Ramón María del Valle-Inclán: Niña Chole

RAMÓN MARÍA DEL VALLE-INCLÁN

Niña Chole

It was many years ago, recovering from an unhappy love affair, that I embarked for Mexico from a port in the Spanish Antilles. I was young at the time and something of a pot, with no experience of life and far too many novels in my head. I sincerely believed, then, many of the things I now take liberty to doubt. Unhindered by scepticism, I was eager to revel in life. Though I would never admit it (was perhaps unaware of it), I was in truth perfectly happy, with the indefinable happiness that comes from being fancy-free, and so at liberty to love every woman on Earth. While I was no Don Juan, my youthful days were marked by love and passion fresh, impetuous love; sober, red-blooded passion. I scorned the affected decadence of the younger generation. Even today after a lifetime of sinning, my mornings are triumphant, as the French poet has it.

The steamer which bore me to Mexico was the Delilah, a fine ship, later wrecked off the coast of Galicia. Though we had fine weather throughout the crossing, I hardly left the cabin or spoke to a soul, so busy was I nursing my broken heart. The purpose of the trip was to forget, but my sorrows struck me as so novelettish that I could never quite bring myself to banish them. A further reason was that the passengers were Yankees, and conversation in sign-language held little appeal to me.

How unlike my first sea voyage aboard the Masaniello, which carried travellers from all over the world! There, by the second day, I was on familiar terms with a Neapolitan prince, while there was not a seasick damsel whose pale and dishevelled head had not rested on my ever-willing hand. I enjoyed joining the groups gathered on deck to converse in the shade of great canvas awnings, now smattering in Italian with Greek merchants in red fez and slim black mustachios, now lighting a cigar from the pipes of Mormon missionaries. There were all types aboard, card sharpers with the style of diplomats, singers with heavily be-ringed fingers, smooth commission-agents trailing a whiff of musk, American generals and Spanish bullfighters. Russian Jews and English Lords. A picturesque, exotic trope whose gabble made one’s head spin.

Dawn in the tropical jungle, with howler-monkeys and flights of green macaws greeting the sunrise, reminds me of the deck of that great ocean liner and its fairground babel of types, dress and languages. But far, far more powerfully still, it evokes the interminable, opium-laden hours that constituted life aboard the Delilah.

Everywhere red, freckled faces, saffron-coloured hair and shifty eyes. Yankees in the dining-room, Yankees on deck, Yankees in the cabin. Enough to drive anyone to despair! However, I bore it with admirable patience. My heart, after ll, was numb, so numb that not even the last trump could have roused it, nor even the clack of castanets. I was a changed man since the poor thing expired. I dressed all in black, and in the presence of ladies, at the sight of a half-lovely eye. .i struck the lugubrious pose of suffering, funereal poet. This accompanied my oft-repeated soliloquies to the effect that not many can boast being victims of faithlessness, when barely twenty years of age…

To avoid mingling with that gang of Yankee usurers, I hardly left my cabin. Only at sunset did I take a seat aft, and there, free from tiresome interruptions, whiled away the hours gazing at the Delilah’s wake being erased by the waves. The sea of the Antilles, its quivering emerald bosom transparent to the depths, drew me in, fascinated me lie the green, treacherous eyes of fairy creatures living in palaces of crystal at the bottom of lakes. My thoughts turned back always to that first voyage, calling up the ghosts of old delights in the blue hazy distance where happy hours dissolve. The shapeless, symphonic lament of the waves awoke a whole world of memories; faded forms, echoes of laughter, the murmur of foreign tongues, applause and the fluttering of fans mingling with notes of the Tyrolean melody sung by Lili in the mirror room. It was the resurrection of sensations, a luminous dissolution of the past: ethereal, brilliant, dusted with gold—like memories borne to use in dreams.

After three day’s sailing, the Delilah touched port in the Yucatán. As I recall, it was mid-morning, beneath a blazing sun which shrivelled the timbers and melted the pitch, when we dropped anchor in those waters of burnished silver, Indian boatmen, green as ancient bronze, assault the steamer from both sides and pull out exotic merchandise from their canoes; carved coconuts, palm fans and tortoiseshell-handled canes. Smiling like beggars, they hold these up to passengers leaning over the side. Lifting my eyes to the rocks onshore that raise their sweltering heads above the waves. I make out groups of naked boys diving from on high and swimming great distances, gabbling to each other as they draw apart, shouting. Some are lying on the rocks, feet dangling in the water. Others stand drying themselves in a sun which lights them obliquely, slender and naked as figures on a Parthenon frieze. Studied through the captain’s binoculars. Progreso is lie one of those imaginary townscapes painted by a precocious child; white, blue, red, all the colours of the rainbow. A smiling town, like a young woman dressed for spring, dabbing the tips of her toes in the waters of the port. The result is somehow odd; flat roofs faced with brilliant tiles contrasting with surroundings where the palm-tree raises its bold silhouette, speaking to us of remote deserts and weary caravans resting in its welcoming shade.

To escape the tediousness of Yankees, I decided to go ashore. I shall never forget he interminable hours from the Delilah to the beach. Drugged by the heat, I like in a skiff rowed with exasperating slowness by an African negro. Through half-closed yes, I watched him sway back and forth above me wit the maddeningly slow rhythm of this oars, a coal-black figure, alternately smiling at me with thick giant’s lips, or whistling tunes charged with sacral lethargy, three plaintive noes such as the snake-charmers of savage tribes use to hypnotise the great snakes. Such, in the ancient world, was the trip to Hades in Charon’s boat; a roasting sun, bleaches white horizon, calm sea without a breeze or a ripple. And in the air, all the hear of Vulcan’s forge.

At the risk of missing the ship, I pressed on to Mérida. I have only confused, hazy impressions of this trip to the Mayan city, like a volume of prints leafed through lazily in a hammock in the oppressive heat of the siesta. Closing my eyes brings back memories, paints them in vivid hues. I feel again the anguish of thirst and dust. I see the somnolent comings and goings of Indians, sheeted like ghosts. I hear again the caressing voices of native women, garbed with the charming simplicity of classical statues, hair flowing loose over shoulders bare but for a transparent silk shawl.

I lunched at the Hotel Cuahutemoc, its dining-room a cool marble cloister, shaded by canvas awnings tinged by the strong midday sun to a golden glow, like ship’s sails. Mosquitoes droned around a fountain whose silver crest spurted boldly I the sun, raining down in tiny iridescent drops upon the alabaster basin. In that fiery heat, beneath that blue sky, where the palm-tree spreads its rusting parasol, the fresh music of water evoked distantly the travails of the desert and the delights of slumber at the oasis.

There, in the hotel dining-room, I saw her for the first time. A singular woman, a species of Salammbô, whose Indian servants—slaves, I almost said—addressed her softly as Niña Chole. She was lunching at a table near mine min the company of a fine, strapping young Englishman whom I took to be her husband. The contrast between the pair could not have been more marked; he, athletic, blue-eyed and fair-headed, with red cheeks and a pale forehead, while she was a bronzed, exotic beauty, with the striking, sinuous grace of nomad races, a figure hieratic and serpentine, brining to mind those princesses, daughters of the Sun, who glitter in Indian poems, with the double fascination of the priestly and the voluptuous.

She was dressed in the manner of the Yucatán women, In a white huipil or tunic, embroidered with coloured silks; a native garment like the peplum of the ancients. Beneath it, she wore the Andalucian petticoat, still known in these former Spanish lands by the name of fustán. Her black hair was loose, and the tunic outlines her classical breasts. Alas, from where I sat, I could glimpse her face at those rare moments when she turned in my direction, but all in the Niña Chole spoke of the beautiful poses of an idol—the ecstatic, sacral calm of the Mayan race, a race so old, so noble, so mysterious that it must have migrated from the depths of India. Denied her face, I concentrated on what the shawl failed fully to hide, and my gaze dwelt on the soft turn of her shoulder and the curve of her neck. Heaven help me! it was as if that body, burnished by the blazing sun of Yucatán, gave off a languorous perfume whose inhalation made me drunk…

A servant approaches to remove the tablecloth. Niña Chole rises and moves away, smiling. Seeing her face to face, my heart leaps. The very smile of Lilí, the Lilí I had so loved—or hated!

As the train rattled towards Progreso across wide plains now invaded by evening shadow, my thoughts were on the unknown woman glimpsed at the Hotel Cuahutemoc, that Salammbô of the palaces of Mixtla.

Truly, the hour was propitious for this kind of reverie. The countryside was sinking slowly into the amorous, sighing silence of burning evening. Though the open windows, the aromatic, fertile breeze awoken by tropical sunset played on my face. The countryside shuddered as if poised for its wedding-night, virgin entrails exuding a hot reek of passionate negress, powerful, lascivious. Here and there, at the foot of the hills and in the hemp between stockades of giant cactus. Copper.coloured, doe-eyed women standing in their doorways, silent, indifferent, watched the train pass by whistling and making the ground shake. The attitude of those bronze figures revealed the age-old, inherited sadness of a conquered race. Their faces were humble, with very white teeth and great dark eyes, indolent, wild, shrouded. Born to live eternally in encampments at the foot of palm-trees and ahuehuetls.

The heat was unbearable. The train, tracing speedy curves, raced across great stretches of the hot lands—never-ending plantations of hemp and sugar cane. Far away on the horizon rose volcanic hills, squat, covered with thick green-black vegetation. On the plains, evergreen oaks, spread their branches to create a single canopy like a giant sunshade, while, sitting in a circle under its protection, Indians in canvas breeches ate their wretched meal of tamales.

In the compartment, conversation had died away. Some windows were open, others shut. The inspector came by, checking tickets. The last passengers got out at a station with an Indian name, and silence then reigned in the carriage. Drowsy from the rhythmical clacketing of the train, from the heat and the dust, I dreamed like an Arab who has passed the portals of Paradise. Need I say that the seven hours provided by the Prophet were seven native women dressed in huipil and petticoat, all of the with Lilí’s smile and Niña Chole’s gaze? Truly, that unknown woman was becoming an obsession, and I knew myself doomed to fall madly in love with her magnificent eyes if ever I had the misfortune to see them again. Luckily, the women who bowl us over like this are rarely glimpsed more than once in a lifetime. They come and go like shadows, wrapped in the mystery of a magical sunset. If they were to appear again, the magic might well not work. But why should they reappear, when one glance of theirs conveys to us all the secret melancholy of love!

However, I doubt if it stopped to analyse my sensations at that time. I vaguely recall humming a ditty from the Americas that a close friend of my mother, Nieves Agar, had taught me many years ago. Then I was a fair-haired angel, dozing o the laps of the ladies of my mother’s circle, gathered at the house. not that I have ceased dozing on ladies’ laps! Poor Nieves Agar, how often you rocked me on your knees to that danzón!

One hand on your lap,

The other fans your charming face.

The hammock sways

Your lovely body’s shape traced by its mesh.

Greek is your figure,

African your hue,

Jewish your eyes,

Spanish your tongue,

Bronzed by the sun’s kiss

Sand is your carpet,

The palm-tree your sister.

O romantic infatuation, wretched offspring of the ideal, born in the few hours of a railway journey, or around the table at an inn! Who has reached old age without feeling his heart tremble under the caress of thy white wing? I treasure in my soul so many of these loves! Even today, with all my hair already white and thinning, old before my time, I can never without yearning recall a woman’s face glimpsed one morning between Cádiz and Seville, to whose university my father had sent me. She was a pale, sighing, dreamlike creature, floating in the past, but casting over my adolescent memories the spiritual perfume of those dried flowers that lovers preserve, along with letters and curls of hair, and which, from the bottom of some casket, exude the innocent secret of first love.

Niña Chole’s eyes had stirred in my soul such distant memories, tenuous as ghosts, pale as if bathed in moonlight. That smile, so like Lilí’s awoke tumultuous desires in my blood, and in my soul, a diffuse urge to love. Rejuvenated and happy, possessing a kind of melancholy happiness within me, I sighed for loves past, ever more drunk with the perfume of the April roses once more flowering around my hoary trunk. My heart, numb for so long, grew avid for the old sensations under the pressure of youthful sap flowing through me once more. It was plunged in the mists of the past, and savoured the pleasure of memory—privilege of the moribund who have loved greatly, in many different ways. Ah, the sweet shiver sent to the nerves by the aroused imagination…!

Meanwhile, night spread its shadow over the great plains, pregnant with passionate promise. A whiff of sea, of seaweed and tar, blended with the overpowering odour of the countryside. Far away, against the dark backcloth of the horizon, the reddish tones of the jungle on fire. Nature luxuriant and savage, still glowing with the heat of the afternoon, seemed to sleep the deep, panting sleep of a pregnant wild beast. In those shadows, filled with whispered matings, fireflies dancing among the tall grass, swift and evanescent, I detected a soft, delicious, divine scent—the scent that summer ripeness pours into the calix of flowers and into the hears of men.

The locomotive whistles, roars, pants, judders to a halt. The monster’s life escapes through open valves, stertorous, asthmatic. Here we are, Progreso! A Sheet-clad Indian opens the compartment door and thrusts in his dark head.

‘Some little thing I can carry for the young master?’

I leap down onto the platform, and reply:

‘No… nothing…’

The Indian makes as if to go:

‘Need a guide, maybe, niño?’

‘I need nothing at all.’

Unhappy, pensive, he wraps tighter the sheet that serves him as a cloak, and departs defeated…

So few of us were left on the train that the station entrance hall was almost deserted. I was quickly out, there being no crowds to push through. Feeling the sea breeze on my cheeks, I peered around, wondering if the ship had sailed. Thus preoccupied, I was making my way to the beach when a soft, humble Mayan voice reached my ear:

Four for a media,

Eight for a real,

Being as how times go now

Making ends meet’s so tough!

I turn my head and there he is, a few yards away, coming on at a trot, chanting as he hawks the sweetmeats piled up in the basket under his arm:

Alfajores, alfajores,

For poor and rich folks,

Purest buttermilk,

Selling for a half,

And for a quarter.

With this, he caught up with me and murmured:

‘Master, you not like a real’s worth of jelly, alfajores, charamuscas? Come on boss, just a real.’

The fellow is starting to annoy me, and I refuse to acknowledge him or answer. This only encourages him, for he continues pestering me. for a moment he falls silent, then, in conspiratorial tones:

‘Boss, how about getting a chinita for you? From Guadalajara, just fifteen, a real peach, lives nearby. Come on boss, you should see her dance the jarabe. Only a month since Niño Nacho of Huaxila ranch took her you-know-what…’

Then suddenly, he breaks off, and with a leap like a savage, he bars my path, clearly determined I shall not pass. He is crouching, basket in one hand in guise of a buckler, while the other, raised menacingly, wields a broad of glittering knife. I confess I was scared. The place was perfect for this kind of assault: swampy dunes between black pools that reflected the moon, while in the distance was a sinister looking hut with light shining through the cracks. I might have submitted if the robber had been less polite. Indeed, if he had been fierce and threatening—if he had sworn to rip out my guts and drink my blood. But instead of the sharp imperious demands I expected, came instead his eternal sing-song, slave’s voice:

‘Careful, mi amito, you could get hurt.’

To hear this and to react was a matter of seconds. The Indian was crouching now like a mountain cat ready to spring. I could almost feel the cold steel piercing the marrow of my bones. Horror at the thought of dying by the knife galvanized me and suddenly I found reserves of strength and valour. Berayed by only a slight tremor in my voice, I stepped forward, determined to resist, and shouted at the ruffian:

‘Out of my way, or I’ll kill you stone dead.’

The Indian did not budge. His servile voice took an ironic tone:

‘Don’t worry, mi amito. Wanna get out of here in one piece? Make with your money, then. Put all of it on the rock, over there. Come on now, quick about it!’

The gling of that knife was daunting, but I managed to mutter between clenched teeth:

‘That remains to be seen, bandit!’

I carried no weapons but, from a young Indian woman selling jaguar skins, curiously carved coconuts, marine statuettes and suchlike exotic souvenirs in Mérida, I had bought an ebony stick whose rare carving appealed to me. I have it on my table as I write. It resembles the sceptre of an African kind, so richly oriental yet naïve in the imagination behind its carving. I adjusted my prince-nez, grasped the stick, and with some ‘smart footwork’ as the footpads of a couple of centuries ago would have put it, set about the robber. He side-stepped my attack and lunged at me by stealth. Luckily, the moonlight fell brightly on him, and I spotted the move in time to avoid it.

I have a vague recollection of trying to disarm him with a feint to the head followed by a blow to the arm, but the Indian dodged it with the agility of the savage. After that, I am not sur what happened. I have only anguished, nightmarish impression. The dunes, lit by the moo; the black treacherous sand into which my feet sank; the increasing heaviness of my arm; my eyesight blurred, the Indian recoiling, returning, crouching and leaping with the fantastic fury of a bewitched, macabre cat. Then, as the stick is falling from my hand, a fleeing shape and glitter of a knife whirring over my head to lodge, quivering life a viper, in the black twisted wood of a cross made of two charred boughs.

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For a moment I paused, bewildered, not fully aware of what had happened. As thorough a gathering mist, I saw the door of the hut open cautiously and two men emerge, looking up and down the beach. Fearing another encounter like the last, I set out briskly for the quayside. Just as I reached it, the Delilah’s boat was leaning with the ship’s mate and the doctor on board. I shouted after them. Happily, they recognized me and turned back. With a foot on the gunwale, I exclaimed:

‘What a fright!’

On the point of relating my encounter with the Indian, without knowing quite why, I changed my mind and said simply:

‘My word, what a fright! I thought the ship had sailed’

The mate, laconic as a good Scot, slipped the bar into the tiller and without turning his head, said in broken Spanish:

‘Not till tomorrow night.’

Bending forward like a rider urging on his mount, he roared:

‘Row!’

Six oars struck the water and the launch leapt forward like an arrow. Once aboard the steamer, I retired to my cabin utterly exhausted and went straight to bed. Lo and behold, no sooner have I put out the light, but the slumbering serpents of desire which have lurked entwined around my heart all day, awake and make ready to sink in their fangs. At the same time, I was invaded by a deep sadness, filled with confusion and mystery; the melancholy of sex, seed of the great sadness of human existence.

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The memory of Niña Chole pursued me like a persistent, gossamer butterfly. Her Indian beauty, the allure of a priestess, that serpentine grace and sybil’s glance, swaying hips, disturbing smile, child’s foot, bare shoulders—everything that eye could see, or imagination conjure up, all of this became a devouring blaze that consumed my flesh. My imagination dwelt on the glorious, youthful body of that bronze Venus disporting itself among zephyrs, first veiled, then increasingly uncovered. Firm, fresh, lascivious, fragrant as roses of Alexandria in the gardens in Tierra Caliente. Such was the suggestive power of memory that for a while, I could have sworn I breathed in the voluptuous scent spread upon the air by the slow undulations of her skirt.

Gradually, wariness closed my eyes, and the lullaby of waves sleeping against the hull lulled me into the amorous, feverish, uneasy sleep—mirror and symbol of my whole existence. I woke in the morning with nerves a-tingle, as if I had spent the night in a hot-house amid tropical plants with rare aromas, aphrodisiac, penetrating. From above my head came shouts and the patter of bare feet, accompanied by sounds of activity and splashing. The crew were swabbing down. I roused myself and went on up deck. Here I am, savouring the breeze, with its smell of tar and seaweed. At this hour of the day, the temperature is delightful there is a voluptuous quivering in the air, the horizon is laughing beneath a bright sun. gusts of wind reach us off the virgin forest, mild and caressing as the breath of a passionate woman, whistling through the rigging, while the odour of the gentile swell seeps into, and drugs the soul. As if in its green depths the vast Gulf of Mexico felt the languor of that morning, laden with fertile and mysterious pollens like the harem of the Universe.

Wrapped in the rosy mist spread by dawn light over the blue sea, a launch, was cutting through the waves. It was so slender, light and while that classical comparisons with seagull or swam fitted it to perfection. Six oarsmen manned its thwarts. Beneath a canvas awning at the stern, two white-clad shapes sought refuges from the sun. by the time the launch came alongside the Delilah’s ladder. I was there, confusedly hopeful of—who knows what great happiness?

A woman was seated by the tiller. The awning allows me to glimpse only the hem of a skirt and the feet of a queen shod in white satin slippers. But already my heart knows. It must her her! Niña Chole, the Salammbô of the palaces of Mixtla! And indeed, it was her, more charming than ever, in sailor blouse and cap set at a jaunty angle. Now she is standing on the thwarts of the launch, holding on to the Herculean shoulders of her husband, the Englishman with her at Mérida.

The full red lips of he yucateca are smiling with the unsettling charm of an Egyptian, of a Turanian. Her eyes, shadowed by long lashes, are mysterious, fleeting, distant, evoking ancient, noble races, founders in far-off times of great empires in the lands of the sun. the launch is dancing on the waves alongside the ship. The woman, half-alarmed, half-amused, grasps the blonde hair of the giant who suddenly sweeps her up in his arms and launches himself in the ladder. Both laugh as the sea-spray bathes their faces. Once on deck, the Englishman leaves her momentarily while he speaks to be bo’sun.

I hurry to the stateroom through which perforce they must pass. Never had my heart beaten so violently. I recall that the great salon was deserted and, despite the dawn light glittering off the windows, rather dark. I took an English magazine from the piano and sat by the door, pretending to read for a moment. Nothing happens. Then I hear voices and laughter. A ray of sunshine more playful, more lively, more joyful than the rest, lights up the stateroom, and in the depths of the mirror appears the image of Niña Chole. Haughty, majestic, advancing slowly, giving instructions to a young Indian girl who listens with eyes respectfully lowered, before answering in the language of Yucatán, ancient tongue blending the sweetness of Italian with the picturesque simplicity of primitive tongues. I stepped aside quickly, folding the magazine. She brushed past. I think she shot me a quick glance, taking note, her fresh, healthy lips sketched the beginning of a smile. The smile which drove me mad on the lips of Lilí!

Hoe of seeing the yucateca again sent me prowling on the look-out for the rest of the morning in vain. Her husband, on the other hand, never ceased pacing up and down the deck. He seemed the strong haughty type hair combed like the Prince of Wales, but sporting neither beard nor moustache. His eyes were of a neutral, pale blue and his lids were half-closed as he gazed around him. The attitude he struck were definitely aristocratic. His progress up and down the deck was in large strides, arms by his side, teeth clenched on a pipe. From time to time he paused to add a dottle of tobacco or to spit over the side. For the whole morning I never saw him smile or talk to anybody.

At ten, the ship’s bell summoned us the dining-room. I went to my cabin and combed my hair with more than ordinary care before proceeding to the meal. Though nigh on a hundred people were seated along those not too much as a whisper of conversation was to be heard. A church-like silence reigned, broken only by the noise of busy forks and the discreet footsteps of waiters, bustling up and down behind the guests, chests bursting out of their tail-coats. The servants were likely lads, fair-haired, sporting sideburns like German princes.

As I sat down, my eyes sought out Niña Chole. She was at the other end of the table, smiling at a burly Yankee gentleman with bull-like neck and great red whiskers, banker’s whiskers which brushed solemnly against the diamond studs of his shirt-front. I saw that the blonde giant, meanwhile, was also looking at his wife and smiling. So strange that smile, so enigmatic on the lips of a husband, that I found it deeply disturbing! She turned, her head and made an almost imperceptible gesture, while her eyes, her lovely eyes with their hypnotic, sacral gaze, continued to caress the banker. I was so overcome with jealousy and rage that I could feel myself go white. Humiliated, I threw down my napkin and left the table. I could not conceive a husband tolerating such carrying on. What sort of a man was this colossus, if he allowed his wife the free ranging of her eyes. and such lovely eyes…!

From the doorway, I turned to direct a scornful glare at them. Oh, that I had possessed the powers of the basilisk, for my eyes to reduce them the and there to dust! But I had not, and Yankee gentleman was able to carry on stroking his ox-coloured whiskers, puffing and blowing in his white waistcoat, setting in motion the charms dangling from the large watch-chain that spanned his paunch from pocket to pocket. She, the Salammbô of the palaces of Mixtla, was able to carry on regaling him with the queenly, indulgent smile that I had seen and love on other lips…

Three days later, tedious, interminable days when the yucateca never left her cabin, the Delilah anchored in the bay of Villa Rica de Veracruz.

My soul prey to an almost religious emotion. I contemplated the sweltering beach where, first among all the peoples of old Europe, those Spanish adventurers—sons of Alaric the Barbarian and Tarik the Moor—had disembarked. The city they founded and to which they bequeathed their heritage of valour, I saw mirrored in the leaden sea, as if staring in fascination at the fateful route that brought the white men. At the far end, set on its stark granitic islet, the castle of San Juan of Ulloa dips its feet in the waves—a romantic shape evoking a feudal past that neve was. In the distance, the Orizaba mountain range, white as a grandfather’s head, projected impressionistic against a classical sky as blue and deep as Greece.

Half-forgotten reading swam back into my mind, tales that had moved me as child to dream of this land, daughter of the sun. semi-historical, semi-romantic tales, with copper-coloured men, sad and silent as behoves vanquished heroes, virgin forests alive with birds of brilliant plumage, women like Niña Chole, dark and hot-blooded—as the poet has it, the very symbols of passion. My feverish imagination depicted myself as the Extremaduran adventurer burning his boats while, lying about on the sand, his men cast black looks, their mustaches spiked upwards in the old military manner, their manly features leathery, varnished wit the patina of figures in old paintings. And as one cannot renounce the fatherland, as a Spaniard, I felt my heart swell with enthusiasm, my mind’s eye filled with glorious visions, my memory replete with historic events. It was no dream! I was myself to disembark on that sacred shore! Obscure adventurer that I was, restless and homeless, moved by wanderlust, I was about to lose myself—perhaps for ever—in the vastness of the ancient empire of the Aztecs. An empire whose history was unknown, buried forever with the mummies of its kings, its cyclopean remains, evoking past civilizations, cults and races, matched only in the far and mysterious East.

How beautiful are tropical lands! Once seen, never forgotten. The calm blue of the sea, blinding, burning sun, breeze laden with all the aromas of the hot lands, these leave such voluptuous memories in the flesh, senses, heart and soul (like a much-loved mistress), that desire to conjure them up again fades only with old age. My mind grows young again as I recall that immense glittering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, which I have never since crossed again. In my mind’s eye, I see again the towers of Veracruz, the forest of Campeche, the sans of Yucatán, the palaces of Palenque, the palm-trees of Tuxpan and Laguna. And always, indissoluble linked to my memories of that lovely far-off land, the memory of Niña Chole, as I had seen her for the first time, with her loose hair, surrounded by her retinue of servants, wearing the white hupil of a Mayan priestess of old!

No sooner are we at anchor than a gaily-decked flotilla of boats and launches sets out from the shore. The steady beat of oars is audible from afar. A hundred heads peer over the side of the Delilah, while the multi-coloured crowd bustle about, thronging the half-deck. Voice shout in Spanish, in English, in Chinese. Frantic signs are made to the Indian boatman to draw alongside. The passengers haggle and dispute, then finally, like a rosary coming undone, they drop into the boats clustered in quieter and tired groups, oars shipped, at the bottom of the ladder. The flotilla disperse. Even at a distance one can descry tiny figures moving, arms waving like a clown, voices clashing with, enhancing, the solemn silence of these sun-baked lands. Not a single head has turned to send the ship a farewell glance. There they go, racing to be first ashore: the gold-hunters.

Night is nearly upon us. At this sunset hour, the burning desire aroused in me by Niña Chole is refined, purified, transformed into a vague longing for an ideal, poetic love. Darkness falls slowly. The wind moans, the moon glimmers, the turquoise blue sky grows black, a solemn black in which the stars acquire profound clarity.

It is night in the Americas, as described by poets.

I had gone to my cabin and was lying on the bunk smoking a pipe and very likely dreaming of Niña Chole, when the door opens and in comes young Julius Caesar, a mulatto lad given to me in Jamaica the previous year by a Portuguese adventurer who later ended up a general and minister in the Dominical Republic. Julius Caesar pauses in the doorway, framed in the drapes of the curtain.

‘Master! There’s a darkie on board kill sharks in the water with his knife. Come quick!’

Away he races, like the Ethiopian gaoler of a princess in some enchanted castle. Curiosity aroused, I go up after him. Here I am on deck in the light of a calm, luminous full moon. A colossal negro, his canvas clothing dripping water, shakes himself amid a group of passengers, smiling, revealing his white teeth. A few yards away, two seamen are bending over the starboard gunwale, hauling up a shark with its throat slit open, swaying in mid-air alongside the Delilah. Then suddenly the line snaps and the enormous cetacean disappears in a frenzied churning of the water. Lips light, the huge negro breathes:

‘Fools!’

He is moving off, bare feet leaving a trail of wet footmarks on the deck, when a woman’s voice calls out to him.

‘Here!’

‘Coming right away, Niña, right away.’

This reply caught the bo’sun’s ear as he passed by, conducting a manoeuvre. With the laconic, brutal concision of the true sailor, and without dropping the whistle from his lips or turning his head, he shot at him.

‘400 and don’t be a fool.’

The negro was in two minds. He went to the starboard gunwale and stared for a moment into the depths of the sea, where the stars quivered tenuously. Fantastic silvered fish could be seen crossing back and forth, leaving a trail of phosphorescent flashes to blend with the glitter of the moon before they vanished. In the shadow projected on the water by the looming hulk of the Delilah, moved a shapeless mass; a pack of sharks. The seaman drew back, thoughtful. He returned once or twice to study the slumbering waves, as if drawn by some groan issuing from the silence of the night. He nipped off a cigar with his fingernail, and turned to her:

‘Four, if it please Missy.’

Niña Chole, with the haughty disdain of the rich American, turned to him, her splendid Indian queen’s head, tedium-laden words almost dropping asleep at the edge of her lips:

‘Are you done? Four it shall…!’

The lips of the negro sketched the smile of an avaricious ogre. He took off his shirt and unsheathed his knife, clasping it in his teeth like a Newfoundland dog as he leaned over one side. The sea water was still fresh and glistening on the varnished ebony of his naked torso. The huge negro leant over sill farther, peering into the depths, then he turned to me:

‘Your Wo’ship care to give me somethin’ to bait that fish?’

Having nothing else to hand, I gave him my travelling cap which he thoughtfully flattened to make it float. Then, as the sharks broke surface, he drew himself up, black and mythological, on the moonlit handrail. Arms outstretched, he dived in head-first and swam away under water. Everyone on Delilah’s deck, passengers and crew alike, crowded to the side. The sharks whirled and vanished in pursuit of the negro. All eyes were fixed on a turmoil of foam in the water; this had barely subsided when a stain of red bubbles spread over the sea.

Amid cheers from the crew and vigorous applause from the ruddy, bourgeois hands of the Yankees, the squat woolly head of the seaman broke surface; he was swimming with one arm only, the other dragging a shark half out of the water, gaffed by the knife that had slit its throat. Everybody rushed to haul up the negro. The ropes readied for this moment were flung over the side. But as he rose half out of the water, a fearsome scream pierced the night. We saw him fling his arms wide, then disappear beneath the water in a frenzy of sharks.

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I was still standing aghast when a voice behind me said in Egnlish:

‘Sir, lend me four pounds, will you?’

At the same time, somebody tapped me softly on the shoulder. Turning my head, I found myself eye to eye with Niña Chole. An unnerving smile was playing on her lips, while her fingers opened and closed on what I saw to bee several gold coins. With an air of mysetery, she asked me to stand aside. Than leaning over the side, she flung the coins as far as she could. Bust gracefully arched, she turned to me:

‘With that, he can pay Charon’s passage.’

I must have been paler than death, but as she fixed me with her lovely eyes and smiled, the stimulus of the senses prevailed, and my still trembling lips returned her cynical smile with the obedient laugh of the slave who acquiesces in his master’s every act. The ironic cruelty of the criolla both horrified and attracted me. never had she seemed so lovely and so tempting. Murmurs and aromas rose from the dark, mysterious sea, lent an extraordinary voluptuousness by the white moonlight.

The tragic death of the negro colossus, the mute horror visible on all the faces, a violin’s lament from the stateroom, everything that night, bathed in moonlight, enhanced my feeling of subtle, depraved desire. The yucateca departed with the rhythmic, sinuous step of a tiger, and as she disappeared, a cruel doubt struck me. I had not till then realized that standing beside me, was the Yankee usurer with the red, treacherous beard. Could he have been the recipient of those glances from the Salammbô of Mixtla? Those eyes, in whose depths seemed to slumber the enigma of an ancient, licentious, cruel and diabolical cult.

Be that as it may, I was never to see them again.

Next day, I disembarked at Veracruz at first light. I feared that smile, Lilí’s smile, now reappearing on the lips of another woman. I feared those lips—Lilí’s lips—fresh, fragrant as the cherries in our garden, which she so loved to offer me in her mouth. Ah, when the heart has but twenty years (if the wretched thing opens itself to love more than just once or twice, savouring the rare joys while enduring the countless sufferings) it must tremble at such meaningful glances and smiles when the eyes and lips that lavish them are like Niña Chole’s. I trembled then, and would tremble again today, when the snows of so many winters have falling on my head—without melting!

Paris, April 1893