III

THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKE

Elena came out upright, haughty, leaning on André’s arm; but once in the street, she abruptly
separated from his side.

“Bye, sir… and thank you for lending yourself to please those ladies sparing them of my
presence…”

Andrés hung on to Elena, holding her hands in his own.

“Will you forgive me?”

She felt her anger melting into tears.

“What right do I have to forgive? I am nothing more than a poor woman who has wanted to
change her fate…”

The dewy periwinkle eyes were so tender, so eloquent, that the old aristocrat was moved.

He was confused. On the one hand, the great dignity, the elegance and the courtesy of the
young woman showed a distinguished person. On the other hand, in her conversation, in her
discreteness, there was something daring, even indecent, that did not match her kind of naïve
young lady nor her youth.

She said nothing that let discern her family, her life, her condition, no matter how used to
dealing with women, he had deftly steered the conversation back into the past. The same
interest she took in avoiding talking about it was an unfavorable evidence. In doubt, she made
a resolution:

“Every woman must be treated as a princess as long as she does not lead to something
else…”

Elena’s beauty confused him and did not allow him to reason coldly.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “I am in the house of some compatriots.”

“I do not have a house either. I live in a boarding house… Do you want to come and have
lunch with me? I would like to be honest with you…”
“For what reason?”

“Do you hold any grudge against me?”

“No…”

They entered the apartment, which was made up of an office, a bedroom and a bathroom. It
smelled of perfumes. Elena encompassed him with a quick glance and approached the
dressing table laden with essence bottles, powder and fards. She had the urge to fix her hair
and pass the makeup puff over her face, like a woman who is used to taking possession,
easily, of someone else’s house. She had valued with the first glance that Andrés had a good
position, and he received lady friends. Those things were not only for his use.

He placed an armchair next to the large balcony, made her sit down and removed the pins
from her hat, without her opposing any resistance. She was more beautiful like this, with her
head uncovered. The braids haloed a youthful face, so naïve, that it disconcerted him. The
panorama, over the lake, surrounded by gardens and large palaces, was splendid.

In front, the perspective of the city with its buildings, its towers and the golden domes of the
Russian church, beyond the shape of the mountains, the big and the small “Salerne”, in a dark
tone, in contrast with the background formed by the “Silver Needle”, stuck in the blue sky
and the giant “Mont Blanc” covered with snow, which seemed flattened, like the cone of a
great sorbet that had been slurped from the tip.

“Believe me,” said Andrés, “that in everything that has happened there is nothing depressing
for you, nothing that is a lack of consideration. A prank from my nieces that I lent myself to
before I met you. Deep inside of everything, the fault is the jealousy that you must inspire
with your beauty to other women, no matter how beautiful they are.”

But Elena was not paying attention to him. She was crying uncontrollably. He felt invaded by
great tenderness.

“Calm down, my daughter. I will force them to ask for forgiveness.”

He separated her hands from her face, wiped her eyes with his perfumed batiste handkerchief.

“If you only knew how unhappy I am, Mr. Laurent!”, she stammered.

“Tell me everything that happens to you. Perhaps our encounter has been providential”.
“Trust me, just call me Andrés…”

Evening was beginning to fall; the immobile, light blue lake shone with the garlands of lights
that underlined the bridges; the mountains were lost as wrapped in the cloak of shadows.

The gardens were black patches, next to the white patches of the houses, and in the distance,
high up, like a luminous constellation, the golden domes of the Russian church were still
shining.

Elena related her life with a naive accent, as if her confession escaped from her soul and
Andrés listened to her spellbound, captivated by things that, if the one who was telling them
was not so pretty, would not have interested him.

She told him how her first years had passed in a small village of her country, where she lived
with her parents and her many brothers, all men, with whom she got used to living with. That
is why she did not like the games of the other girls. She gave herself to them for a while; but
soon she would go away bad-tempered, which forced her companions to ask her:

“Are you angry?”

The same happened to her after playing a little while with the doll or doing one of those tea
times or those comedies that the girls improvise, in which they perform their roles as
“woman”, “mother” or “visitor”.

She could never take part in those games. She preferred to run, throw the ball away and
indulge in the amusements of children.

Her personality annoyed the mother, who loved her less than her other children, younger than
she was.

“She is a fantastic child,” she would say, “too spoiled”. This will finish as soon as she goes to
the school and deals only with girls.

For that reason she sent her to the city, to an aunt’s home, single and devotee, who received
her grudgingly and sent her to school.

She was looking forward to having companions, to not be so lonely; but since the first day, all
the girls laughed at her or dodge her company. She wore her blonde braid, which was then a
darker blonde, tied with a ribbon; the hair tight, the fringe cut above the forehead, revealing
the little ears. Although she had the right features, she was not very pretty then, due to her
yellowish color and her expressionless countenance.

She heard the commentaries that the companions made about her.

“She is ugly,” said one.

“No, not ugly,” answered another; “she seems dumb.”

“Because she is brainless.”

She suffered, she loved all of them, they seemed beautiful to her, above her, a simple villager,
who did not know how to be part of their games, or talk about elegance, of frivolities and
even of boyfriends. What could she know or what could she explain, staying so alone in the
house of that woman that did not take care about her at all? No one paid attention to her. Her
only distraction was playing with the two cats of the spinster, “Ney” and “Maricota”, with
whom she spoke as with two good friends.

Every night she listened to her aunt reading the melodramatic novel “Le Matin”, and she
settled her solitude with a whole village of paper dolls, men and women, with whom she
staged the novels that were being read, continuing them according to her imagination.

But her aunt ruined that innocent fun, assuring her that it was the devil who embodied her
dolls.

“You are a fantastic creature,” she told her “that does nothing useful.”

Nevertheless, she wanted to study and learn a lot in order to help her mother; it was not her
fault that the volatility of her attention, which prevented her from learning by heart the
multiplication table, and not making a single well-done curve in the flat of lined paper, for the
first exercises, with the feather held in that strange way, taking out some fingers and putting
in others. Perhaps she would have found a way to do it, but Lady Elisa was inflexible. The
good colocation of the fingers for the good writing was essential. She punished her constantly
and all girls she loved so much laughed at her. So much that, while she looked at them with
their big sad eyes mocking her without pity, she entertained herself with desiring a large fire
devoured the school to be the one to pass through the flames and save her classmates.

Seeing that every day she was more pale and deteriorated, and that nothing was happening,
the teacher called her aunt.
“You must take this girl with you,” she said. “You can't get anything out of her. She’s a
fantastic creature.”

She had then a crisis of mysticism. She spent the days on her knees praying Heavenly
Fathers, Ave Marias and Creeds. It was especially the Salve that she loved to pray. She found
great sweetness in repeating the sweet and poetic words. The Creed seemed to her an
unexciting thing, caramel brown, covered in almonds, like a croquant. The Salve was like a
garland of fragrant flowers.

She took all the flowers of the sole rose bush of the orchard to decorate her Cruz de Mayo,
and as they were all red, she turned them white with the sulfur smoke.

She read the lives of the saints with as much enthusiasm as if they were novels. She dreamt of
martyrdom as she had dreamt of touring the big cities and travelling through the jungles of
Africa, like Salgari’s heroes, when she heard her aunt reading the pamphlet.

She was plagued by a fixation for making promises, and for anything she undertook to pray
hundreds and thousands of salves.

She wanted to join a convent, but the nuns rejected her with tenderness, but she, anxious to be
loved, only felt more seduced.

“You cannot rely on the vocation of such a fantastic girl,” she said after knowing that she
would not wear dowry.

This time they were right. Their mysticism vanished with the first little passion that is soon
forgotten and never confessed; that innocent passion, childish, imaginative; and that is,
perhaps , life's greatest passion: the epiphany.

A young widow lived in front of her house. She did not remember her well, but she
conserved the idea that she must be beautiful like her name. Mercedes recalled in her, with
that fantasy of her imagination, which gave plastic forms to sounds, the color of a blue sky,
like the mantle of a Purisima statue, luminous "Mercedes", but she was "Celeste".

She was the first woman she treated. The widowed talked as the heroines of the novels do.
She had a boyfriend and made the girl confident of her love. Elena fell in love with
Mercedes’s boyfriend. That was her first daydream, her first passion. She escaped from him
when he wanted to kiss her and she would even hit him if he played a joke on her. She gave
everyone the impression that she hated him... When he realised the passion he inspired in the
girl, he was flattered in his masculine vanity and he had for her a look and a triumphant
smile, which were enough to vanish all Elena’s hope. He became hateful and repulsive to her.

It was the moment she became a woman within. The capricious, fantastic little woman,
because she had to be that way since everyone had told her about her fantasy and persuaded
her to have it.

Oscar was her first boyfriend. He was a boy of her age, son of some of her aunt’s friends,
with whom played and ran around the orchard.

One afternoon he told her:

“Do you want us to become a couple?”

“For what?”

“So that you do not hang out with the other boys and go out with me all afternoons.”

She hesitated, but she decided by the fact that his name was Oscar.

A few days after that game, her aunt called her.

“Elena, you must no longer meet Oscar”.

“He is my boyfriend,” she said boldly.

“I know… you do not have the age to marry.”

“I am about to turn fourteen!”

“You are a brat, you do not know how to do anything.”

“I will learn it… others get married at my age.”

It looks very nice, a fifteen-year-old mother walking with the nursemaid and her baby. After
that it is not funny.

“You are crazy! But do not get your hopes up. Oscar’s family is against him marrying you.”

“We will ignore them.”

“You have to listen to them. They have a respectable reason”.

“I want to know it.”

“It’s better to ignore it.”

“Probably it will be any invention.”

“I see that it is necessary for me to reveal to you…what I did not want to tell you, so that you
do not doubt the truth… your father was a man who made your mother suffer a lot… my poor
sister had to abandon him.”

“But they got together again.”

“No, my poor Elena, that man that you have known is the father of your brothers, but he is
not your father.”

That revelation opened a terrible breach in the young girl is fantastic spirit. She thought she
was a heroine of a novel; disgraced, without her mother’s love, pursued by a fatal fate. Oscar
was up to the situation. They dither between escape or suicide.

And one night they ran away. They went to Paris.

It was two months of elation, of love, of romanticism… until they ran out of the money he
had stolen from his mother, and with which he had bought her suits and furs…

From the luxurious hotel they had been staying they moved to “Maison Meuble”, from there
to an attic, but Elena thought she was loved and she lived through a novel. They would
work…

But one afternoon she waited in vain for Oscar’s return. She spent the night crying, without
sleeping. Unable to doubt her boyfriend’s affection, she thought that some misfortune had
happened to him. She did not dare to go to the police because she did not want to implicate
herself. The next morning she went to look for him at the morgue, and strolled along the
banks of the Sena to see if any corpse appeared in the water…

When she returned home she was given a letter. Oscar, repentant, returned home to his
family, leaving her alone and abandoned, but with the hope that she would go with her
mother and they could both rebuild their lives after that rake.
A rake! This is how he described a love in which she had invested her whole life!

She cried a lot, she was a few days without eating… wanted to die, jumped into the river…

At last her desperation gave way.

She found some merciful ladies who pitied her and offered to find her position as escort, but
one day they warned her:

“Undoubtedly your mother asks for you. Some police officers have come asking for you.”

She was underage. To escape custody she had to go abroad. The ladies gave her a
recommendation for Andrés’ sister and nieces.

He listened with increasing emotion to that vulgar story, so childish, so pure in the midst of it
all. That innocent little girl’s story.

“And how could you not tell my sister your situation?”, asked finally.

“That is my fault. That is because I do not complain about what happened. They have
embraced me like a lady… they offered me their friendship… they invited me to dinner…
They were so nice! I was afraid of falling out of her regard… that is why I did not say
anything… they were right… my crazy head… fantastic… That is why I will never be happy,
that is why no one has ever loved me… nor even my own mother.”

She cried bitterly again.

Andrés felt his interest growing by the minute.

“No. Don’t be afraid. Your enemy isn’t your fantasy, it’s your beauty”, he said. “Beauty is a
luxury that only very wealthy and independent women can afford without risk. A beautiful
woman cannot expect the protection that is only given to ugly women as compensation.”

He kept speaking to her fatherly and sweetly as she cried. He was a charming, worldly man,
skeptical without being cynical and hedonistic without being selfish. He had a deep voice and
sweetness that moved her. There was a moment when she did not hear what he was saying.
She heard nothing but the murmur of his voice. Her heart was flooded with the melancholy
that makes more lovers than love.
Andrés was struggling to keep his composure. He had to take advantage of the situation? She
was very beautiful, with her blond hair, her angelic face, the blue eyes, so pale, so innocent,
of such a candid look, veiled by her thick luminous eyelashes. Her very beauty showed her
the path she would have to inevitably follow.

She put up no resistance. She let herself be kissed in the eyes, in the neck, in the mouth,
letting herself into Andrés’ arms. She perceived no more than the murmur of the city, and saw
nothing but the distant light of the stars. It was the city, the outline of the mountains and the
willows, the scent of the lake. That possessed her. It was not the man. She felt the charm of
the things, of the nature, of the environment. She was the fantastic woman who loved
everything and everything took shape to embody and embrace her. That night she was the
lover of Geneva. She devoted herself to the city to the spirit of the lake.