the three months I worked in that wretched post as secretary in the Ministry of the Interior bestowed on me by my late uncle Joaquín. You have to live, Don Jaime. And this from a man who yesterday lost three thousand duros on the casino table, and did so with a scornful smile on his lips which was much commented on by the public. Do you understand?"

Don Jaime smiled indulgently. "Perhaps."

"You don't seem very convinced."

"You know me well enough, Excellency, to know what I think."

"Yes, I do. You are a man who feels like a foreigner everywhere. If Jesus Christ had said to you, 'Leave everything and follow me,' you would have done so gladly. There's nothing you care about enough to regret its loss."

"Apart from a pair of foils. At least allow me that."

"All right, keep the foils. Assuming that you were the type to follow Jesus Christ, or anyone, but that is assuming rather a lot." The marquis seemed amused by the idea. "I've never asked you if you are a monarchist, Don Jaime. I mean the monarchy as an abstraction, not our pathetic national farce."

"Before, Don Luis, you said that my kingdom was not of this world."

"Nor of the next, I'm sure. The fact is, I unreservedly admire your ability to remain on the margins."

Don Jaime looked up; he was studying the clouds in the distance, as if there was something familiar about them. "Perhaps I'm too selfish," he said. "An old egotist."

Don Luis made a face. "That often has a price, my friend, a very high price."

Don Jaime turned the palms of his hands up in a gesture of resignation. "You can get used to anything, especially when you have no option. If you have to pay, you pay; it's just a question of attitude. At a particular moment in your life you adopt a certain position, whether mistaken or not. You decide to be like this or that. You burn your boats, and then all you can do is defend that position, come what may."

"Even when you're clearly living a mistake?"

"Especially then. That's where aesthetics comes in."

The marquis gave a broad smile, revealing his perfect teeth. "The aesthetics of the mistake. That would make a fine academic thesis. There would certainly be plenty to say on the subject."

"I don't agree. Indeed, I don't think there's much to say about anything."

"Apart from fencing."

"Apart from fencing, of course." Don Jaime fell silent, as if that were the end of the matter. But after a moment, he shook his head and pressed his lips together. "Pleasure isn't only to be found outside, as Your Excellency said a moment ago. It can also be found in remaining faithful to certain personal rituals, especially when everything stable seems to be collapsing around you."

The marquis observed in an ironic tone: "I think Cervantes had something to say about that. Except that you are a gentleman who has no need to set out on the road, because you carry your windmills inside you."

"And I'm an introspective, egotistical gentleman, don't forget that, Your Excellency. The man from La Mancha wanted to right wrongs; all I want is to be left in peace." He remained thoughtful for a while, analyzing his feelings. "I don't know if that is compatible with honesty, but I am trying to be honest, I assure you, or at least honorable—anything, indeed, that has its roots in the word 'honor,'" he added simply. No one would have taken his tone to be that of a conceited man.

"A most unusual obsession, maestro," said the marquis, genuinely surprised. "Especially these days. Why that word above all others? I can think of dozens of alternatives: money, power, ambition, hatred, passion..."

"I suppose because one day I chose that word and not another. Perhaps by chance, or because I liked the sound of it. Perhaps, in some way, I related it to the image of my father, for I was always proud of the way he died. A good death justifies anything, any life."

"That idea of death," said Ayala, smiling, eager to prolong his conversation with the fencing master, "has a suspicious whiff of Catholicism about it. The good death as gateway to eternal salvation."

"If you're hoping for salvation or whatever, it has very little merit in it. I was referring to the final battle on the threshold of eternal darkness, with oneself the only witness."

"You're forgetting about God."

"He doesn't interest me. God tolerates the intolerable; he is irresponsible and inconsistent. He is not a gentleman."

The marquis looked at Don Jaime with real respect. "I have always maintained, maestro," he said, after a silence, "that nature organizes things in such a way that she makes cynics out of lucid men in order that they may live. You are the only proof I have of the wrongness of my theory. And perhaps that is what I like about you—even more than our fencing bouts. It reconciles me to certain things that I would have sworn existed only in books. You're my sleeping conscience."

They both fell silent, listening to the sound of the fountain; the soft breeze again shook the branches of the willows. Then Don Jaime thought about Adela de Otero, gave a sideways glance at Luis de Ayala, and noticed inside himself a disagreeable murmur of remorse.

I
NDIFFERENT
to the political turmoil taking place in the capital that summer, Don Jaime kept punctually to the arrangements made with his clients, including the three hours a week devoted to Señora de Otero. There was nothing questionable about these sessions; the two kept strictly to the technical side of things, which was the reason for their relationship. Apart from these bouts, in which the young woman continued to fence with consummate skill, they spoke only briefly about inconsequential issues. The almost intimate conversation they had had on the afternoon of her second visit to his apartment was never repeated. In general, she merely asked Don Jaime precise questions about fencing, to which he replied with great pleasure and considerable relief. For his part, Don Jaime suppressed, with apparent ease, any interest he had in learning more about his client, and when he occasionally touched on the subject, she either ignored him or ingeniously sidestepped the question. The only thing he could ascertain was that she lived alone, that she had no close relatives, and that she was trying, for reasons whose secret she alone possessed, to remain on the periphery of the social life that, given her situation, one would have expected her to enjoy in Madrid. He knew that she possessed a considerable fortune yet had a third-floor rather than a secondfloor apartment on Calle Riaño, and that she had lived for some years abroad, possibly in Italy, or so he assumed from certain details and expressions he picked up during his conversations with the young woman. Otherwise, there was no way of knowing if she was single or a widow, although her style of living seemed more suited to the second hypothesis. Her easy manner, the skepticism evident in all her remarks about men, were not what one would expect in a young single woman. It was clear that she had loved and suffered. Don Jaime was old enough to recognize the aplomb that, even in youth, it is possible to achieve only by experiencing and surviving intense personal pain. In that respect, he was unsure whether or not it would be fair to describe her, in the vulgar terminology of the day, as an adventuress. Perhaps she was. She seemed so unusually independent that it was difficult to place her among the ranks of the more conventional women of the fencing master's acquaintance. Nevertheless, something told him that to label her an adventuress was to oversimplify.

Despite Adela de Otero's reticence about herself, the relationship he had with her could, on the whole, be regarded as satisfying. The youth and personality of his female client, enhanced by her beauty, produced in Don Jaime a state of healthy animation that grew with each passing day. She treated him with a respect not exempt from strange coquetry. He enjoyed their skirmishing, so much so that, as time passed, he waited ever more eagerly for the moment when she would appear in the gallery, always with the same small traveling bag beneath her arm. He was now used to her leaving the door of the changing room ajar, and he would go in there as soon as she had left, to breathe in the sweet smell of rose water that hung in the air like a reminder of her presence. And there were moments, for example, when they looked too long into each other's eyes, when a violent bout of fencing brought them close to physical contact, in which only by dint of great self-discipline did he manage to conceal, beneath a layer of paternal courtesy, the unsettling effect this woman had on his mind.

The day came when, during a bout, she lunged forward with such force that she hurled herself against Don Jaime's chest. He felt the weight of her body, warm and supple in his arms, and out of pure reflex grasped her around the waist, to help her recover her balance. She quickly drew herself up, but her face, covered by the metal mesh of the mask, remained turned for a moment toward his, so close that he could feel her breath and see her shining eyes on him. Back in the on-guard position, he was so affected by what had happened that the young woman hit him twice in the chest before he could even think about putting himself properly on defense. Happy to have successfully carried out two attacks, she moved back and forth on the piste, harrying him with lightning-quick thrusts, with improvised attacks and feints, bursting with joy, like a young girl giving herself heart and soul to a game she loved. His calm restored, Don Jaime observed her while he kept her at arm's length, tapping the young woman's foil, which clinked against his when she stopped for a moment and sagely studied her opponent's defense to find an opening into which she could lunge forward with speed and valor. He had never loved her so much as at that moment.

Later, when she emerged from the changing room in her street clothes, she seemed shaken. She was pale and unsteady on her feet. She passed a hand across her forehead, dropped her hat on the floor, and had to use the wall for support. He went over to her, concerned.

"Are you all right?"

"I think so," she said faintly. "It's just the heat." She leaned on his proffered arm. Her head was bent, and her cheek almost brushed his shoulder.

"It's the first sign of weakness I've ever seen in you, Doña Adela."

A smile lit up the young woman's pale face. "Consider it a privilege, then," she said.