Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). Blasco Ibáñez Vicente
captivated by this funny eschatalogy, and would haggle less in the matter of fees. Famous Don Esteban!… Just for the pleasure of hearing his yarns they would have liked a legal paper drawn up every month.
The future destiny of the notarial crown prince was the object of many after-dinner conversations on the special days when the poet was an invited guest.
"What do you want to be?" Labarta asked his godson.
His mother's supplicating glance seemed desperately to implore the little fellow: "Say Archbishop, my king." For the good señora, her son could not make his début in any other way than in a church career. The notary always used to speak very positively from his own viewpoint, without consulting the interested party. He would be an eminent jurisconsult; thousands of dollars were going to roll toward him as though they were pennies; he was going to figure in university solemnities in a cloak of crimson satin and an academic cap announcing from its multiple sides the tasseled glory of the doctorate. The students in his lecture-room would listen to him most respectfully. Who knew what the government of his country might not have in store for him!…
Ulysses interrupted these images of future grandeur:
"I want to be a captain."
The poet approved. He felt the unreflective enthusiasm which all pacific and sedentary beings have for the plume and the sword. At the mere sight of a uniform his soul always thrilled with the amorous tenderness of a child's nurse when she finds herself courted by a soldier.
"Fine!" said Labarta. "Captain of what?… Of artillery?… Of the staff?…"
A pause.
"No; captain of a ship."
Don Esteban looked up at the roof, raising his hands in horror. He well knew who was guilty of this ridiculous idea, the one who had put such absurd longings in his son's head!
And he was thinking of his brother, the retired doctor, who was living in the paternal home over there in the Marina:—an excellent man, but a little crazy, whom the people on the coast called the Dotor, and the poet Labarta had nicknamed the Triton.
CHAPTER II
MATER AMPHITRITE
When the Triton occasionally appeared in Valencia, thrifty Doña Cristina was obliged to modify the dietary of her family. This man ate nothing but fish, and her soul of an economical housewife worried greatly at the thought of the extraordinarily high price that fish brings in a port of exportation.
Life in that house, where everything always jogged along so uniformly, was greatly upset by the presence of the doctor. A little after daybreak, just when its inhabitants were usually enjoying the dessert of their night's sleep, hearing drowsily the rumble of the early morning carts and the bell-ringing of the first Masses, the house would reëcho to the rude banging of doors and heavy footsteps making the stairway creak. It was the Triton rushing out on the street, incapable of remaining between four walls after the first streak of light. Following the currents of the early morning life, he would reach the market, stopping before the flower stands where were the most numerous gatherings of women.
The eyes of the women turned toward him instinctively with an expression of interest and fear. Some blushed as he passed by, imagining against their will what an embrace from this hideous and restless Colossus must be.
"He is capable of crushing a flea on his arm," the sailors of his village used to boast when trying to emphasize the hardness of his biceps. His body lacked fat, and under his swarthy skin bulged great, rigid and protruding muscles—an Herculean texture from which had been eliminated every element incapable of producing strength. Labarta found in him a great resemblance to the marine divinities. He was Neptune before his head had silvered, or Poseidon as the primitive Greek poets had seen him with hair black and curly, features tanned by the salt air, and with a ringleted beard whose two spiral ends seemed formed by the dripping of the water of the sea. The nose somewhat flattened by a blow received in his youth, and the little eyes, oblique and tenacious, gave to his countenance an expression of Asiatic ferocity, but this impression melted away when his mouth parted in a smile, showing his even, glistening teeth, the teeth of a man of the sea accustomed to live upon salt food.
During the first few days of his visit he would wander through the streets wavering and bewildered. He was afraid of the carriages; the patter of the passers-by on the pavements annoyed him; he, who had seen the most important ports of both hemispheres, complained of the bustle in the capital of a province. Finally he would instinctively take the road from the harbor in search of the sea, his eternal friend, the first to salute him every morning upon opening the door of his own home down there on the Marina.
On these excursions he would oftentimes be accompanied by his little nephew. The bustle on the docks,—(the creaking of the cranes, the dull rumble of the carts, the deafening cries of the freighters),—always had for him a certain music reminiscent of his youth when he was traveling as a doctor on a transatlantic steamer.
His eyes also received a caress from the past upon taking in the panorama of the port—steamers smoking, sailboats with their canvas spread out in the sunlight, bulwarks of orange crates, pyramids of onions, walls of sacks of rice and compact rows of wine casks paunch to paunch. And coming to meet the outgoing cargo were long lines of unloaded goods being lined up as they arrived—hills of coal coming from England, sacks of cereal from the Black Sea, dried codfish from Newfoundland sounding like parchment skins as they thudded down on the dock, impregnating the atmosphere with their salty dust, and yellow lumber from Norway that still held a perfume of the pine woods.
Oranges and onions fallen from the crates were rotting in the sun, scattering their sweet and acrid juices. The sparrows were hopping around the mountains of wheat, flitting timidly away when hearing approaching footsteps. Over the blue surface of the harbor waters the sea gulls of the Mediterranean, small, fine and white as doves, twined in and out in their interminable contra-dances.
The Triton went on enumerating to his nephew the class and specialty of every kind of vessel; and upon discovering that Ulysses was capable of confusing a brigantine with a frigate, he would roar in scandalized amazement.
"Heavens! Then what in the devil do they teach your in school?…"
Upon passing near the citizens of Valencia seated on the wharves, fishing rod in hand, he would shoot a glance of commiseration toward their empty baskets. Over there by his house on the coast, before the sun would be up, he would already have covered the bottom of his boat with enough to eat for a week. The misery of the cities!
Standing on the last points of the rocky ledge, his glance would sweep the immense plain, describing to his nephew the mysteries hidden beyond the horizon. At their left, beyond the blue mountains of Oropesa, which bound the Valencian gulf, he could see in imagination Barcelona, where he had numerous friends, Marseilles, that prolongation of the Orient fastened on the European coast, and Genoa with its terraced palaces on hills covered with gardens. Then his vision would lose itself on the horizon stretching out in front of him. That was the road of his happy youth.
Straight ahead in a direct line was Naples with its smoking mountain, its music and its swarthy dancing girls with hoop earrings; further on, the Isles of Greece; at the foot of an Aquatic Street, Constantinople; and still beyond, bordering the great liquid court of the Black Sea, a series of ports where the Argonauts—sunk in a seething mass of races, fondled by the felinism of slaves, the voluptuosity of the Orientals, and the avarice of the Jews—were fast forgetting their origin.
At their right was Africa; the Egyptian ports with their traditional corruption that at sunset was beginning to tremble and steam like a fetid morass; Alexandria in whose low coffee houses were imitation Oriental dancers with no more clothes than a pocket handkerchief, every woman of a different nation and shrieking in chorus all the languages of the earth….
The doctor withdrew his eyes from the sea in order to observe his flattened nose. He was recalling a night of Egyptian heat increased by the fumes of whiskey; the familiarity of the half-clad public women, the scuffle with some ruddy Northern sailors, the encounter in the dark which obliged him to flee with bleeding face to the ship that, fortunately, was weighing anchor at dawn. Like all Mediterranean men,