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Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez · English · Gutenberg #11697 · 915,408 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

Author: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Translator: Charlotte Brewster Jordan


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11697]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11697

Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, GF Untermeyer and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARE NOSTRUM (OUR SEA): A NOVEL ***

Mare Nostrum

(_OUR SEA_)



A Novel

By

Vicente Blasco Ibanez



AUTHOR OF

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,"
"The Shadow of the Cathedral,"
"Blood and Sand,"
"La Bodega," etc.



Authorized translation from the Spanish by Charlotte Brewster Jordan

Translator of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"



1919



CONTENTS


    CHAPTER I  CAPTAIN ULYSSES FERRAGUT

   CHAPTER II  MATER AMPHITRITE

  CHAPTER III  PATER OCEANUS

   CHAPTER IV  FREYA

    CHAPTER V  THE AQUARIUM OF NAPLES

   CHAPTER VI  THE WILES OF CIRCE

  CHAPTER VII  THE SIN OF ULYSSES

CHAPTER  VIII  THE YOUNG TELEMACHUS

   CHAPTER IX  THE ENCOUNTER AT MARSEILLES

    CHAPTER X  IN BARCELONA

   CHAPTER XI  "FAREWELL, I AM GOING TO DIE"

  CHAPTER XII  AHPHITRITE!... AMPHITRITE!




Mare Nostrum



CHAPTER I


CAPTAIN ULYSSES FERRAGUT

His first gallantries were with an empress. He was ten years old, and
the empress six hundred.

His father, Don Esteban Ferragut--third quota of the College of
Notaries--had always had a great admiration for the things of the past.
He lived near the cathedral, and on Sundays and holy days, instead of
following the faithful to witness the pompous ceremonials presided over
by the cardinal-archbishop, used to betake himself with his wife and
son to hear mass in _San Juan del Hospital_,--a little church sparsely
attended the rest of the week.

The notary, who had read Walter Scott in his youth, used to gaze on the
old and turreted walls surrounding the church, and feel something of
the bard's thrills about his own, his native land. The Middle Ages was
the period in which he would have liked to have lived. And as he trod
the flagging of the _Hospitolarios_, good Don Esteban, little, chubby,
and near-sighted, used to feel within him the soul of a hero born too
late. The other churches, huge and rich, appeared to him with their
blaze of gleaming gold, their alabaster convolutions and their jasper
columns, mere monuments of insipid vulgarity. This one had been erected
by the Knights of Saint John, who, united with the Templars, had aided
King James in the conquest of Valencia.

Upon crossing the covered passageway leading from the street to the
inner court, he was accustomed to salute the Virgin of the Conquest, an
image of rough stone in faded colors and dull gold, seated on a bench,
brought thither by the knights of the military order. Some sour orange
trees spread their branching verdure over the walls of the church,--a
blackened, rough stone edifice perforated with long, narrow,
window-like niches now closed with mud plaster. From the salient
buttresses of its reinforcements jutted forth, in the highest parts,
great fabled monsters of weather-beaten, crumbling stone.

In its only nave was now left very little of this romantic exterior.
The baroque taste of the seventeenth century had hidden the Gothic arch
under another semi-circular one, besides covering the walls with a coat
of whitewash. But the medieval reredos, the nobiliary coats of arms,
and the tombs of the Knights of Saint John with their Gothic
inscriptions still survived the profane restoration, and that in itself
was enough to keep up the notary's enthusiasm.

Moreover the quality of the faithful who attended its services had to
be taken into consideration. They were few but select, always the same.
Some of them would drop into their places, gouty and relaxed, supported
by an old servant wearing a shabby lace mantilla as though she were the
housekeeper. Others would remain standing during the service holding up
proudly their emaciated heads that presented the profile of a fighting
cock, and crossing upon the breast their gloved hands,--always in black
wool in the winter and in thread in the summer time. Ferragut knew all
their names, having read them in the _Trovas_ of Mosen Febrer, a
metrical composition in Provençal, about the warriors that came to the
neighborhood of Valencia from Aragon, Catalunia, the South of France,
England and remote Germany.

At the conclusion of the mass, the imposing personages would nod their
heads, saluting the faithful nearest them. "Good day!" To these, it was
as if the sun had just arisen: the hours before did not count. And the
notary with meek voice would enlarge his response: "Good day, Señor
Marquis!" "Good day, Señor Baron!" Although his relations never went
beyond this salutation, Ferragut used to feel toward these noble
personages the sympathy that the customers have for an establishment,
looking upon them with affectionate eyes for many years without
presuming to exchange more than a greeting with them.

His son Ulysses was exceedingly bored as he followed the monotonous
incidents of the chanted mass in the darkened, almost deserted, church.
The rays of the sun, oblique beams of gold that filtered in from above,
illuminating the spirals of dust, flies and moths, made him think in a
homesick way of the lush green of the orchard, the white spots of the
hamlets, the black smoke columns of the harbor filled with steamships,
and the triple file of bluish convexities crowned with froth that were
discharging their contents with a sonorous surge upon the
bronze-colored beach.

When the embroidered mantles of the three priests ceased to gleam
before the high altar, and another priest in black and white appeared
in the pulpit, Ulysses would turn his glance toward a side chapel. The
sermon always represented for him a half hour of somnolence, peopled
with his own lively imaginings. The first thing that his eyes used to
see in the chapel of Santa Barbara was a chest nailed to the wall high
above him, a sepulcher of painted wood with no other adornment than the
inscription: "_Aqui yace Doña Constansa Augusta, Emperatriz de
Grecia_,"--Here lies Constance Augusta, Empress of Greece.

The name of Greece always had the power of exciting the little fellow's
imagination. His godfather, the lawyer Labarta, poet-laureate, could
not repeat this name without a lively thrill passing across his
grizzled beard and a new light in his eyes. Sometimes the mysterious
power of such a name evoked a new mystery and a more intense
interest,--Byzantium. How could that august lady, sovereign of remote
countries of magnificence and vision, have come to leave her remains in
a murky chapel of Valencia within a great chest like those that
treasured the remnants of old trumpery in the garrets of the notary?...

One day after mass Don Esteban had rapidly recounted her history to his
little son. She was the daughter of Frederick the Second of Suabia, a
Hohenstaufen, an emperor of Germany who esteemed still more his crown
of Sicily. In the palaces of Palermo,--veritable enchanted bowers of
Oriental gardens,--he had led the life both of pagan and savant,
surrounded by poets and men of science (Jews, Mahometans and
Christians), by Oriental dancers, alchemists, and ferocious Saracen
Guards. He legislated as did the jurisconsults of ancient Rome, at the
same time writing the first verses in Italian. His life was one
continual combat with the Popes who hurled upon him excommunication
upon excommunication. For the sake of peace he had become a crusader
and set forth upon the conquest of Jerusalem. But Saladin, another
philosopher of the same class, had soon come to an agreement with his
Christian colleague. The position of a little city surrounded with
untilled land and an empty sepulcher was really not worth the trouble
of decapitating mankind through the centuries. The Saracen monarch,
therefore, graciously delivered Jerusalem over to him, and the Pope
again excommunicated Frederick for having conquered the Holy Land
without bloodshed.

"He was a great man," Don Esteban used to murmur. "It must be admitted
that he was a great man...."

He would say this timidly, regretting that his enthusiasm for that
remote epoch should oblige him to make this concession to an enemy of
the Church. He shuddered to think of those sacrilegious books that
nobody had seen, but whose paternity Rome was accustomed to attribute
to this Sicilian Emperor--especially _Los Tres Impostores_ (The Three
Imposters), in which Frederick measured Moses, Jesus and Mahomet, by
the same standard. This royal author was, moreover, the most ancient
journalist of history, the first that in the full thirteenth century
had dared to appeal to the judgment of public opinion in his
manifestoes against Rome.

His daughter had married an Emperor of Byzantium, Juan Dukas Vatatzés,
the famous "Vatacio," when he was fifty and she fourteen. She was a
natural daughter soon legitimized like almost all his progeny,--a
product of his free harem, in which were mingled Saracen beauties and
Italian marchionesses. And the poor young girl married to "Vatacio the
heretic," by a father in need of political alliances had lived long
years in the Orient as a _basilisa_ or empress, arrayed in garments of
stiff embroidery representing scenes from the holy books, shod with
buskins laced with purple which bore on their soles eagles of
gold,--the highest symbol of the majesty of Rome.

At first she had reigned in Nicaea, refuge of the Greek Emperors while
Constantinople was in the power of the Crusaders, founders of a Latin
dynasty; then, when Vatacio died, the audacious Miguel Paleólogo
reconquered Constantinople, and the imperial widow found herself
courted by this victorious adventurer. For many years she resisted his
pretensions, finally maneuvering that her brother Manfred should return
her to her own country, where she arrived just in time to receive news
of her brother's death in battle, and to follow the flight of her
sister-in-law and nephews. They all took refuge in a castle defended by
Saracens in the service of Frederick, the only ones faithful to his
memory.

The castle fell into the power of the warriors of the Church, and
Manfred's wife was conducted to a prison where her life was shortly
after extinguished. Obscurity swallowed up the last remnants of the
family accursed by Rome. Death was always hovering around the
_basilisa_. They all perished--her brother Manfred, her half-brother,
the poetic and lamented Encio, hero of so many songs, and her nephew,
the knightly Coradino, who was to die later on under the axe of the
executioner upon attempting the defense of his rights. As the Oriental
empress did not represent any danger for the dynasty of Anjou, the
conqueror let her follow out her destiny, as lonely and forsaken as a
Shakespearian Princess.

As the widow of the late Emperor she was supposed to have a rental of
three thousand _besantes_ of fine gold. But this remote rental never
arrived, and almost as a pauper she embarked with her niece, Constanza,
in a ship going toward the perfumed shores of the Gulf of Valencia,
where she entered the convent of Santa Barbara. In the poverty of this
recently founded convent, the poor Empress lived until the following
century, recalling the adventures of her melancholy destiny and seeing
in imagination the palace of golden mosaics on Lake Nicaea, the gardens
where "Vatacio" had wished to die under a purple tent, the gigantic
walls of Constantinople, and the arches of Saint Sophia, with its
hieratic galaxies of saints and crowned monarchs.

From all her journeys and glittering fortunes she had preserved but one
thing--a stone--the sole baggage that accompanied her upon disembarking
on the shore of Valencia. It was a fragment from Nicodemia that had
miraculously sent forth water for the baptism of Santa Barbara.

The notary used to point out this rough, sacred stone inlaid in a
baptismal font of Holy Water. Without ceasing to admire these historic
bits of knowledge, Ulysses, nevertheless, used to receive them with a
certain ingratitude.

"My godfather could explain things to me in a better way.... My
godfather knows more."

When surveying the chapel of Santa Barbara during the Mass, he used
always to turn his eyes away from the funeral chest. The thought of
those bones turned to dust filled him with repugnance. That Doña
Constanza did not exist for him. The one who was interesting to him was
the other one, a little further on who was painted in a small picture.
Doña Constanza had had leprosy--an infirmity that in those days was not
permitted to Empresses--so Santa Barbara had miraculously cured her
devotee. In order to perpetuate this event, Santa Barbara was depicted
on the canvas as a lady dressed in a full skirt and slashed sleeves,
and at her feet was the _basilisa_ in the dress of a Valencian peasant
arrayed in great jewels. In vain Don Esteban affirmed that this picture
had been painted centuries after the death of the Empress. The child's
imagination vaulted disdainfully over such difficulties. Just as she
appeared on the canvas, Doña Constanza must have been--flaxen-haired,
with great black eyes, exceedingly handsome and a little inclined to
stoutness, perhaps, as was becoming to a woman accustomed to trailing
robes of state and who had consented to disguise herself as a
country-woman, merely because of her piety.

The image of the Empress obsessed his childish thoughts. At night when
he felt afraid in bed, impressed by the enormousness of the room that
served as his sleeping chamber, it was enough for him to recall the
sovereign of Byzantium to make him forget immediately his disquietude
and the thousand queer noises in the old building. "Doña Constanza!"...
And he would go off to sleep cuddling the pillow, as though it were the
head of the _basilisa_, his closed eyes continuing to see the black
eyes of the regal Señora, maternal and affectionate.

All womankind, on coming near him, took on something of that other one
who had been sleeping for the past six centuries in the upper part of
the chapel wall. When his mother, sweet and pallid Doña Cristina, would
stop her fancy work for an instant to give him a kiss, he always saw in
her smile something of the Empress. When Visenteta, a maid from the
country--a brunette, with eyes like blackberries, rosy-cheeked and
soft-skinned--would help him to undress, or awaken him to take him to
school, Ulysses would always throw his arms around her as though
enchanted by the perfume of her vigorous and chaste vitality.
"Visenteta!... Oh, Visenteta!..." And he was thinking of Doña
Constanza; Empresses must be just that fragrant.... Just like that must
be the texture of their skin!... And mysterious and incomprehensible
thrills would pass over his body like light exhalations, bubbling up
from the slime that is sleeping in the depths of all infancy and coming
to the surface during adolescence.

His father guessed in part this imaginary life upon seeing his pet
plays and readings.

"Ah, comedian!... Ah, play-actor!... You are like your godfather."

He used to say this with an ambiguous smile in which were equally
mingled his contempt for useless idealism and his respect for the
artist--a respect similar to the veneration that the Arabs feel for the
demented, believing their insanity to be a gift from God.

Doña Cristina was very anxious that this only son, as spoiled and
coddled as though he were a Crown Prince, should become a priest. To
see him intone his first Mass!... Then a canon; then a prelate! Who
knew if perhaps when she was no longer living, other women might not
admire him when preceded by a cross of gold, trailing the red state
robe of a cardinal-archbishop, and surrounded by a robed staff--envying
the mother who had given birth to this ecclesiastical magnate!...

In order to guide the inclinations of her son she had installed a
chapel in one of the empty rooms of the great old house. Ulysses'
school companions on free afternoons would hasten thither, doubly
attracted by the enchantment, of "playing priest" and by the generous
refreshment that Doña Cristina used to prepare for all the parish
clergy.

This solemnity would begin with the furious pealing of some bells
hanging over the parlor door, causing the notary's clients, seated in
the vestibule waiting for the papers that the clerks were just
scribbling off at full speed, to raise their heads in astonishment. The
metallic uproar rocked the edifice whose corners had seemed so full of
silence, and even disturbed the calm of the street through which a
carriage only occasionally passed.

While some of his chums were lighting the candles on the shrines and
unfolding the sacred altar cloths of beautiful lace work made by Doña
Cristina, the son and his more intimate friends were arraying
themselves before the faithful, covering themselves with surplices and
gold-worked vestments and putting wonderful caps on their heads. The
mother, who was peeping from behind one of the doors, had to make a
great effort not to rush in and devour Ulysses with kisses. With what
grace he was imitating the mannerisms and genuflections of the chief
priest!...

Up to this point all went perfectly. The three officiating near the
pyramid of lights were singing at the top of their lungs, and the
chorus of the faithful were responding from the end of the room with
tremors of impatience. Suddenly surged forth Protest, Schism and
Heresy. Those at the altar had already done more than enough. They must
now give up their chasubles to those who were looking on in order that
they, in their turn, might exercise the sacred ministry. That was what
they had agreed upon. But the clergy resisted with the haughtiness and
majesty of acquired right, and impious hands began pulling off the garb
of the saints, profaning them and even tearing them. Yells, kicks,
images and wax candles on the floor!... Scandal and abominations as
though the Anti-Christ were already born!... The prudence of Ulysses
put an end to the struggle: "What if we should go up in the _pòrche_ to
play?..."

The _pòrche_ was the immense garret of the great old house, so all
accepted the plan with enthusiasm. Church was over! And like a flock of
birds they went flying up the stairs over the landings of multi-colored
tiles with their chipped glaze, disclosing the red brick underneath.
The Valencian potters of the eighteenth century had adorned these tiles
with Berber and Christian galleys, birds from nearby Albufera,
white-wigged hunters offering flowers to a peasant girl, fruits of all
kinds, and spirited horsemen on steeds that were half the size of their
bodies parading before houses and trees that scarcely reached to the
knees of their prancing coursers.

The noisy group spread themselves over the upper floor as in the most
terrible invasions of history. Cats and mice fled together to the
far-away corners. The terrified birds sped like arrows through the
skylights of the roof.

The poor notary!... He had never returned empty-handed when called
outside of the city by the confidence of the rich farmers, incapable of
believing in any other legal science than his. That was the time when
the antique dealers had not yet discovered rich Valencia, where the
common people dressed in silks for centuries, and furniture, clothing
and pottery seemed always to be impregnated with the light of steady
sunshine and with the blue of an always clear atmosphere.

Don Esteban, who believed himself obliged to be an antiquarian by
virtue of his membership in various local societies, was continually
filling up his house with mementoes of the past picked up in the
villages, or that his clients freely gave him. He was not able to find
wall space enough for the pictures, nor room in his salons for the
furniture. Therefore, the latest acquisitions were provisionally taking
their way to the _pòrche_ to await definite installation. Years
afterward, when he should retire from his profession, he might be able
to construct a medieval castle--the most medieval possible on the
coasts of the _Marina_; near to the village where he had been born, he
would put each object in a place appropriate to its importance.

Whatever the notary deposited in the rooms of the first floor would
soon make its appearance in the garret as mysteriously as though it had
acquired feet; for Doña Cristina and her servants, obliged to live in a
continual struggle with the dust and cobwebs of an edifice that was
slowly dropping to pieces, were beginning to feel a ferocious hatred of
everything old.

Up here on the top floor, discords and battles because of lack of
things to dress up in, were not possible among the boys. They had only
to sink their hands into any one of the great old chests, pulsing with
the dull gnawing of the wood-borers, whose iron fretwork, pierced like
lace, was dropping away from its supports. Some of the youngsters,
brandishing short, small swords with hilts of mother-of-pearl, or long
blades such as the Cid carried, would then wrap themselves in mantles
of crimson silk darkened by ages. Others would throw over their
shoulders damask counterpanes of priceless old brocade, peasant skirts
with great flowers of gold, farthingales of richly woven texture that
crackled like paper.

When they grew tired of imitating comedians with noisy clashing of
spades and death-blows, Ulysses and the other active lads would propose
the game of "Bandits and Bailiffs." But thieves could not go clad in
such rich cloths; their attire ought to be inconspicuous. And so they
overturned some mountains of dull-colored stuffs that appeared like
mere sacking in whose dull woven designs could be dimly discerned legs,
arms, heads, and branching sprays of metallic green.

Don Esteban had found these fragments already torn by the farmers into
covers for their large earthen jars of oil or into blankets for the
work-mules. They were bits of tapestry copied from cartoons of Titian
and Rubens which the notary was keeping only out of historic respect.
Tapestry then, like all things that are plentiful, had no special
merit. The old-clothes dealers of Valencia had in their storehouses
dozens of the same kind of remnants and when the festival of _Corpus
Christi_ approached they used them to cover the natural barricades
formed by the ground, instead of building new ones in the street
followed by the processions.

At other times, Ulysses repeated the same game under the name of
"Indians and Conquerors." He had found in the mountains of books stored
away by his father, a volume that related in double columns, with
abundant wood cuts, the navigations of Columbus, the wars of Hernando
Cortez, and the exploits of Pizarro.

This book cast a glamor over the rest of his existence. Many times
afterwards, when a man, he found this image latent in the background of
his likes and desires. He really had read few of its paragraphs, but
what interested him most were the engravings--in his estimation more
worthy of admiration than all the pictures in the garret.

With the point of his long sword he would trace on the ground, just as
Pizarro had done before his discouraged companions, ready on the Island
of Gallo to desist from the conquest: "Let every good Castilian pass
this line...." And the good Castilians--a dozen little scamps with long
capes and ancient swords whose hilts reached up to their mouths--would
hasten to group themselves around their chief, who was imitating the
heroic gestures of the conqueror. Then was heard the war-cry: "At them!
Down with the Indians!"

It was agreed that the Indians should flee and on that account they
were modestly clad in scraps of tapestry and cock feathers on their
head. But they fled treacherously, and upon finding themselves upon
_vargueños_, tables and pyramids of chairs, they began to shy books at
their persecutors. Venerable leather volumes decorated with dull gold,
and folios of white parchment fell face downward on the floor, their
fastenings breaking apart and spreading abroad a rain of printed or
manuscript pages and yellowing engravings--as though tired of living,
they were letting their life-blood flow from their bodies.

The uproar of these wars of conquest brought Doña Cristina to the
rescue. She no longer cared to harbor little imps who preferred the
adventurous whoops of the garret to the mystic delights of the
abandoned chapel. The Indians were most worthy of execration. In order
to make splendor of attire counterbalance the humility of their role,
they had slashed their sinful scissors into entire tapestries,
mutilating vestments so as to arrange upon their breasts the head of a
hero or goddess.

Finding himself without playfellows, Ulysses discovered a new
enchantment in the garret life. The silence haunted by the creaking of
wood and the scampering of invisible animals, the inexplicable fall of
a picture or of some piled-up books, used to make him thrill with a
sensation of fear and nocturnal mystery, despite the rays of sunlight
that came filtering in through the skylights; but he began to enjoy
this solitude when he found that he could people it to his fancy. Real
beings soon annoyed him like the inopportune sounds that sometimes
awoke him from beautiful dreams. The garret was a world several
centuries old that now belonged entirely to him and adjusted itself to
all his fancies.

Seated in a trunk without a lid, he made it balance itself, imitating
with his mouth the roarings of the tempest. It was a caravel, a
galleon, a ship such as he had seen in the old books, its sails painted
with lions and crucifixes, a castle on the poop and a figure-head
carved on the prow that dipped down into the waves, only to reappear
dripping with foam.

The trunk, by dint of vigorous pushing, could be made to reach the
rugged coast at the corner of the old chest, the triangular gulf made
of two chests of drawers, and the smooth beach formed by some bundles
of clothes. And the navigator, followed by a crew as numerous as it was
imaginary, would leap ashore, sword in hand, scaling some mountains of
books that were the Andes, and piercing various volumes with the tip of
an old lance in order to plant his standard there. Oh, why had he not
been one of the conquerors?...

Fragments of a conversation between his godfather and his father, who
believed everything was already known regarding the surface of the
earth, left him unconvinced. Something must still be left for him to
discover! He was the meeting point of two families of sailors. His
mother's brothers had ships on the coast of Catalunia. His father's
ancestors had been valorous and obscure navigators, and there in the
_Marina_ was his uncle, the doctor, a genuine man of the sea.

When he grew tired of these imaginative orgies, he used to examine the
portraits of different epochs stowed away in the garret. He preferred
those of the women--noble dames with short-cropped, curled hair bound
by a knot of ribbon on the temple, like those that Velazquez loved to
paint, and long faces of the century following, with cherry-colored
mouth, two patches on the cheeks, and a tower of white hair. The memory
of the Grecian _basilisa_ appeared to emanate from these paintings. All
the high-born dames seemed to have something in common with her.

Among the portraits of the men there was one of a bishop that irritated
him by its absurd childishness. He appeared almost his own age, an
adolescent bishop, with imperious and aggressive eyes. These eyes used
to inspire the sensitive lad with a certain terror, and he therefore
decided to have done with them. "Take that!" and he ran his sword
through the old chipped picture, making two gashes replace the
challenging eyes. Then he added a few gashes more for good measure....
That same evening, his godfather having been invited to supper, the
notary spoke of a certain portrait acquired a few months before in the
neighborhood of Játiva, a city that he had always regarded with
interest on account of the Borgias having been born in one of its
suburbs. The two men were of the same opinion. That almost infantile
prelate could have been no other than Caesar Borgia, made Archbishop of
Valencia when sixteen years old by his father, the Pope. On their first
free day they would examine the portrait with particular attention....
And Ulysses, hanging his head, felt every mouthful sticking in his
throat.

For the fanciful lad, a pleasure even more intense and substantial than
his lonely games in the garret was a visit to his godfather's home; to
his childish eyes, this godparent, the lawyer, Don Carmelo Labarta, was
the personification of the ideal life, of glory, of poesy. The notary
was wont to speak of him with enthusiasm, yet pitying him at the same
time.

"That poor Don Carmelo!... The leading authority of the age in civilian
matters! By applying himself he might earn some money, but verses
attracted him more than lawsuits."

Ulysses used to enter his office with keen emotion. Above rows of
multicolored and gilded books that covered the walls, he saw some great
plaster heads with towering foreheads and vacant eyes that seemed
always to be contemplating an immense nothingness.

The child could repeat their names like a fragment from a choir book,
from Homer to Victor Hugo. Then his glance would seek another head
equally glorious although less white, with blonde and grizzled beard,
rubicund nose and bilious cheeks that in certain moments scattered bits
of scale. The sweet eyes of his godfather--yellowish eyes spotted with
black dots--used to receive Ulysses with the doting affection of an
aging, old bachelor who needs to invent a family. He it was who had
given him at the baptismal font the name which had awakened so much
admiration and ridicule among his school companions; with the patience
of an old grand-sire narrating saintly stories to his descendants, he
would tell Ulysses over and over the adventures of the navigating King
of Ithaca for whom he had been named.

With no less devotion did the lad regard all the souvenirs of glory
that adorned his house--wreaths of golden leaves, silver cups, nude
marble statuettes, placques of different metals upon plush backgrounds
on which glistened imperishably the name of the poet Labarta. All this
booty the tireless Knight of Letters had conquered by means of his
verse.

When the Floral Games were announced, the competitors used to tremble
lest it might occur to the great Don Carmelo to hanker after some of
the premiums. With astonishing facility he used to carry off the
natural flower awarded for the heroic ode, the cup of gold for the
amorous romance, the pair of statues dedicated to the most complete
historical study, the marble bust for the best legend in prose, and
even the "art bronze" reward of philological study. The other aspirants
might try for the left-overs.

Fortunately he had confined himself to local literature, and his
inspiration would not admit any other drapery than that of Valencian
verse. Next to Valencia and its past glories, Greece claimed his
admiration. Once a year Ulysses beheld him arrayed in his frock coat,
his chest starred with decorations and in his lapel the golden cicada,
badge of the poets of Provence.

He it was who was going to be celebrated in the fiesta of Provençal
literature, in which he always played the principal role; he was the
prize bard, lecturer, or simple idol to whom other poets were
dedicating their eulogies--clerics given to rhyming, personifiers of
religious images, silk-weavers who felt the vulgarity of their
existence perturbed by the itchings of inspiration--all the brotherhood
of popular bards of the ingenuous and domestic brand who recalled the
_Meistersingers_ of the old German cities.

His godson always imagined him with a crown of laurel on his brows just
like those mysterious blind poets whose portraits and busts ornamented
the library. In real life he saw perfectly well that his head had no
such adornment, but reality lost its value before the firmness of his
conceptions. His godfather certainly must wear a wreath when he was not
present. Undoubtedly he was accustomed to wear it as a house cap when
by himself.

Another thing which he greatly admired about the grand man was his
extensive travels. He had lived in distant Madrid--the scene of almost
all the novels read by Ulysses--and once upon a time he had crossed the
frontier, going courageously into a remote country called the south of
France, in order to visit another poet whom he was accustomed to call
"My friend, Mistral." And the lad's imagination, hasty and illogical in
its decisions, used to envelop his godfather in a halo of historic
interest, similar to that of the conquerors.

At the stroke of the twelve o'clock chimes Labarta, who never permitted
any informality in table matters, would become very impatient, cutting
short the account of his journeys and triumphs.

"Doña Pepa!... We have a guest here."

Doña Pepa was the housekeeper, the great man's companion who for the
past fifteen years had been chained to the chariot of his glory. The
portières would part and through them would advance a huge bosom
protruding above an abdomen cruelly corseted. Afterwards, long
afterwards, would appear a white and radiant countenance, a face like a
full moon, and while her smile like a night star was greeting the
little Ulysses, the dorsal complement of her body kept on coming
in--forty carnal years, fresh, exuberant, tremendous.

The notary and his wife always spoke of Doña Pepa as of a familiar
person, but the child never had seen her in their home. Doña Cristina
used to eulogize her care of the poet--but distantly and with no desire
to make her acquaintance--while Don Esteban would make excuses for the
great man.

"What can you expect!... He is an artist, and artists are not able to
live as God commands. All of them, however dignified they may appear,
are rather carnal at heart. What a pity! such an eminent lawyer!... The
money that he could make...!"

His father's lamentations opened up new horizons to the little fellow's
suspicions. Suddenly he grasped the prime motive force of our
existence, hitherto only conjectured and enveloped in mystery. His
godfather had relations with a woman; he was enamored like the heroes
of the novels! And the boy recalled many of his Valencian poems, all
rhapsodizing a lady--sometimes singing of her great beauty with the
rapture and noble lassitude of a recent possession; at others
complaining of her coldness, begging of her that disposition of her
soul without which the gift of the body is as naught.

Ulysses imagined to himself a grand señora as beautiful as Doña
Constanza. At the very least, she must be a Marchioness. His godfather
certainly deserved that much! And he also imagined to himself that
their rendezvous must be in the morning, in one of the strawberry
gardens near the city, where his parents were accustomed to take him
for his breakfast chocolate after hearing the first dawn service on the
Sundays of April and May.

Much later, when seated at his godfather's table, he surprised the poet
exchanging glances over his head with the housekeeper, and began to
suspect that possibly Doña Pepa might be the inspiration of so much
lachrymose and enthusiastic verse. But his great loyalty rebelled
before such a supposition. No, no, it could not be possible; assuredly
there must be another!

The notary, who for long years had been friendly with Labarta, kept
trying to direct him with his practical spirit, like the boy who guides
a blind man. A modest income inherited from his parents was enough for
the poet to live upon. In vain his friend brought him cases that
represented enormous fees. The voluminous documents would become
covered with dust on his table and Don Esteban would have to saddle
himself with the dates in order that the end of the legal procedures
should not slip by.

His son, Ulysses would be a very different sort of man, thought the
notary. In his mind's eye he could see the lad as a great civilian
jurist like his godfather, but with a positive activity inherited from
his father. Fortune would enter through his doors on waves of stamped
paper.

Furthermore, he would also possess the notarial studio--the dusty
office with its ancient furniture and great wardrobes, with its screen
doors and green curtains, behind which reposed the volumes of the
protocol, covered with yellowing calfskin with initials and numbers on
their backs. Don Esteban realized fully all that his study represented.

"There is no orange grove," he would say in his expansive moments;
"there are no rice plantations that can produce what this estate does.
Here there are no frosts, nor strong sea winds, nor inundations."

The clientele was certain--people from the church, who had the devotees
back of them and considered Don Esteban as one of their class, and
farmers, many rich farmers. The families of the country folk, whenever
they heard any talk about smart men, always thought immediately of the
notary from Valencia. With religious veneration they saw him adjust his
spectacles in order to read as an expert the bill of sale or dowry
contract that his amanuenses had just drawn up. It was written in
Castilian and for the better understanding of his listeners he would
read it, without the slightest hesitation, in Valencian. What a man!...

Afterwards, while the contracting parties were signing it, the notary
raising the little glass window at the front, would entertain the
assembly with some local legends, always decent, without any illusions
to the sins of the flesh, but always those in which the digestive
organs figured with every degree of license. The clients would roar
with laughter, 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,
he never went ashore without wearing a dagger hidden on his person, and
he had to "sting" with it in order to make way for himself.

"What times those were!" said the _Triton_ with more regret and
homesickness than remorse; and then he would add by way of excuse, "Ay,
but then I was only twenty-four years old!"

These memories made him turn his eyes toward a huge bluish bulk
extending out into the sea and looking to the casual spectator like a
great barren island. It was the promontory crowned by the Mongó, the
great Ferrarian promontory of the ancient geographers, the
furthest-reaching point of the peninsula in the lower Mediterranean
that closes the Gulf of Valencia on the south.

It had the form of a hand whose digits were mountains, but lacked the
thumb. The other four fingers extended out into the waves, forming the
capes of San Antonio, San Martin, La Nao and Almoraira. In one of their
coves was the _Triton's_ native village, and the home of the
Ferraguts--hunters of black pirates in other days, contrabandists at
times in modern days, sailors in all ages, appearing originally,
perhaps, from those first wooden horses that came leaping over the foam
seething around the promontory.

In that home in the _Marina_ he wished to live and die, with no further
desire of seeing more lands, with that sudden immovability that attacks
the vagabonds of the waves and makes them fix themselves upon a ledge
of the coast like a mollusk or bunch of seaweed.

Soon the _Triton_ grew tired of these strolls to the harbor. The sea of
Valencia was not a real sea for him. The waters of the river and of the
irrigation canals disturbed him. When it rained in the mountains of
Aragon, an earthy liquid always discharged itself into the Gulf,
tinting the waves with flesh color and the foam with yellow. Besides,
it was impossible to indulge in his daily sport of swimming. One winter
morning, when he began to undress himself on the beach, the crowd
gathered around him as though attracted by a phenomenon. Even the fish
of the Gulf had to him an insufferable slimy taste.

"I'm going back home," he would finally say to the notary and his wife.
"I can't understand how in the world you are able to live here!"

In one of these retreats to the _Marina_ he insisted upon taking
Ulysses home with him. The summer season was beginning, the boy would
be free from school for three months, and the notary, who was not able
to go far away from the city, was going to pass the summer with his
family on the beach at Cabañal checkered by bad-smelling irrigation
canals near a forlorn sea. The little fellow was looking very pale and
weak on account of his studies and hectoring. His uncle would make him
as strong and agile as a dolphin. And in spite of some very lively
disputes, he succeeded in snatching the child away from Doña Cristina.

The first things that Ulysses admired upon entering the doctor's home
were the three frigates adorning the ceiling of the dining-room--three
marvelous vessels in which there was not lacking a single sail nor
pulley rope, nor anchor, and which might be made to sail over the sea
at a moment's notice.

They were the work of his grandfather Ferragut. Wishing to release his
two sons from the marine service which had weighed upon the family for
many centuries, he had sent them to the University of Valencia in order
that they might become inland gentlemen. The older, Esteban, had
scarcely terminated his career before he obtained a notaryship in
Catalunia. The younger one, Antonio, became a doctor so as not to
thwart the old man's wishes, but as soon as he acquired his degree he
offered his services to a transatlantic steamer. His father had closed
the door of the sea against him and he had entered by the window.

And so, as Ferragut Senior began to grow old, he lived completely
alone. He used to look after his property--a few vineyards scattered
along the coast in sight of his home--and was in frequent
correspondence with his son, the notary. From time to time there came a
letter from the younger one, his favorite, posted in remote countries
that the old Mediterranean seaman knew only by hearsay. And during his
long, dull hours in the shade of his arbor facing the blue and luminous
sea, he used to entertain himself constructing these little models of
boats. They were all frigates of great tonnage and fearless sail. Thus
the old skipper would console himself for having commanded during his
lifetime only heavy and clumsy merchant vessels like the ships of other
centuries, in which he used to carry wine from Cette or cargo
prohibited in Gibraltar and the coast of Africa.

Ulysses was not long in recognizing the rare popularity enjoyed by his
uncle, the doctor--a popularity composed of the most antagonistic
elements. The people used to smile in speaking of him as though he were
a little touched, yet they dared to indulge in these smiles only when
at a safe distance, for he inspired a certain terror in all of them. At
the same time they used to admire him as a local celebrity, for he had
traversed all seas, and possessed, besides, a violent and tempestuous
strength which was the terror and pride of his neighbors. The husky
youths when testing the vigor of their fists, boxing with crews of the
English vessels that came there for cargoes of raisins, used to evoke
the doctor's name as a consolation in case of defeat. "If only the
_Dotor_ could have been here!... Half a dozen Englishmen are nothing to
him!"

There was no vigorous undertaking, however absurd it might be, that
they would not believe him capable of. He used to inspire the faith of
the miracle-working saints and audacious highway captains. On calm,
sunshiny winter mornings the people would often go running down to the
beach, looking anxiously over the lonely sea. The veterans who were
toasting themselves in the sun near the overturned boats, on scanning
the broad horizon, would finally discern an almost imperceptible point,
a grain of sand dancing capriciously on the waves.

They would all break into shouts and conjectures. It was a buoy, a
piece of masthead, the drift from a distant shipwreck. For the women it
was somebody drowned, so bloated that it was floating like a leather
bottle, after having been many days in the water.

Suddenly the same supposition would arise in every perplexed mind. "I
wonder if it could be the _Dotor!_" A long silence.... The bit of wood
was taking the form of a head; the corpse was moving. Many could now
perceive the bubble of foam around his chest that was advancing like
the prow of a ship, and the vigorous strokes of his arms.... "Yes, it
surely was the _Dotor!_"... The old sea dogs loaned their telescopes to
one another in order to recognize his beard sunk in the water and his
face, contracted by his efforts or expanded by his snortings.

And the _Dotor_ was soon treading the dry beach, naked and as serenely
unashamed as a god, giving his hand to the men, while the women
shrieked, lifting their aprons in front of one eye--terrified, yet
admiring the dripping vision.

All the capes of the promontory challenged him to double them, swimming
like a dolphin; he felt impelled to measure all the bays and coves with
his arms, like a proprietor who distrusts another's measurements and
rectifies them in order to affirm his right of possession. He was a
human bark who, with the keel of his breast, cut the foam, whirling
through the sunken rocks and the pacific waters in whose depths
sparkled fishes among mother-of-pearl twigs and stars moving like
flowers.

He used to seat himself to rest on the black rocks with overskirts of
seaweed that raised or lowered their fringe at the caprice of the wave,
awaiting the night and the chance vessel that might come to dash
against them like a piece of bark. Like a marine reptile he had even
penetrated certain caves of the coast, drowsy and glacial lakes
illuminated by mysterious openings where the atmosphere is black and
the water transparent, where the swimmer has a bust of ebony and legs
of crystal. In the course of these swimming expeditions he ate all the
living beings he encountered fastened to the rocks by antennas and
arms. The friction of the great, terrified fish that fled, bumping
against him with the violence of a projectile, used to make him laugh.

In the night hours passed before his grandfather's little ships,
Ulysses used to hear the _Triton_ speak of the _Peje Nicolao_, a
man-fish of the Straits of Messina mentioned by Cervantes and other
authors, who lived in the water maintaining himself by the donations
from the ships. His uncle must be some relative of this _Peje Nicolao_.
At other times this uncle would mention a certain Greek who in order to
see his lady-love swam the Hellespont every night. And he, who used to
know the Dardanelles, was longing to return there as a simple passenger
merely that a poet named Lord Byron might not be the only one to
imitate the legendary crossing.

The books that he kept in his home, the nautical charts fastened to the
walls, the flasks and jars filled with the animal and vegetable life of
the sea, and more than all this, his tastes which were so at variance
with the customs of his neighbors, had given the _Triton_ the
reputation of a mysterious sage, the fame of a wizard.

All those who were well and strong considered him crazy, but the moment
that there was the slightest break in their health they would share the
same faith as the poor women who oftentimes passed long hours in the
home of the _Dotor_, seeing his bark afar off and patiently awaiting
his return from the sea, in order to show him the sick children they
carried in their arms. He had an advantage over all other doctors, as
he made no charge for his services; better still, many sick people came
away from his house with money in their hands.

The _Dotor_ was rich--the richest man in the countryside; a man who
really did not know what to do with his money. His maid-servant--an old
woman who had known his father and served his mother--used daily to
receive from his hands the fish provided for the two with a regal
generosity. The _Triton_, who had hoisted sail at daybreak, used to
disembark before eleven, and soon the purpling lobster was crackling on
the red coals, sending forth delicious odors; the stew pot was bubbling
away, thickening its broth with the succulent fat of the sea-scorpion;
the oil in the frying pan was singing, browning the flame-colored skin
of the salmonettes; and the sea urchins and the mussels opened hissing
under his knife, were emptying their still living pulp into the boiling
stew pan. Furthermore, a cow with full udders was mooing in the yard,
and dozens of chickens with innumerable broods were cackling
incessantly.

The flour kneaded and baked by his servant, and the coffee thick as
mud, was all that the _Triton_ purchased with his money. If he hunted
for a bottle of brandy on his return from a swim, it was only to use it
in rubbing himself down.

Money entered through his doors once a year, when the girls of the
vintage lined up among the trellises of his vineyards, cutting the
bunches of little, close fruit and spreading them out to dry in some
small sheds called _riurraus_. Thus was produced the small raisin
preferred by the English for the making of their puddings. The sale was
a sure thing, the boats always coming from the north to get the fruit.
And the _Triton_, upon finding five or six thousand pesetas in his
hand, would be greatly perplexed, inwardly asking himself what a man
was ever going to do with so much money.

"All this is yours," he said, showing the house to his nephew.

His also the boat, the books and the antique furniture in whose drawers
the money was so openly hid that it invited attention.

In spite of seeing himself lord of all that surrounded him, a rough and
affectionate despotism, kept nevertheless, weighing the child down. He
was very far from his mother, that good lady who was always closing the
windows near him and never letting him go out without tying his
neckscarf around him with an accompaniment of kisses.

Just when he was sleeping soundest, believing that the night would
still be many hours longer, he would feel himself awakened by a violent
tugging at his leg. His uncle could not touch him in any other way.
"Get up, cabin boy!" In vain he would protest with the profound
sleepiness of youth.... Was he, or was he not the "ship's cat" of the
bark of which his uncle was the captain and only crew?...

His uncle's paws bared him to the blasts of salt air that were entering
through the windows. The sea was dark and veiled by a light fog. The
last stars were sparkling with twinkles of surprise, ready to flee. A
crack began to appear on the leaden horizon, growing redder and redder
every minute, like a wound through which the blood is flowing. The
ship's cat was loaded up with various empty baskets, the skipper
marching before him like a warrior of the waves, carrying the oars on
his shoulders, his feet rapidly making hollows on the sand. Behind him
the village was beginning to awaken and, over the dark waters, the
sails of the fishermen, fleeing the inner sea, were slipping past like
ghostly shrouds.

Two vigorous strokes of the oar sent their boat out from the little
wharf of stones, and soon he was untying the sails from the gunwales
and preparing the ropes. The unfurled canvas whistled and swelled in
bellying whiteness. "There we are! Now for a run!"

The water was beginning to sing, slipping past both sides of the prow.
Between it and the edge of the sail could be seen a bit of black sea,
and coming little by little over its line, a great red streak. The
streak soon became a helmet, then a hemisphere, then an Arabian arch
confined at the bottom, until finally it shot up out of the liquid mass
as though it were a bomb sending forth flashes of flame. The
ash-colored clouds became stained with blood and the large rocks of the
coast began to sparkle like copper mirrors. As the last stars were
extinguished, a swarm of fire-colored fishes came trailing along before
the prow, forming a triangle with its point in the horizon. The mist on
the mountain tops was taking on a rose color as though its whiteness
were reflecting a submarine eruption. "_Bon dia!_" called the doctor to
Ulysses, who was occupied in warming his hands stiffened by the wind.

And, moved with childlike joy by the dawn of a new day, the _Triton_
sent his bass voice booming across the maritime silence, several times
intoning sentimental melodies that in his youth he had heard sung by a
vaudeville prima donna dressed as a ship's boy, at other times caroling
in Valencian the chanteys of the coast--fishermen's songs invented as
they drew in their nets, in which most shameless words were flung
together on the chance of making them rhyme. In certain windings of the
coast the sail would be lowered, leaving the boat with no other motion
than a gentle rocking around its anchor rope.

Upon seeing the space which had been obscured by the shadow of the
boat's hulk, Ulysses found the bottom of the sea so near that he almost
believed that he could touch it with the point of his oar. The rocks
were like glass. In their interstices and hollows the plants were
moving like living creatures, and the little animals had the
immovability of vegetables and stones. The boat appeared to be floating
in the air and athwart the liquid atmosphere that wraps this abysmal
world, the fish hooks were dangling, and a swarm of fishes was swimming
and wriggling toward its encounter with death.

It was a sparkling effervescence of yellowing flames, of bluish backs
and rosy fins. Some came out from the caves silvered and vibrant as
lightning flashes of mercury; others swam slowly, big-bellied, almost
circular, with a golden coat of mail. Along the slopes, the crustaceans
came scrambling along on their double row of claws attracted by this
novelty that was changing the mortal calm of the under-sea where all
follow and devour, only to be devoured in turn. Near the surface
floated the medusae, living parasols of an opaline whiteness with
circular borders of lilac or red bronze. Under their gelatinous domes
was the skein of filaments that served them for locomotion, nutrition
and reproduction.

The fishermen had only to pull in their lines and a new prisoner would
fall into their boat. Their baskets were filling up so fast that the
_Triton_ and his nephew grew tired of this easy fishing.... The sun was
now near the height of its curve, and every wavelet was carrying away a
bit of the golden band that divided the blue immensity. The wood of the
boat appeared to be on fire.

"We've earned our day's pay," said the _Triton_, looking at the sky and
then at the baskets. "Now let's clean up a little bit."

And stripping off his clothing, he threw himself into the sea. Ulysses
saw him descend from the center of the ring of foam opened by his body,
and could gauge by it the profundity of that fantastic world composed
of glassy rocks, animal plants and stone animals. As it went down, the
tawny body of the swimmer took on the transparency of porcelain. It
appeared of bluish crystal--a statue made of a Venetian mirror
composition that was going to break as soon as it touched the bottom.

Like a god he was passing through the deeps, snatching plants out by
the roots, pursuing with his hands the flashes of vermilion and gold
hidden in the cracks of the rocks. Minutes would pass by; he was going
to stay down forever; he would never come up again. And the boy was
beginning to think uneasily of the possibility of having to guide the
bark back to the coast all alone. Suddenly the body of white crystal
began taking on a greenish hue, growing larger and larger, becoming
dark and coppery, until above the surface appeared the head of the
swimmer, who, spouting and snorting, was holding up all his submarine
plunder to the little fellow.

"Now then, your turn!" he ordered in an imperious tone.

All attempts at resistance were useless. His uncle either insulted him
with the harshest kind of words or coaxed him with promises of safety.
He never knew certainly whether he threw himself into the water or
whether a tug from the doctor jerked him from the boat. The first
surprise having passed, he had the impression of remembering some long
forgotten thing. He was swimming instinctively, divining what he ought
to do before his master told him. Within him was awakening the
ancestral experience of a race of sailors who had struggled with the
sea and, sometimes, had remained forever in its bosom.

Recollection of what was existing beyond his feet suddenly made him
lose his serenity,--his lively imagination making him shriek,

"Uncle!... Uncle!"

And he clutched convulsively at the hard island of bearded and smiling
muscles. His uncle came up immovable, as though his feet of stone were
fastened to the bottom of the ocean. He was like the nearby promontory
that was darkening and chilling the water with its ebony shadow.

Thus would slip by the mornings devoted to fishing and swimming; then
in the afternoons there were tramps over the steep shores of the coast.

The _Dotor_ knew the heights of the promontory as well as its depths.
Up the pathways of the wild goat they clambered to its peaks in order
to get a view of the Island of Ibiza. At sunset the distant Balearic
Islands appeared like a rose-colored flame rising out of the waves. At
other times the cronies made trips along the water's edge, and the
_Triton_ would show his nephew hidden caves into which the
Mediterranean was working its way with slow undulations. These were
like maritime roadsteads where boats might anchor completely concealed
from view. There the galleys of the Berbers had often hidden, in order
to fall unexpectedly upon a nearby village.

In one of these caves, on a rocky pedestal, Ulysses often saw a heap of
bundles.

"Well, now, what of it!" expostulated the doctor. "Every man must gain
his living as best he can."

When they stumbled upon a solitary custom house officer resting upon
his gun and looking out toward the sea, the doctor would offer him a
cigar and give him medical advice if he were sick. "Poor men! so badly
paid!"... But his sympathies were always going out to the others--to
the enemies of the law. He was the son of his sea, and in the make-up
of all Mediterranean heroes and sailors there had always been something
of the pirate or smuggler. The Phoenicians, who by their navigation
spread abroad the first works of civilization, instituted this service,
reaping their reward by filling their barks with stolen women, rich
merchandise of easy transportation.

Piracy and smuggling had formed the historic past of all the villages
that Ulysses was visiting, some huddled in the shelter of the
promontory crowned with a lighthouse, others opening on the concavity
of a bay dotted with barren islands girdled with foam. The old churches
had turrets on their walls and loopholes in their doors for shooting
with culverins and blunderbusses. The entire neighborhood used to take
refuge in them when the smoke columns from their watchmen would warn
them of the landing of pirates from Algiers. Following the curvings of
the promontory there was a dotted line of reddish towers, each one
accompanied by a smaller pair for lookouts. This line extended along
the south toward the Straits of Gibraltar, and on its northern side
reached to France.

The doctor had seen their counterpart in all the islands of the western
Mediterranean, on the coasts of Naples and in Sicily. They were the
fortifications of a thousand-year war, of a struggle ten centuries long
between Moors and Christians for the domination of the blue sea, a
struggle of piracy in which the Mediterranean men--differentiated by
religion, but identical at heart--had prolonged the adventures of the
Odyssey down to the beginnings of the nineteenth century.

Ferragut gradually became acquainted with many old men of the village
who in their youth had been slaves in Algiers. On winter evenings the
oldest of them were still singing romances of captivity and speaking
with terror of the Berber brigantines. These thieves of the sea must
have had a pact with the devil, who notified them of opportune
occasions. If in a convent some beautiful novices had just made their
profession, the doors would give away at midnight under the
hatchet-blows of the bearded demons who were advancing inland from the
galleys prepared to receive their cargo of feminine freight. If a girl
of the coast, celebrated for her beauty, was going to be married, the
infidels, lying in wait, would surround the door of the church,
shooting their blunderbusses and knifing the unarmed men as they came
out, in order to carry away the women in their festal robes.

On all the coast, the pirates stood in awe only of the navigators from
the _Marina_, so fearless and warlike were they. If their villages were
ever attacked, it was because their seafaring defenders were on the
Mediterranean and, in their turn, had gone to sack and burn some
village on the coast of Africa.

The _Triton_ and his nephew used to eat their supper under the arbor in
the long summer twilights. After the cloth was removed Ulysses would
manipulate his grandfather's little frigates, learning the technical
parts and names of the different apparatus, and the management of the
sets of sails. Sometimes the two would stay out on the rustic porch
until a late hour gazing out over the luminous sea sparkling under the
splendor of the moon, or streaked with a slender wake of starry light
in the murky nights.

All that mankind had ever written or dreamed about the Mediterranean,
the doctor had in his library and could repeat to his eager little
listener. In Ferragut's estimation the _mare nostrum_ ["Mare Nostrum"
(Our Sea), the classic name for the Mediterranean.] was a species of
blue beast, powerful and of great intelligence--a sacred animal like
the dragons and serpents that certain religions adored, believing them
to be the source of life. The rivers that threw themselves impetuously
into its bosom in order to renew it were few and scanty. The Rhone and
the Nile appeared to be pitiful little rivulets compared with the river
courses of other continents that empty into the oceans.

Losing by evaporation three times more liquid than the rivers bring to
it, this sunburnt sea would soon have been converted into a great salt
desert were not the Atlantic sending it a rapid current of renewal that
was precipitated through the Straits of Gibraltar. Under this
superficial current existed still another, flowing in an opposite
direction, that returned a part of the Mediterranean to the ocean,
because the Mediterranean waters were more salt and dense than those of
the Atlantic. The tide scarcely made itself felt on its strands. Its
basin was mined by subterranean fires that were always seeking
extraordinary outlets through Vesuvius and Aetna and breathed
continually through the mouth of Stromboli. Sometimes these Plutonic
ebullitions would come to the surface, making new islands rise up upon
the waters like tumors of lava.

In its bosom exist still double the quantity of animal species that
abound in other seas, although less numerous. The tunny fish, playful
lambs of the blue pasture lands, were gamboling over its surface or
passing in schools under the furrows of the waves. Men were setting
netted traps for them along the coasts of Spain and France, in
Sardinia, the Straits of Messina and the waters of the Adriatic. But
this wholesale slaughter scarcely lessened the compact, fishy
squadrons. After wandering through the windings of the Grecian
Archipelago, they passed the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, stirring
the two narrow passageways with the violence of their invisible
gallopade and making a turn at the bowl of the Black Sea, swimming
back, decimated but impetuous, to the depths of the Mediterranean.

Red coral was forming immovable groves on the substrata of the Balearic
Islands, and on the coasts of Naples and Africa. Ambergris was
constantly being found on the steep shores of Sicily. Sponges were
growing in the tranquil waters in the shadow of the great rocks of
Mallorca and the Isles of Greece. Naked men without any equipment
whatever, holding their breath, were still descending to the bottom as
in primitive times, in order to snatch these treasures away.

The doctor gave up his geographic descriptions to discourse on the
history of his sea, which had indeed been the history of civilization,
and was more fascinating to him. At first miserable and scanty tribes
had wandered along its coasts seeking their food from the crustaceans
drawn from the waves--a life similar to that of the rudimentary people
that Ferragut had seen in the islands of the Pacific. When stone saws
had hollowed out the trunks of trees and human arms had ventured to
spread the first rawhides to the forces of the atmosphere, the coasts
became rapidly populated.

Temples were constructed on the promontories, and maritime cities--the
first nuclei of modern civilization--came into existence. On this
landlocked sea mankind had learned the art of navigation. Every one
looked at the waves before looking at the sky. Over this blue highway
had arrived the miracles of life, and out of its depths the gods were
born. The Phoenicians--Jews, become navigators--abandoned their cities
in the depths of the Mediterranean sack, in order to spread the
mysterious knowledge of Egypt and the Asiatic monarchies all along the
shores of the interior sea. Afterwards the Greeks of the maritime
republics took their places.

In Ferragut's estimation the greatest honor to which Athens could lay
claim was that she had been a democracy of sailors, her freemen serving
their country as rowers and all her famous men as great marine
officials.

"Themistocles and Pericles," he added, "were admirals of fleets, and
after commanding ships, governed their country."

On that account Grecian civilization had spread itself everywhere and
had become immortal instead of lessening and disappearing without fruit
as in the interior lands. Then Rome, terrestrial Rome, in order to hold
its own against the superiority of the Semitic navigators of Carthage,
had to teach the management of the oar and marine combat to the
inhabitants of Latium, to their legionaries with faces hardened by the
chin straps of their helmets, who did not know how to adjust their
world-dominating iron-shod feet to the slippery planks of a vessel.

The divinities of _mare nostrum_ always inspired a most loving devotion
in the doctor. He knew that they had not existed, but he, nevertheless,
believed in them as poetic phantasms of natural forces.

The ancient world only knew the immense ocean in hypothesis, giving it
the form of an aquatic girdle around the earth. Oceanus was an old god
with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with
his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No
Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious
divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the
Oceanides--virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which
Prometheus was bound.

Other more approachable deities were those of the eternal sea on whose
borders were founded the opulent cities of the Syrian coast; the
Egyptian cities that sent sparks of their ritual civilization to
Greece; the Hellenic cities, hearths of clear fire that had fused all
knowledge, giving it eternal form; Rome, mistress of the world;
Carthage, famed for her audacious geographical discoveries, and
Marseilles, which had made western Europe share in the civilization of
the Greeks, scattering it along the lower coast from settlement to
settlement, even to the Straits of Cadiz.

A brother of the Oceanides, the prudent Nereus, used to reign in the
depths of the Mediterranean. This son of Oceanus had a blue beard,
green eyes, and bunches of sea rushes on his eyebrows and breast. His
fifty daughters, the Nereids, bore his orders across the waves or
frolicked around the ships, splashing in the faces of the rowers the
foam tossed up by their arms. But the sons of Father Time, on
conquering the giant, had reapportioned the world, determining its
rulers by lot. Zeus remained lord of the land, the obscure Hades, lord
of the underworld, reigned in the Plutonic abysses, and Poseidon became
master of the blue surfaces.

Nereus, the dispossessed monarch, fled to a cavern of the Hellenic sea
in order to live the calm existence of the philosopher-counselor of
mankind, and Poseidon installed himself in the mother-of-pearl palaces
with his white steeds tossing helmets of bronze and manes of gold.

His amorous eyes were fixed on the fifty Mediterranean princesses, the
Nereids, who took their names from the aspect of the waves--the Blue,
the Green, the Swift, the Gentle.... "Nymphs of the green abysses with
faces fresh as a rosebud, fragrant virgins that took the forms of all
the monsters of the deep," sang the Orphic hymn on the Grecian shore.
And Poseidon singled out among them all the Nereid of the Foam, the
white Amphitrite who refused to accept his love.

She knew about this new god. The coasts were peopled with cyclops like
Polyphemus, with frightful monsters born of the union of Olympian
goddesses and simple mortals; but an obliging dolphin came and went,
carrying messages between Poseidon and the Nereid, until, overwhelmed
by the eloquence of this restless rover of the wave, Amphitrite agreed
to become the wife of the god, and the Mediterranean appeared to take
on still greater beauty.

She was the aurora that shows her rosy finger-tips through the immense
cleft between sky and sea, the warm hour of midday that makes the
waters drowsy under its robe of restless gold, the bifurcated tongue of
foam that laps the two faces of the hissing prow, the aroma-laden
breeze that like a virgin's breath swells the sail, the compassionate
kiss that lulls the drowned to rest, without wrath and without
resistance, before sinking forever into the fathomless abyss.

Her husband--Poseidon on the Greek coast and Neptune on the Latin--on
mounting his chariot, used to awaken the tempest. The brazen-hoofed
horses with their stamping would paw up the huge waves and swallow up
the ships. The tritons of his cortege would send forth from their white
shells the bellowing blasts that snap off the masts like reeds.

_O, mater Amphitrite_!... and Ferragut would describe her as though she
were just passing before his eyes. Sometimes when swimming around the
promontories, feeling himself enveloped like primitive man in the blind
forces of Nature, he used to believe that he saw the white goddess
issuing forth from the rocks with all her smiling train after a rest in
some marine cave.

A shell of pearl was her chariot and six dolphins harnessed with
purpling coral used to draw it along. The tritons, her sons, handled
the reins. The Naiads, their sisters, lashed the sea with their scaly
tails, lifting their mermaid bodies wrapped in the magnificence of
their sea-green tresses between whose ringlets might be seen their
heaving bosoms. White seagulls, cooing like the doves of Aphrodite,
fluttered around their nude sea-queen, serenely contemplating them from
her movable throne, crowned with pearls and phosphorescent stars drawn
from the depths of her dominion. White as the cloud, white as the sail,
white as the foam, entirely, dazzlingly white was her fair majesty
except where a rosy blush tinted the petal-like skin of her heels or
her bosom.

The entire history of European man--forty centuries of wars,
emigrations, and racial impact--was due, according to the doctor, to
the desire of possessing this harmoniously framed sea, of enjoying the
transparency of its atmosphere and the vivacity of its light.

The men from the North who needed the burning log and alcoholic drink
in order to defend their life from the clutches of the cold, were
always thinking of these Mediterranean shores. All their warlike or
pacific movements were with intent to descend from the coasts of the
glacial seas to the beaches of the warm _mare nostrum_. They were eager
to gain possession of the country where the sacred olive alternates its
stiff old age with the joyous vineyard; where the pine rears its cupola
and the cypress erects its minaret. They longed to dream under the
perfumed snow of the interminable orange groves; to be masters of the
sheltered valleys where the myrtle and the jasmine spice the salty air;
where the aloe and the cactus grow between the stones of extinct
volcanoes; where the mountains of marble extend their white veins down
even into the depths of the sea and refract the African heat emitted by
the opposite coast.

The South had replied to the invasion from the North with defensive
wars that had extended even into the center of Europe. And thus history
had gone on repeating itself with the same flux and reflux of human
waves--mankind struggling for thousands of years to gain or hold the
blue vault of Amphitrite.

The Mediterranean peoples were to Ferragut the aristocracy of humanity.
Its potent climate had tempered mankind as in no other part of the
planet, giving him a dry and resilient power. Tanned and bronzed by the
profound absorption of the sun and the energy of the atmosphere, its
navigators were transmuted into pure metal. The men from the North were
stronger, but less robust, less acclimitable than the Catalan sailor,
the Provençal, the Genoese or the Greek. The sailors of the
Mediterranean made themselves at home in all parts of the world. Upon
their sea man had developed his highest energies. Ancient Greece had
converted human flesh into spiritual steel.

Exactly the same landscapes and races bordered the two shores. The
mountains and the flowers on both shores were identical. The Catalan,
the Provençal and the South Italian were more like the inhabitants of
the African coast than their kindred who lived inland back of them.
This fraternity had shown itself instinctively in the thousand-year
war. The Berber pirates, the Genoese sailors, the Spaniards, and the
Knights of Malta used implacably to behead each other on the decks of
their galleys and, upon becoming conquerors, would respect the life of
their prisoners, treating them like gentlemen. The Admiral Barbarossa,
eighty-four years of age, used to call Doria, his eternal rival nearly
ninety years old, "my brother." The Grand Master of Malta clasped the
hand of the terrible Dragut upon finding him his captive.

The Mediterranean man, fixed on the shores that gave him birth, was
accustomed to accept all the changes of history, as the mollusks
fastened to the rocks endure the tempests. For him the only important
thing was not to lose sight of his blue sea. The Spaniard used to pull
an oar on the Liburnian felucca, the Christian would join the crews of
the Saracen ships of the Middle Ages; the subjects of Charles V would
pass through the fortunes of war from the galleys of the Cross to those
of the Crescent, and would end by becoming rulers of Algiers, rich
captains of the sea, or by making their names famous as renegades.

In the eighth century the inhabitants of the Valencian coast united
with the Andalusian Moors to carry the war to the ends of the
Mediterranean and to the island of Crete, taking possession of it and
giving it the name of Candia. This nest of pirates was the terror of
Byzantium, taking Salonica by assault and selling as slaves the
patricians and most important ladies of the realm. Years afterwards,
when dislodged from Candia, the Valencian adventurers returned to their
native shores and there established a town in a fertile valley, giving
it the name of the distant island which was changed to Gandia.

Every type of human vigor had sprung from the Mediterranean
race,--fine, sharp and dry as flint, doing good and evil on a large
scale with the exaggeration of an ardent character that discounts
halfway measures and leaps from duplicity to the greatest extremes of
generosity. Ulysses was the father of them all, a discreet and prudent
hero, yet at the same time complex and malicious. So was old Cadmus
with his Phoenician miter and curled beard, a great old sea-wolf,
scattering by means of his various adventures the art of writing and
the first notions of commerce.

In one of the Mediterranean islands Hannibal was born, and twenty
centuries after, in another of them, the son of a lawyer without briefs
embarked for France, with no other outfit than his cadet's uniform, in
order to make famous his name of Napoleon.

Over the Mediterranean waves had sailed Roger de Lauria, knight-errant
of vast tracts of sea, who wished to clothe even the fishes with the
colors of Aragon. A visionary of obscure origin named Columbus had
recognized as his country the republic of Genoa. A smuggler from the
coasts of Laguria came to be Messina, the marshal beloved by Victory,
and the last personage of this stock of Mediterranean heroes associated
with the heroes of fabulous times was a sailor from Nice, simple and
romantic, a warrior called Garibaldi, an heroic tenor of all seas and
lands who cast over his century the reflection of his red shirt,
repeating on the coast of Marseilles the remote epic of the Argonauts.

Then Ferragut summed up the various defects of his race. Some had been
bandits and others saints, but none mediocre. Their most audacious
undertakings had much about them that was prudent and practical. When
they devoted themselves to business they were at the same time serving
civilization. In them the hero and the trader were so intermingled that
it was impossible to discern where one ended and the other began. They
had been pirates and cruel men, but the navigators from the foggy seas
when imitating the Mediterranean discoveries in other continents had
not shown themselves any more gentle or loyal.

After these conversations, Ulysses felt greater esteem for the old
pottery and the shabby little figures that adorned his uncle's bedroom.

They were objects vomited up by the sea, Grecian amphoras wrested from
the shells of mollusks after a submarine interment centuries long. The
deep waters had embossed these petrified ornaments with strange
arabesques that made one think of the art of another planet, and,
twined in with the pottery that had held the wine and water of a
shipwrecked Liburnian felucca, were bits of rope hardened by limey
deposit and flukes of anchors whose metal was disintegrating into
reddish scales. Various little statues corroded by the salt sea
inspired in the boy as much admiration as his grandfather's frigates.
He laughed and trembled before these _Cabiri_ coming from the
Phoenician or Carthaginian biremes,--grotesque and terrible gods that
contracted their faces with grimaces of lust and ferocity.

Some of these muscular and bearded marine divinities bore a remote
resemblance to his uncle. Ulysses had overheard certain strange
conversations among the fishermen and had noticed, besides, the
precipitation of the women and their uneasy glances when they found the
doctor near them in a solitary part of the coast. Only the presence of
his nephew had made them recover tranquility and check their step.

At times the sea seemed to craze him with gusts of amorous fury. He was
Poseidon rising up unexpectedly on the banks in order to surprise
goddesses and mortals. The women of the _Marina_ ran away as terrified
as those Greek princesses on the painted vases when surprised, washing
their robes, by the apparition of a passionate triton.

Some nights at the hour when the lighthouses were beginning to pierce
the coming dusk with their fresh shafts of light, he would become
melancholy and, forgetting the difference in their age, would talk with
his nephew as though he were a sailor companion.

He regretted never having married.... He might have had a son by this
time. He had known many women of all colors--white, red, yellow, and
bronze--but only once had he really been in love, very far away on the
other side of the planet, in the port of Valparaiso.

He could still see in imagination a certain graceful Chilean maiden,
wrapped in her great black veil like the ladies of the Calderonian
theater, showing only one of her dark and liquid eyes, pale and
slender, speaking in a plaintive voice.

She enjoyed love-songs, always provided that they were sung "with great
sadness"; and Ferragut would devour her with his eyes while she plucked
the guitar, chanting the song of Malek-Adhel and other romances about
"Roses, sighs and Moors of Granada," that from childhood the doctor had
heard sung by the Berbers of his country. The simple attempt at taking
one of her hands always provoked her modest resistance.... "That,
then...." She was ready to marry him; she wished to see Spain.... And
the doctor might have fulfilled her wishes had not a good soul informed
him that in later hours of the night, others were accustomed to come in
turns to hear her romantic solos.... Ah, these women! and then, on
recalling the finale of his trans-oceanic idyl, Ferragut would become
reconciled to his celibacy.

Late in the Fall the notary had to go in person to the _Marina_ to make
his brother give Ulysses up. The boy held the same opinion as did his
uncle. The very idea of losing the winter fishing, the cold sunny
morning, the spectacle of the great tempests, just for the silly reason
that the Institute had commenced, and he must study for his bachelor's
degree!...

The following year Doña Cristina tried to prevent the _Triton's_
carrying off her son, since he could learn nothing but bad words and
boastful bullying in the old home of the Ferraguts. And trumping up the
necessity of seeing her own family, she left the notary alone in
Valencia, going with her boy to spend the summer on the coast of
Catalunia near the French frontier.

This was Ulysses' first important journey. In Barcelona he became
acquainted with his uncle, the rich and talented financier of the
Blanes family,--one of his mother's brothers, proprietor of a great
hardware shop situated in one of the damp, narrow and crowded streets
that ran into the Rambla. He soon came to know other maternal uncles in
a village near the Cape of Creus. This promontory with its wild coasts
reminded him of that other one where the _Triton_ lived. The first
Hellenic sailors had also founded a city here, and the sea had also
cast up amphoras, little statues and petrified bits of iron.

The Blanes family had gone much to sea. They loved it as intensely as
did the doctor, but with a cold and silent love, appreciating it less
for its beauty than for the profits which it offered to the fortunate.
Their trips had been to America, in their own sailing vessels,
importing sugar from Havana and corn from Buenos Ayres. The
Mediterranean was for them only a port that they crossed carelessly on
departure and arrival. None of them knew the white Amphitrite even by
name.

Moreover, they did not have the devil-may-care and romantic appearance
of the bachelor of the _Marina_, ready to live in the water like an
amphibian. They were gentlemen of the coast who, having retired from
the sea, were entrusting their barks to captains who had been their
pilots,--middle class citizens who never laid aside the cravat and silk
cap that were the symbols of their high position in their natal town.

The gathering-place of the rich was the Athenæum,--a society that in
spite of its title offered no other reading matter than two Catalunian
periodicals. A large telescope mounted on a tripod before the door used
to fill the club members with pride. For the uncles of Ulysses, it was
enough merely to put one eyebrow to the glass to be able to state
immediately the class and nationality of the ship that was slipping
along over the distant horizon line. These veterans of the sea were
accustomed to speak only of the freight cargoes, of the thousands and
thousands of dollars gained in other times with only one round trip,
and of the terrible rivalry of the steamship.

Ulysses kept hoping in vain that sometimes they would allude to the
Nereids and other poetic beings that the _Triton_ had conjured around
his promontory. The Blanes had never seen these extraordinary
creatures. Their seas contained fish only. They were cold, economical
men of few words, friends of order and social preferment. Their nephew
suspected that they had the courage of men of the sea but without
boasting or aggressiveness; their heroism was that of traders capable
of suffering all kinds of adventures provided their stock ran no risks,
but becoming wild beasts if any one attacked their riches.

The members of the Athenaeum were all old, the only masculine beings in
the village. Besides them there were only the carbineers installed in
the barracks and various calkers making their mallets resound on the
hull of a schooner ordered by the Blanes brothers.

All the active men were on the sea. Some were sailing to America as
crew of the brigs and barks of the Catalunian coast. The more timid and
unfortunate ones were always fishing. Others, more valiant and anxious
for ready money, had become smugglers on the French coast whose shores
began on the other side of the promontory.

In the village there were only women, women of all kinds:--women seated
before their doors, making lace on great cylindrical pillows on their
knees, along whose length their bobbins wove strips of beautiful
openwork, or grouped on the street corners in front of the lonely sea
where their men were, or speaking with an electric nervousness that
oftentimes would break out suddenly in noisy tempests.

Only the parish priest, whose fishing recreations and official
existence were embittered by their constant quarrels, understood the
feminine irritability which embroiled the village. Alone and having to
live incessantly in such close contact, the women had come to hate each
other as do passengers isolated on a boat for many months. Besides,
their husbands had accustomed them to the use of coffee, the seaman's
drink, and they tried to beguile their tedium with strong cups of the
thick liquid.

A common interest, nevertheless, united these women miraculously when
living alone. When the carbineers inspected the houses in search of
contraband goods smuggled in by the men, the Amazons worked off their
nervous energy in hiding the illegal merchandise, making it pass from
one place of concealment to another with the cunning of savages.

Whenever the government officers began to suspect that certain packages
had gone to hide themselves in the cemetery, they would find there only
some empty graves, and in the bottom of them a few cigars between
skulls that were mockingly stuck up in the ground. The chief of the
barracks did not dare to inspect the church, but he looked
contemptuously upon Mosen Jòrdi, the priest, as a simpleton quite
capable of permitting tobacco to be hidden behind the altars in
exchange for the privilege of fishing in peace.

The rich people lived with their backs turned on the village,
contemplating the blue expanse upon which were erected the wooden
houses that represented all their fortune. In the summer-time the sight
of the smooth and brilliant Mediterranean made them recall the dangers
of the winter. They spoke with religious terror of the land breeze, the
wind from the Pyrenees, the _Tramontana_ that oftentimes snatched
edifices from their bases and had overturned entire trains in the
nearby station. Furthermore, on the other side of the promontory began
the terrible Gulf of Lyons. Upon its surface, not more than ninety
yards in extent, the waters driven by the strong sea winds often became
so rough, and raised up waves so high and so solid that upon clashing
together and finding no intermediate space upon which to fall, they
piled one upon another, forming regular towers.

This gulf was the most terrible of the Mediterranean. The transatlantic
liners returning from a good voyage to the other hemisphere used here
to tremble with a pre-monition of danger and sometimes even turned
back. The captains who had just crossed the great Atlantic would here
furrow their brows with uneasiness.

From the door of the Athenaeum the experts used to point out the Latin
sailboats that were about to double the promontory. They were merchant
vessels such as that elder Ferragut had commanded, embarkations from
Valencia that were bringing wine to Cette and fruits to Marseilles.
Upon seeing the blue surface of the Gulf on the other side of the Cape
with no other roughness than that of a long and infinitely heavy swell,
the Valencians would exclaim happily:

"Let us cross quickly, while the lion sleeps."

Ulysses had one friend, the secretary of the city-hall, and the only
inhabitant that had any books in his house. Treated by the rich with a
certain contempt, the official used to seek the boy's company because
he was the only creature who would listen to him attentively.

He adored the _mare nostrum_ as much as Doctor Ferragut, but his
enthusiasm was not concerned with the Phoenician and Egyptian ships
whose keels had first plowed these waves. He was equally indifferent to
Grecian and Carthaginian Triremes, Roman warships, and the monstrous
galleys of the Sicilian tyrants,--palaces moved by oars, with statues,
fountains and gardens. That which most interested him was the
Mediterranean of the Middle Ages, that of the kings of Aragon, the
Catalunian Sea. And the poor secretary would give long daily
dissertations about them in order to pique the local pride of his
juvenile listener.

One day after dilating at length on Roger de Lauria and the Catalan
navy, he wound up his tedious history by telling the little fellow how
Alfonso V, his brother the King of Navarre, and all his cortege of
magnates, had remained prisoners of the Republic of Genoa, which,
terrified by the importance of its royal prey, had entrusted the
captives to the guard of the Duke of Milan.... But the monarchs easily
came to an understanding in order to deceive the democratic
governments, and the Milanese sovereign released the King of Aragon
with all his suite. Thereupon he immediately blockaded Genoa with an
enormous fleet. The Provençal navy came promptly to the relief of its
neighbors, and the Aragonese King forced the port of Marseilles,
bearing away as trophy the chains that closed its entrance.

Ulysses nodded affirmatively. The sailor king had deposited these
chains in the cathedral of Valencia. His godfather, the poet, had
pointed them out to him in a Gothic chapel, forming a garland of iron
over the black hewn stones.

The Catalan navy still continued to dominate the Mediterranean
commercially, adding to its ancient vessels great galleons, lighter
galleys, caravels, cattle boats, and other ships of the period.

"But Christopher Columbus," concluded the Catalan sadly, "discovered
the Indies, thereby giving a death blow to the maritime riches of the
Mediterranean. Besides, Aragon and Castile became united and their life
and power were then concentrated in the center of the Peninsula, far
from the sea."

Had Barcelona been the capital of Spain, Catalunia would have preserved
the Mediterranean domination. Had Lisbon been the capital, the Spanish
colonial realm would have developed into something organic and solid
with a robust life. But what could you expect of a nation which had
stuck its head into a pillow of yellow interior steppes, the furthest
possible from the world's highways, showing only its feet to the
waves!...

The Catalan would always end by speaking sadly of the decadence of the
Mediterranean marine. Everything that was pleasing to his tastes made
him hark back to the good old time of the domination of the
Mediterranean by the Catalan marine. One day he offered Ulysses a sweet
and perfumed wine.

"It is Malvasian, the first stock the Almogavars brought here from
Greece."

Then he said in order to flatter the boy:

"It was a citizen of Valencia, Ramon Muntaner, who wrote of the
expeditions of the Catalans and Aragonese against Constantinople."

The mere recollection of this novel-like adventure, the most unheard-of
in history, used to fill him with enthusiasm, and, in passing, he paid
highest tribute to the Almogavar chronicler, a rude Homer in song,
Ulysses and Nestor in council, and Achilles in hard action.

Doña Cristina's impatience to rejoin her husband and to return to the
comforts of her well-regulated household finally carried Ulysses away
from this life by the coast.

For many years thereafter he saw no other sea than the Gulf of
Valencia. The notary, under various pretexts, contrived to prevent the
doctor's again carrying off his nephew; and the _Triton_ made his trips
to Valencia less frequently, rebelling against all the inconveniences
and dangers of these terrestrial adventures.

And Labarta, when occupied with the future of Ulysses, used to take on
a certain air of a good-natured regent charged with the guardianship of
a little prince. The boy appeared to belong to them more than to his
own father; his studies and his future destiny filled completely their
after-dinner conversations when the doctor was in town.

Don Esteban felt a certain satisfaction in annoying his brother by
eulogizing the sedentary and prosperous life.

Over there on the coasts of Catalunia lived his brothers-in-law, the
Blanes, genuine wolves of the sea. The doctor would not be able to
contradict that. Very well, then,--their sons were in Barcelona, some
as business clerks, others making a name for themselves in the office
of their rich uncle. They were all sailors' sons and yet they had
completely freed themselves from the sea. Their business was entirely
on _terra firma_. Only crazyheads could think of ships and adventures.

The _Triton_ used to smile humbly before such pointed allusions, and
exchange glances with his nephew.

A secret existed between the two. Ulysses, who was finishing his
studies for a bachelor's degree, was at the same time taking the
courses of pilotage at the institute. Two years would be sufficient for
the completion of these latter studies. The uncle had provided the
matriculation fees and the books, besides recommending the boy to a
former sailor comrade.



CHAPTER III


PATER OCEANUS

When Don Esteban died very suddenly, his eighteen-year-old son was
still studying in the university.

In his latter days the notary had begun to suspect that Ulysses was not
going to be the celebrated jurist that he had dreamed. He had a way of
cutting classes in order to pass the morning in the harbor, exercising
with the oars. If he entered the university, the beadles were on their
guard fearing his long-reaching hands: for he already fancied himself a
sailor and liked to imitate the men of the sea who, accustomed to
contend with the elements, considered a quarrel with a man as a very
slight affair. Alternating violently between study and laziness, he was
laboriously approaching the end of his course when neuralgia of the
heart carried off the notary.

Upon coming out from the stupefaction of her grief, Doña Cristina
looked around her with aversion. Why should she linger on in Valencia?
Since she could no longer be with the man who had brought her to this
country, she wanted to return to her own people. The poet Labarta would
look after her properties that were not so valuable nor numerous as the
income of the notary had led them to suppose. Don Esteban had suffered
great losses in extravagant business speculations good-naturedly
accepted, but there was still left a fortune sufficient to enable his
wife to live as an independent widow among her relatives in Barcelona.

In arranging her new existence, the poor lady encountered no opposition
except the rebelliousness of Ulysses. He refused to continue his
college course and he wished to go to sea, saying that for that reason
he had studied to become a pilot. In vain Doña Cristina entreated the
aid of relatives and friends, excluding the _Triton_, whose response
she could easily guess. The rich brother from Barcelona was brief and
affirmative, "But wouldn't that bring him in the money?"... The Blanes
of the coast showed a gloomy fatalism. It would be useless to oppose
the lad if he felt that to be his vocation. The sea had a tight clutch
upon those who followed it, and there was no power on earth that could
dissuade him. On that account they who were already old were not
listening to their sons who were trying to tempt them with the
convenience of life in the capital. They needed to live near the coast
in agreeable contact with the dark and ponderous monster which had
rocked them so maternally when it might just as easily have dashed them
to pieces.

The only one who protested was Labarta. A sailor?... that might be a
very good thing, but a warlike sailor, an official of the Royal Armada.
And in his mind's eye the poet could see his godson clad in all the
splendors of naval elegance,--a blue jacket with gold buttons for every
day, and for holiday attire a coat trimmed with galloon and red
trappings, a pointed hat, a sword....

Ulysses shrugged his shoulders before such grandeur. He was too old now
to enter the naval school. Besides he wanted to sail over all oceans,
and the officers of the navy only had occasion to cruise from one port
to another like the people of the coast trade, or even passed years
seated in the cabinet of the naval executive. If he had to grow old in
an office, he would rather take up his father's profession of notary.

After seeing Doña Cristina well established in Barcelona, surrounded
with a cortège of nephews fawning upon the rich aunt from Valencia, her
son embarked as apprentice on a transatlantic boat which was making
regular trips to Cuba and the United States. Thus began the seafaring
life of Ulysses Ferragut, which terminated only with his death.

The pride of the family placed him on a luxurious steamer, a
mail-packet full of passengers, a floating hotel on which the officials
were something like the managers of the Palace Hotel, while the real
responsibility devolved upon the engineers, who were always going
below, and upon returning to the light, invariably remained modestly in
a second place, according to a hieratical law anterior to the progress
of mechanics.

He crossed the ocean several times, as do those making a land journey
at the full speed of an express train. The august calm of the sea was
lost in the throb of the screws and in the deafening roar of the
machinery. However blue the sky might be, it was always darkened by the
floating crepe band from the smokestacks. He envied the leisurely
sailboats that the liner was always leaving behind. They were like
reflective wayfarers who saturate themselves with the country
atmosphere and commune deeply with its soul. The people of the steamer
lived like terrestrial travelers who sleepily survey from the
car-windows a succession of indefinite and dizzying views streaked by
telegraph wires.

When his novitiate was ended he became second mate on a sailing vessel
bound for Argentina for a cargo of wheat. The slow day's run with
little wind and the long equatorial calms permitted him to penetrate a
little into the mysteries of the oceanic immensity, severe and dark,
that for ancient peoples had been "the night of the abyss," "the sea of
utter darkness," "the blue dragon that daily swallows the sun."

He no longer regarded Father Ocean as the capricious and tyrannical god
of the poets. Everything in his depths was working with a vital
regularity, subject to the general laws of existence. Even the tempests
roared within prescribed and charted quadrangles.

The fresh trade-winds pushed the bark toward the Southeast, maintaining
a heavenly serenity in sky and sea. Before the prow hissed the silken
wings of flying fish, spreading out in swarms, like little squadrons of
diminutive aeroplanes.

Over the masts and yards covered with canvas, the albatross, eagles of
the Atlantic desert, traced their long, sweeping circles, flashing
across the purest blue their great, sail-like wings. From time to time
the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed
dislodged from the Sargasso Sea. Enormous tortoises drowsed in the
midst of these clumps of gulf-weed, serving as islands of repose to the
seagulls perched on their shells. Some of the seaweeds were green,
nourished by the luminous water of the surface; others had the reddish
color of the deep where enters only the deadly chill of the last rays
of the sun. Like fruits of the oceanic prairies, there floated past
close bunches of dark grapes, leathery capsules filled with brackish
water.

As they approached the equator, the breeze kept falling and falling,
and the atmosphere became suffocating in the extreme. It was the zone
of calms, the ocean of dark, oily waters, in which boats remained for
entire weeks with sails limp, without the slightest breath rippling the
atmosphere.

Clouds the color of pit coal reflected the ship's slow progress over
the sea; showers of rain like whipcord occasionally lashed the deck,
followed by a flaming sun that was soon blotted out by a new downpour.
These clouds, pregnant with cataracts, this night descending upon the
full daylight of the Atlantic, had been the terror of the ancients, and
yet, thanks to just such phenomena, the sailors could pass from one
hemisphere to another without the light wounding them to death, or the
sea scorching them like a burning glass. The heat of the equator,
raising up the water in steam, had formed a band of shade around the
earth. From other worlds it must appear like a girdle of clouds almost
similar to the sidereal rings.

In this gloomy, hot sea was the heart of the ocean, the center of the
circulatory life of the planet. The sky was a regulator that, absorbing
and returning, restored the evaporation to equilibrium. From this place
were sent forth the rains and dews to all the rest of the earth,
modifying its temperatures favorably for the development of animal and
vegetable life. There were exchanged the exhalations of the two worlds;
and, converted into clouds, the water of the southern hemisphere--the
hemisphere of the great seas with no other points of relief than the
triangular extremities of Africa and America, and the humps of the
oceanic archipelagoes--was always reinforcing the rills and rivers of
the northern hemisphere with its inhabited lands.

From this equatorial zone, the heart of the globe, come forth two
rivers of tepid water that heat the coasts of the north. They are the
two currents that issue from the Gulf of Mexico and the Java Sea. Their
enormous liquid masses, fleeing ceaselessly from the equator, govern a
vast assemblage of water from the poles that comes to occupy their
space, and these chilled and fresher currents are constantly
precipitating themselves on the electric hearth of the equator that
warms and salts them anew, renewing with its systole and diastole the
life of the world. The ocean struggles vainly to condense these two
warm currents without ever succeeding in mingling itself with them.
They are torrents of a deep blue, almost black, that flow across the
cold and green waters.

The Atlantic current, upon reaching Newfoundland, divides its arms,
sending one of them to the North Pole. With the other, weak and
exhausted by its long journey, it modifies the temperature of the
British Isles, tempering refreshingly the coasts of Norway. The Indian
current that the Japanese call, because of its color, "the black
river," circulates between the islands, maintaining for a longer time
than the other its prodigious powers of creation and agitation which
enable it to trail over the planet an enormous tail of life.

Its center is the apogee of terrestrial energy in the vegetable and
animal creations, in monsters and in fish. One of its arms, escaping
toward the south, goes on forming the mysterious world of the coral
sea. In a space as large as four continents, the polyps, strengthened
by the lukewarm water, are building up thousands of atolls, ring-shaped
islands, reefs and submarine pillars that, when united together by the
work of a thousand years, are going to create a new land, an exchange
continent in case the human species should lose its present base in
some cataclysm of Nature.

The pulse of the blue god is the tides. The earth turns towards the
moon and the stars with a sympathetic rotation like that of the flowers
that turn towards the sun. Its most movable part--the fluid mass of the
atmosphere--dilates twice daily, swelling its cavities; and this
atmospheric suction, the work of universal attraction, is reflected in
the tidal waters. Closed seas, like the Mediterranean, scarcely feel
its effects, the tides stopping at their door. But on the oceanic coast
the marine pulsation vexes the army of the waves, hurrying them daily
to their assault of the steep cliffs, making them roar with fury among
the islands, promontories and straits, and impelling them to swallow up
extensive lands which they return hours afterward.

This salty sea, like our body, that has a heart, a pulse and a
circulation of two different bloods incessantly renewed and
transformed, becomes as furious as an organic creature when the
horizontal currents of its interior come to unite themselves with the
vertical currents descending from the atmosphere. The violent passage
of the winds, the crises of evaporation, and the obscure electrical
forces produce the tempests.

These are no more than cutaneous shudderings. The storms, so deadly for
mankind, merely contract the marine epidermis while the profound mass
of its waters remains in murky calm, fulfilling its great function of
nourishing and renewing life. Father Ocean completely ignores the
existence of the human insects that dare to slip across his surface in
microscopic cockle-shells. He does not inform himself as to the
incidents that may be taking place upon the roof of his dwelling. His
life continues on,--balanced, calm, infinite, engendering millions upon
millions of beings in the thousandth part of a second.

The majesty of the Atlantic on tropical nights made Ulysses forget the
wrathful storms of its black days. In the moonlight it was an immense
plane of vivid silver streaked with serpentine shadows. Its soft
doughlike undulations, replete with microscopic life, illuminated the
nights. The infusoria, a-tremble with love, glowed with a bluish
phosphorescence. The sea was like luminous milk. The foam breaking
against the prow sparkled like broken fragments of electric globes.

When it was absolutely tranquil and the ship remained immovable with
drooping sail, the stars passing slowly from one side of the mast to
the other, the delicate medusae, that the slightest wave was able to
crush, would come to the surface floating on the waters, around the
island of wood. There were thousands of these umbrellas filing slowly
by, green, blue, rose, with a vague coloring similar to oil-lights,--a
Japanese procession seen from above, that on one side was lost in the
mystery of the black waters and incessantly reappeared on the other
side.

The young pilot loved navigation in a sailing ship,--the struggle with
the wind, the solitude of its calms. He was far nearer the ocean here
than on the bridge of a transatlantic liner. The bark did not beat the
sea into such rabid foam. It slipped discreetly along as in the
maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth. The
oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling
like a mute and inoffensive whale.

In six years Ulysses changed his boat many times. He had learned
English, the universal language of the blue dominions, and was
refreshing himself with a study of Maury's charts--the sailors'
Bible--the patient work of an obscure genius who first snatched from
ocean and atmosphere the secret of their laws.

Desirous of exploring new seas and new lands, he did not stop in the
usual travel zones or ports, and the British, Norwegian, and North
American captains received cordially this good-mannered official so
little exacting as to salary. So Ulysses wandered over the oceans as
had the king of Ithaca over the Mediterranean, guided by a fatality
which impelled him with a rude push far from his country every time
that he proposed to return to it. The sight of a boat anchored near by
and ready to set sail for some distant port was a temptation that
invariably made him forget to return to Spain.

He traveled in filthy, old, happy-go-lucky sea-tramps, in which the
crews used to spread all the sails to the tempest, get drunk and fall
asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken
them on the following morning. He lived in white boats as silent and
scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and
children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of
the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the
dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation
that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or
in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would
read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads.
The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress and
mittened hands.

He went to Newfoundland to load codfish. There is where the warm
current from the Gulf of Mexico meets that from the Poles. In the
meeting of these two marine rivers the infinitesimal little beings that
the gulf stream drags thither die, suddenly frozen to death, and a rain
of minute corpses descends across the waters. The cod gather there to
gorge themselves on this manna which is so abundant that a great part
of it, freed from their greedy jaws, drops to the bottom like a
snowstorm of lime.

In Iceland (the _Ultima Thule_ of the ancients), they showed Ulysses
bits of wood that the equatorial current had brought thither from the
Antilles. On the coasts of Norway, as he watched the herring during the
spawning season, he marveled at the formidable fertility of the sea.

From their refuge in the shadowy depths, these fish mount to the
surface moved by the message of the spring, desirous of taking their
part in the joy of the world. They swim one against another, close,
compact, forming strata that subdivide and float out to sea. They look
like an island just coming to the surface, or a continent beginning to
sink. In the narrow passages the shoals are so numerous that the waters
become solidified, making almost impossible the advance of a row boat.
Their number is beyond the possibilities of calculation, like the sands
and the stars.

Men and carnivorous fish fall upon them, opening great furrows of
destruction in their midst: but the breaches are closed instantly and
the living bank continues on its way, growing denser every moment, as
though defying death. The more their enemies destroy them, the more
numerous they become. The thick and close columns ceaselessly reproduce
themselves _en route_. At sunrise the waves are greasy and
viscous,--replete with life that is fermenting rapidly. For a space of
hundreds of leagues the salt ocean around them is like milk.

The fecundity of these fishy masses was placing the world in danger.
Each individual could produce up to seventy thousand eggs. In a few
generations there would be enough to fill the ocean, to make it solid,
to make it rot, extinguishing other beings, depopulating the globe....
But death was charged with saving universal life. The cetaceans bore
down upon this living density and with their insatiable mouths devoured
the nourishment by ton loads. Infinitely little fish seconded the
efforts of the marine giants, stuffing themselves with the eggs of the
herring. The most gluttonous fish, the cod and the hake, pursued these
prairies of meat, pushing them, toward the coasts and finally
dispersing them.

The cod increases its species most prodigiously, surfeiting itself upon
hake, until the world is again menaced. The ocean might be converted
into a mass of cod, for each one can produce as many as nine million
eggs.... Mankind might be overwhelmed under the onslaught of the more
fertile fishes, and the cod might maintain immense fleets, creating,
besides, colonies and cities. Human generations might become exhausted
without succeeding in conquering this monstrous reproduction. The great
marine devourers, therefore, are those that reëstablish equilibrium and
order. The sturgeon, insatiable stomach, intervenes in the oceanic
banquet, relishing in the cod the concentrated substance of armies of
herring. But this oviparous devourer of such great reproductive power
would, in turn, continue the world danger were it not that another
monster as avid in appetite as it is weak in procreation, intervenes
and cuts down with one blow the ever-increasing fecundity of the ocean.

The superior glutton is the shark,--that mouth with fins, that natatory
intestine which swallows with equal indifference the dead and the
living, flesh and wood, cleanses the waters of life and leaves a desert
behind its wriggling tail; but this destroyer brings forth only one
shark that is born armed and ferocious ready from the very first moment
to continue the paternal exploits, like a feudal heir.

Ferragut's wandering life as a pilot abounded in dramatic
adventures,--a few always standing out clearly from his many confused
recollections of exotic lands and interminable seas.

In Glasgow he embarked as second mate on an old sailing tramp that was
bound for Chile, to unload coal in Valparaiso and take on saltpeter in
Iquique. The crossing of the Atlantic was good, but upon leaving the
Malvina Islands the boat had to go out in the teeth of a torrid,
furious blast that closed the passage to the Pacific. The Straits of
Magellan are for ships that are able to avail themselves at will of a
propelling force. The sailboat needs a wide sea and a favorable wind in
order to double Cape Horn,--the utmost point of the earth, the place of
interminable and gigantic tempests.

While summer was burning in the other hemisphere, the terrible southern
winter came to meet the navigators. The boat had to turn its course to
the west, just as the winds were blowing from the west, barring its
route.

Eight weeks passed and it was still contending with sea and tempest.
The wind carried off a complete set of sails. The wooden ship, somewhat
strained by this interminable struggle, commenced to leak, and the crew
had to work the hand-pumps night and day. Nobody was able to sleep for
many hours running. All were sick from exhaustion. The rough voice and
the oaths of the captain could hardly maintain discipline. Some of the
seamen lay down wishing to die, and had to be roused by blows.

Ulysses knew for the first time what waves really were. He saw
mountains of water, literally mountains, pouring over the hull of the
boat, their very immensity making them form great slopes on both sides
of it. When the crest of one broke upon the vessel Ferragut was able to
realize the monstrous weight of salt water. Neither stone nor iron had
the brutal blow of this liquid force that, upon breaking, fled in
torrents or dashed up in spray. They had to make openings in the
bulwarks in order to provide a vent for the crushing mass.

The southern day was a livid and foggy eclipse, repeating itself for
weeks and weeks without the slightest streak of clearing, as though the
sun had departed from the earth forever. Not a glimmer of white existed
in this tempestuous outline; always gray,--the sky, the foam, the
seagulls, the snows.... From time to time the leaden veils of the
tempest were torn asunder, leaving visible a terrifying apparition.
Once it was black mountains with glacial winding sheets from the
Straits of Beagle. And the boat tacked, fleeing away from this narrow
aquatic passageway full of perilous ledges. Another time the peaks of
Diego Ramirez, the most extreme point of the cape, loomed up before the
prow, and the bark again tacked, fleeing from this cemetery of ships.
The wind shifting, then brought their first icebergs into view and at
the same time forced them to turn back on their course in order not to
be lost in the deserts of the South Pole.

Ferragut came to believe that they would never double the Cape,
remaining forever in full tempest, like the accursed ship of the legend
of the Flying Dutchman. The captain, a regular savage of the sea,
taciturn and superstitious, shook his fist at the promontory, cursing
it as an infernal divinity. He was convinced that they would never
succeed in doubling it until it should be propitiated with a human
offering. This Englishman appeared to Ulysses like one of those
Argonauts who used to placate the wrath of the marine deities with
sacrifices.

One night one of the crew was washed overboard and lost; the following
day a man fell from the topmast, that no one might think salvation
impossible. And as though the Southern Demon had only been awaiting
this tribute, the gale from the west ceased, the bark no longer had the
impassable barrier of a hostile sea before its prow, and was able to
enter the Pacific, anchoring twelve days later in Valparaiso.

Ulysses appreciated now the agreeable memory that this port always
leaves in the memory of sailors. It was a resting-place after the
struggle of doubling the cape; it was the joy of existence, after
having felt the blast of death; it was life again in the cafés and in
the pleasure houses, eating and drinking until surfeited, with the
stomach still suffering from the salty food and the skin still smarting
from boils due to the sea-life.

His admiring gaze followed the graceful step of the women veiled in
black who reminded him of his uncle, the doctor. In the nights of the
_remolienda_, [a popular gathering or festival in Chile] his glance
was many times distracted from the dark-hued and youthful beauties
dancing the _Zamacueca_ [the national dance of Chile.] in the middle of
the room, to the matrons swathed in black veils, who were playing the
harp and piano, accompanying the dance with languishing songs which
interested him greatly. Perhaps one of these sentimental, bearded
ladies might have been his aunt.

While his ship finished loading its cargo in Iquique, he
came in contact with the crowd of workers from the saltpeter
works,--"broken-down" [originally a term of contempt is now a
complimentary by-name] Chileans, laboring men from all countries, who
did not know how to spend their day's wages in the monotony of these
new settlements. Their intoxication diverted itself with most mistaken
magnificence. Some would let the wine run from an entire cask just to
fill a single glass. Others used the bottles of champagne lined up on
the shelves of the cafés as a target for their revolvers, paying cash
for all that they broke.

From this trip Ferragut gained a feeling of pride and confidence that
made him scornful of every danger. Afterwards he encountered the
tornadoes of the Asiatic seas, those horrible circular tempests that in
the northern hemisphere revolve from right to left, and in the south
from left to right--rapid incidents of a few hours or days at the most.
He had doubled Cape Horn in mid-winter after a struggle against the
elements that had lasted two months. He had been able to run all risks;
the ocean had exhausted for him all its surprises.... And yet,
nevertheless, the worst of his adventures occurred in a calm sea.

He had been at sea seven years and was thinking of returning once more
to Spain when, in Hamburg, he accepted the post of first mate of a
swift-sailing ship that was setting out for Cameroon and German East
Africa. A Norwegian sailor tried to dissuade him from this trip. It was
an old ship, and they had insured it for four times its value. The
captain was in league with the proprietor, who had been bankrupt many
times.... And just because this voyage was so irrational, Ulysses
hastened to embark. For him, prudence was merely a vulgarity, and
obstacles and dangers but tempted more irresistibly his reckless
daring.

One evening in the latitude of Portugal, when they were far from the
regular route of navigation, a column of smoke and flames suddenly
swept the deck, breaking through the hatchways and devouring the sails.
While Ferragut at the head of a band of negroes was trying to get
control of the fire, the captain and the German crew were escaping from
the ship in two prepared lifeboats. Ferragut felt sure that the
fugitives were laughing at seeing him run about the deck that was
beginning to warp and send up fire through all its cracks.

Without ever knowing exactly how, he found himself in a boat with some
negroes and different objects piled together with the precipitation of
flight,--a half-empty barrel of biscuits and another that contained
only water.

They rowed all one night, having behind them as their unlucky star the
burning boat that was sending its blood-red gleams across the water. At
daybreak they noted on the sun's disk some light, black, wavy lines. It
was land ... but so far away!

For two days they wandered over the moving crests and gloomy valleys of
the blue desert. Several times Ferragut collapsed in mortal lethargy,
with his feet in the water filling the bottom of the boat. The birds of
the sea were tracing spirals around this floating hearse, following it
with vigorous strokes of the wing, and uttering croakings of death. The
waves raised themselves slowly and sluggishly over the boat's edge as
though wishing to contemplate with their sea-green eyes this medley of
white and dark bodies. The ship-wrecked men rowed with nervous
desperation; then they lay down inert, recognizing the uselessness of
their efforts, lost in the great immensity.

The mate, drowsing on the hard stern, finally smiled with closed eyes.
It was all a bad dream. He was sure of awaking in his bed surrounded
with the familiar comforts of his stateroom. And when he opened his
eyes, the harsh reality made him break forth into desperate orders,
which the Africans obeyed as mechanically as though they were still
sleeping.

"I do not want to die!... I ought not to die!" asserted his inner
monitor in a brazen tone.

They shouted and made unavailing signals to distant boats that
disappeared from the great watery expanse without ever seeing them. Two
negroes died of the cold. Their corpses floated many hours near the
boat as if unable to separate themselves from it. Then they were drawn
under by an invisible tugging, and some triangular fins passed over the
water's surface, cutting it like knives at the same time that its
depths were darkened by swift, ebony shadows.

When at last they approached land, Ferragut realized that death was
nearer here than on the high sea. The coast rose up before them like an
immense wall. Seen from the boat it appeared to cover half the sky. The
long oceanic undulation became a ravenous wave upon encountering the
outer bulwarks of these barren islands, breaking in the depths of their
caves, and forming cascades of foam that rolled around them from top to
bottom, raising up furious columns of spray with the report of a
cannonade.

An irresistible hand grasped the keel, making the landing a vertical
one. Ferragut shot out like a projectile, falling in the foaming
whirlpools and having the impression, as he sank, that men and casks
together were rolling and raining into the sea.

He saw bubbling streaks of white and black hulks. He felt himself
impelled by contradictory forces. Some dragged at his head and others
at his feet in different directions, making him revolve like the hands
of a clock. Even his thoughts were working double. "It is useless to
resist," Discouragement was murmuring in his brain, while his other
half was affirming desperately, "I do not want to die!... I must not
die!"

Thus he lived through a few seconds that seemed to him like hours. He
felt the brute force of hidden friction, then a blow in the abdomen
that arrested his course between the two waters, and grasping at the
irregularities of a projecting rock, he raised his head and was able to
breathe. The wave was retreating, but another again overwhelmed him,
detaching him from the point with its foamy churning, making him leave
in the stony crevices bits of the skin of his hands, his breast, and
his knees.

The oceanic suction seemed dragging him down in spite of his desperate
strokes. "It's no use! I'm going to die," half of his mind was saying
and at the same time his other mental hemisphere was reviewing with
lightning synthesis his entire life. He saw the bearded face of the
_Triton_ in this supreme instant. He saw the poet Labarta just as when
he was recounting to his godson the adventures of the old Ulysses, and
his shipwrecked struggle with the rocky peaks and waves.

Again the marine dilatation tossed him against a rock, and again he
anchored himself to it with an instinctive clutch of his hands. But
before this wave retired it hurled him desperately upon another ledge,
the refluent water passing back below him. Thus he struggled a long
time, clinging to the rocks when the sea overwhelmed him, and crawling
along upon the jutting points whenever the retiring water permitted.

Finding himself upon a projecting point of the coast, free at last from
the suction of the waves, his energy suddenly disappeared. The water
that dripped from his body was red, each time more red, spreading
itself in rivulets over the greenish irregularities of the rock. He
felt intense pain as though all his organism had lost the protection of
its covering,--his raw flesh remaining exposed to the air.

He wished to get somewhere, but over his head the coast was rearing its
stark bulk,--a concave and inaccessible wall. It would be impossible to
get away from this spot. He had saved himself from the sea only to die
stationed in front of it. His corpse would never float to an inhabited
shore. The only ones that were going to know of his death were the
enormous crabs scrambling over the rocky points, seeking their
nourishment in the surge; the sea gulls were letting themselves drop
vertically with extended wings from the heights of the steep-sloped
shore. Even the smallest crustaceans had the advantage of him.

Suddenly he felt all his weakness, all his misery, while his blood
continued crimsoning the little lakes among the rocks. Closing his eyes
to die, he saw in the darkness a pale face, hands that were deftly
weaving delicate laces, and before night should descend forever upon
his eyelids, he moaned a childish cry:

"_Mamá_!... _Mamá_!..."

Three months afterward upon arriving at Barcelona, he found his mother
just as he had seen her during his death-agony on the Portuguese
coast.... Some fishermen had picked him up just as his life was ebbing
away. During his stay in the hospital he wrote many times in a light
and confident tone to Doña Cristina, pretending that he was detained by
important business in Lisbon.

Upon seeing him enter his home, the good lady dropped her eternal
lace-work, turned pale and greeted him with tremulous hands and
troubled eyes. She must have known the truth; and if she did not know
it, her motherly instinct told her when she saw Ulysses convalescent,
emaciated, hovering between courageous effort and physical breakdown,
just like the brave who come out of the torture chamber.

"Oh, my son!... How much longer!..."

It was time that he should bring to an end his madness for adventure,
his crazy desire for attempting the impossible, and encountering the
most absurd dangers. If he wished to follow the sea, very well. But let
it be in respectable vessels in the service of a great company,
following a career of regular promotion, and not wandering capriciously
over all seas, associated with the international lawlessness that the
ports offer for the reinforcement of crews. Remaining quietly at home
would be best of all. Oh, what happiness if he would but stay with his
mother!...

And Ulysses, to the astonishment of Doña Cristina, decided to do so.
The good señora was not alone. A niece was living with her as though
she were her daughter. The sailor had only to go down in the depths of
his memory to recall a little tot of a girl four years old, creeping
and frolicking on the shore while he, with the gravity of a man, had
been listening to the old secretary of the town, as he related the past
grandeurs of the Catalunian navy.

She was the daughter of a Blanes (the only poor one in the family) who
had commanded his relatives' ships, and had died of yellow fever in a
Central American port. Ferragut had difficulty in reconciling the
little creature crawling over the sand with this same slender,
olive-colored girl wearing her mass of hair like a helmet of ebony,
with two little spirals escaping over the ears. Her eyes appeared to
have the changing tints of the sea, sometimes black and others blue, or
green and deep where the light of the sun was reflected like a point of
gold.

He was attracted by her simplicity and by the timid grace of her words
and smile. She was an irresistible novelty for this world-rover who had
only known coppery maidens with bestial roars of laughter, yellowish
Asiatics with feline gestures, or Europeans from the great ports who,
at the first words, beg for drink, and sing upon the knees of the one
who is treating, wearing his cap as a testimony of love.

Cinta, that was her name, appeared to have known him all his life. He
had been the object of her conversations with Doña Cristina when they
spent monotonous hours together weaving lace, as was the village
custom. Passing her room, Ulysses noticed there some of his own
portraits at the time when he was a simple apprentice aboard a
transatlantic liner. Cinta had doubtless taken them from her aunt's
room, for she had been admiring this adventurous cousin long before
knowing him. One evening the sailor told the two women how he had been
rescued on the coast of Portugal. The mother listened with averted
glance, and with trembling hands moving the bobbins of her lace.
Suddenly there was an outcry. It was Cinta who could not listen any
longer, and Ulysses felt flattered by her tears, her convulsive
laments, her eyes widened with an expression of terror.

Ferragut's mother had been greatly concerned regarding the future of
this poor niece. Her only salvation was matrimony, and the good señora
had focused her glances upon a certain relative a little over forty who
needed this young girl to enliven his life of mature bachelorhood. He
was the wise one of the family. Doña Cristina used to admire him
because he was not able to read without the aid of glasses, and because
he interlarded his conversation with Latin, just like the clergy. He
was teaching Latin and rhetoric in the Institute of Manresa and spoke
of being transferred some day to Barcelona,--glorious end of an
illustrious career. Every week he escaped to the capital in order to
make long visits to the notary's widow.

"He doesn't come on my account," said the good señora, "who would
bother about an old woman like me?... I tell you that he is in love
with Cinta, and it will be good luck for the child to marry a man so
wise, so serious...."

As he listened to his mother's matrimonial schemes, Ulysses began to
wonder which of a professor of rhetoric's bones a sailor might break
without incurring too much responsibility.

One day Cinta was looking all over the house for a dark, worn-out
thimble that she had been using for many years. Suddenly she ceased her
search, blushed and dropped her eyes. Her glance had met an evasive
look on her cousin's face. He had it. In Ulysses' room might be seen
ribbons, skeins of silk, an old fan--all deposited in books and papers
by the same mysterious reflex that had drawn his portraits from his
mother's to his cousin's room.

The sailor now liked to remain at home passing long hours meditating
with his elbows on the table, but at the same time attentive to the
rustling of light steps that could be heard from time to time in the
near-by hallway. He knew about everything,--spherical and rectangular
trigonometry, cosmography, the laws of the winds and the tempest, the
latest oceanographic discoveries--but who could teach him the approved
form of addressing a maiden without frightening her?... Where the deuce
could a body learn the art of proposing to a shy girl?...

For him, doubts were never very long nor painful affairs. Forward
march! Let every one get out of such matters as best he could. And one
evening when Cinta was going from the parlor to her aunt's bedroom in
order to bring her a devotional book, she collided with Ulysses in the
passageway.

If she had not known him, she might have trembled for her existence.
She felt herself grasped by a pair of powerful hands that lifted her up
from the floor. Then an avid mouth stamped upon hers two aggressive
kisses. "Take that and that!"... Ferragut repented on seeing his cousin
trembling against the wall, as pale as death, her eyes filled with
tears.

"I have hurt you. I am a brute ... a brute!"

He almost fell on his knees, imploring her pardon; he clenched his
fists as if he were going to strike himself, punishing himself for his
audacity. But she would not let him continue.... "No, No!..." And while
she was moaning this protest, her arms were forming a ring around
Ulysses' neck. Her head drooped toward his, seeking the shelter of his
shoulder. A little mouth united itself modestly to that of the sailor,
and at the same time his beard was moistened with a shower of tears.

And they said no more about it.

When, weeks afterward, Doña Cristina heard her son's petition, her
first movement was one of protest. A mother listens with benevolent
appreciation to any request for the hand of her daughter, but she is
ambitious and exacting where her son is concerned. She had dreamed of
something so much more brilliant; but her indecision was short. That
timid girl was perhaps the best companion for Ulysses, after all.
Furthermore the child was well suited to be the wife of a man of the
sea, having seen its life from her infancy.... Good-by Professor!

They were married. Soon afterwards Ferragut, who was not able to lead
an inactive life, returned to the sea, but as first officer of a
transatlantic steamer that made regular trips to South America. To him
this seemed like being employed in a floating office, visiting the same
ports and invariably repeating the same duties. His mother was
extremely proud to see him in uniform. Cinta fixed her gaze on the
almanac as the wife of a clerk fixes it on the clock. She had the
certainty that when three months should have passed by she would see
him reappear, coming from the other side of the world laden down with
exotic gifts, just as a husband who returns from the office with a
bouquet bought in the street.

Upon his return from his first two voyages, she went to meet him on the
wharf, her eager glance searching for his blue coat and his cap with
its band of gold among the transatlantic passengers fluttering about
the decks, rejoicing at their arrival in Europe.

On the following trip, Doña Cristina obliged her to remain at home,
fearing that the excitement and the crowds at the harbor might affect
her approaching maternity. After that on each of his return trips
Ferragut saw a new son, although always the same one; first it was a
bundle of batiste and lace carried by a showily-uniformed nurse; then
by the time he was captain of the transatlantic liner, a little cherub
in short skirts, chubby-cheeked, with a round head covered with a silky
down, holding out its little arms to him; finally a boy who was
beginning to go to school and at sight of his father would grasp his
hard right hand, admiring him with his great eyes, as though he saw in
his person the concentrated perfection of all the forces of the
universe.

Don Pedro, the professor, continued visiting the house of Doña
Cristina, although with less assiduity. He had the resigned and coldly
wrathful attitude of the man who believes that he has arrived too late
and is convinced that his bad luck was merely the result of his
carelessness.... If he had only spoken before! His masculine
self-importance never permitted him to doubt that the young girl would
have accepted him jubilantly.

In spite of this conviction, he was not able to refrain at times from a
certain ironical aggressiveness which expressed itself by inventing
classic nicknames. The young wife of Ulysses, bending over her
lace-making, was Penelope awaiting the return of her wandering husband.

Doña Cristina accepted this nickname because she knew vaguely that
Penelope was a queen of good habits. But the day that the professor, by
logical deduction, called Cinta's son Telemachus, the grandmother
protested.

"He is named Esteban after his grandfather.... Telemachus is nothing
but a theatrical name."

On one of his voyages Ulysses took advantage of a four-hour stop in the
port of Valencia to see his godfather. From time to time he had been
receiving letters from the poet,--each one shorter and sadder,--written
in a trembling script that announced his age and increasing infirmity.

Upon entering the office Ferragut felt just like the legendary sleepers
who believe themselves awaking after a few hours of sleep when they
have really been dozing for dozens of years. Everything there was still
just as it was in his infancy:--the busts of the great poets on the top
of the book-cases, the wreaths in their glass cases, the jewels and
statuettes, prizes for successful poems--were still in their crystal
cabinets or resting on the same pedestals; the books in their
resplendent bindings formed their customary close battalions the length
of the bookcases. But the whiteness of the busts had taken on the color
of chocolate, the bronzes were reddened by oxidation, the gold had
turned greenish, and the wreaths were losing their leaves. It seemed as
though ashes might have rained down upon perpetuity.

The occupants of this spell-bound dwelling presented the same aspect of
neglect and deterioration. Ulysses found the poet thin and yellow, with
a long white beard, with one eye almost closed and the other very
widely opened. Upon seeing the young officer, broad-chested, vigorous
and bronzed, Labarta, who was huddled in a great arm chair, began to
cry with a childish hiccough as though he were weeping over the misery
of human illusions, over the brevity of a deceptive life that
necessitates continual renovation.

Ferragut found even greater difficulty in recognizing the little and
shrunken señora who was near the poet. Her flabby flesh was hanging
from her skeleton like the ragged fringe of past splendor; her head was
small; her face had the wrinkled surface of a winter apple or plum, or
of all the fruits that shrink and wither when they lose their juices.
"Doña Pepa!..." The two old people were thee-ing and thou-ing each
other with the tranquil non-morality of those that realize that they
are very near to death, and forget the tremors and scruples of a life
crumbling behind them.

The sailor shrewdly suspected that all this physical misery was the sad
finale of an absurd, happy-go-lucky and childish dietary,--sweets
serving as the basis of nutrition, great heavy rice dishes as a daily
course, watermelons and cantaloupes filling in the space between meals,
topped with ices served in enormous glasses and sending out a perfume
of honeyed snow.

The two told him, sighing, of their infirmities, which they thought
incomprehensible, attributing them to the ignorance of the doctors. It
was really the morbid wasting away that suddenly attacks people of the
abundant, food-yielding countries. Their life was one continual stream
of liquid sugar.... And yet Ferragut could easily guess the
disobedience of the two old folks to the discipline of diet, their
childish deceptions, their cunning in order to enjoy alone the fruits
and syrups which were the enchantment of their existence.

The interview was a short one. The captain had to return to the port of
Grao where his steamer was awaiting him, ready to weigh anchor for
South America.

The poet wept again, kissing his god-son. He never would see again this
Colossus who seemed to repel his weak embraces with the bellows of his
respiration.

"Ulysses, my son!... Always think of Valencia.... Do for her all that
you can.... Keep her ever in mind, always Valencia!"

He promised all that the poet wished without understanding exactly what
it was that Valencia might expect from him, a simple sailor, wandering
over all the seas. Labarta wished to accompany him to the door but he
sank down in his seat, obedient to the affectionate despotism of his
companion who was always fearing the greatest catastrophes for him.

Poor Doña Pepa!... Ferragut felt inclined to laugh and to weep at the
same time upon receiving a kiss from, her withered mouth whose down had
turned into pin points. It was the kiss of an old beauty who remembers
the gallantry of a youthful lover, the kiss of a childless woman
caressing the son she might have had.

"Poor unhappy Carmelo!... He no longer writes, he no longer reads....
Ay! what will ever become of me?..."

She always spoke of the poet's failing powers with the commiseration of
a strong and healthy person, and she became terrified when thinking of
the years in which she might survive her lord. Taken up with caring for
him, she never even glanced at herself.

A year afterward, on returning from the Philippines, the captain found
a letter from his god-father awaiting him at Port Said. Doña Pepa had
died, and Labarta, working off the tearful heaviness of his low
spirits, bade her farewell in a long canticle. Ulysses ran his eyes
over the enclosed newspaper clipping containing the last verses of the
poet. The stanzas were in Castilian. A bad sign!... After that there
could be no doubt that his end must be very near.

Ferragut never again had an opportunity to see his god-father, who died
while he was on one of his trips. Upon disembarking at Barcelona, Doña
Cristina handed him a letter written by the poet almost in his
death-agony. "Valencia, my son! Always Valencia!" And after repeating
this recommendation many times, he announced that he had made his
god-son his heir.

The books, the statues, all the glorious souvenirs of the
poet-laureate, came to Barcelona to adorn the sailor's home. The little
Telemachus amused himself pulling apart the old wreaths of the
troubador, and tearing out the old prints from his volumes with the
inconsequence of a lively child whose father is very far away and who
knows that he is idolized by two indulgent ladies. Besides his
trophies, the poet left Ulysses an old house in Valencia, some real
estate and a certain amount in negotiable securities,--total, thirty
thousand dollars.

The other guardian of his infancy, the vigorous _Triton_, seemed to be
unaffected by the passing of the years. Upon his return to Barcelona,
Ferragut frequently found him installed in his home, in mute hostility
to Doña Cristina, devoting to Cinta and her son a part of the affection
that he had formerly lavished upon Ulysses alone.

He was very desirous that the little Esteban should know the home of
his great grandparents.

"You will let me have him?... You know well enough," he coaxed, "that
down in the _Marina_ men become as strong as though made of bronze.
Surely you will let me have him?..."

But he quailed before the indignant gesture of the suave Doña Cristina.
Entrust her grandson to the _Triton_, and let him awaken in him the
love of maritime adventure, as he had done with Ulysses?... Behind me,
thou blue devil!

The doctor used to wander around bewildered by the port of
Barcelona.... Too much noisy bustle, too much movement! Walking proudly
along by the side of Ulysses, he loved to recount to him the adventures
of his life as a sailor and cosmopolitan vagabond. He considered his
nephew the greatest of the Ferraguts, a true man of the sea like his
ancestors but with the title of captain;--an adventurous rover over all
oceans, as he had been, but with a place on the bridge, invested with
the absolute command that responsibility and danger confer. When
Ulysses reëmbarked, the _Triton_ would take himself off to his own
dominions.

"It will be next time, sure!" he would say in order to console himself
for having to part with his nephew's son; and after a few months had
passed by, he would reappear, each time larger, uglier, more tanned,
with a silent smile which broke into words before Ulysses just as
tempestuous clouds break forth in thunder claps.

Upon his return from a trip to the Black Sea, Doña Cristina announced
to her son: "Your uncle has died."

The pious señora lamented as a Christian the departure of her
brother-in-law, dedicating a part of her prayers to him; but she
insisted with a certain cruelty in giving an account of his sad end,
for she had never been able to pardon his fatal intervention in the
destiny of Ulysses. He had died as he had lived,--in the sea, a victim,
of his own rashness, without confession, just like any pagan.

Another legacy thus fell to Ferragut.... His uncle had gone out
swimming one sunny, winter morning and had never come back. The old
folks on the shore had their way of explaining how the accident had
happened,--a fainting spell probably, a clash against the rocks. The
_Dotor_ was still vigorous, but the years do not pass without leaving
their footprints. Some believed that he must have had a struggle with a
shark or some other of the carnivorous fish that abound in the
Mediterranean waters. In vain the fishermen guided their skiffs through
all the twisting entrances and exits of the waters around the
promontory, exploring the gloomy caves and the lower depths of
crystalline transparency. No one was ever able to find the _Triton's_
body.

Ferragut recalled the cortege of Aphrodite which the doctor had so
often described to him on summer evenings, by the light of the far-away
gleam of the lighthouse. Perhaps he had come upon that gay retinue of
nereids, joining it forever!

This absurd supposition that Ulysses mentally formulated with a sad and
incredulous smile, frequently recurred in the simple thoughts of many
of the people of the _Marina_.

They refused to believe in his death. A wizard is never drowned. He
must have found down below something very interesting and when he got
tired of living in the green depths, he would probably some day come
swimming back home.

No: the _Dotor_ had not died.

And for many years afterwards the women who were going along the coast
at nightfall would quicken their steps, crossing themselves upon
distinguishing on the dark waters a bit of wood or a bunch of sea weed.
They feared that suddenly would spring forth the _Triton_, bearded,
dripping, spouting, returning from his excursion into the mysterious
depths of the sea.



CHAPTER IV


FREYA

The name of Ulysses Ferragut began to be famous among the captains of
the Spanish ports, although the nautical adventures of his early days
contributed very little to this popularity. The most of them had
encountered greater dangers, but they appreciated him because of the
instinctive respect that energetic and simple men have for an
intelligence which they consider superior to their own. Reading nothing
except what pertained to their career, they used to speak with
consternation of the numerous books that filled Ferragut's stateroom,
many of them upon matters which appeared to them most mysterious. Some
even made inexact statements in order to enlarge the prestige of their
comrade.

"He knows much.... He is a lawyer as well as a sailor."

Consideration of his fortune also contributed to the general
appreciation. He was an important share-holder of the company by which
he was employed. His companions loved to calculate with proud
exaggeration the riches of his mother, piling it up into millions.

He met friends on every ship carrying the Spanish flag, whatever might
be its home port or the nationality of its crews.

They all liked him:--the Basque captains, economical in words, rude and
sparing in affectionate discourse; the Asturian and Galician captains,
self-confident and spendthrift in strange contrast to their sobriety
and avaricious character when ashore; the Andalusian captains,
reflecting in their witty talk white Cadiz and its luminous wines; the
Valencian captains who talk of politics on the bridge, imagining that
they are going to become the navy of a future republic; and the
captains from Catalunia and Mallorca as thoroughly acquainted with
business affairs as are their ship-owners. Whenever necessity obliged
them to defend their rights, they immediately thought of Ulysses.
Nobody could write as he could.

The old mates who had worked their way up from the lower ranks, men of
the sea who had begun their career on coasting vessels and could only
with great difficulty adjust their practical knowledge to the handling
of books, used to speak of Ferragut with pride.

"They say that men of the sea are an uncultivated people.... Here they
have _Don Luis_ who is one of us. They may ask him whatever they
wish.... A real sage!"

The name of Ulysses always made them stammer. They believed it a
nickname, and not wishing to show any lack of respect, they had finally
transformed it into "Don Luis." For some of them, Ferragut's only
defect was his good luck. So far not a single boat of which he had had
command had been lost. And every sailor constantly on the sea ought to
have at least one of these misfortunes in his history in order to be a
real captain. Only landlubbers never lose their boats.

When his mother died, Ulysses was very undecided about the future, not
knowing whether to continue his sea life, or undertake something
entirely different. His relatives at Barcelona, merchants quick to
understand and appraise a fortune, added up what the notary and his
wife had left him and put with that what Labarta and the doctor had
contributed, until it amounted to a million pesetas.... And was a man
with as much money as that to go on living like a poor captain
dependent upon wages to maintain his family!...

His cousin, Joaquin Blanes, proprietor of a factory for knit goods,
urged him repeatedly to follow his example. He ought to remain on shore
and invest his capital in Catalan industry. Ulysses belonged to this
country both on his mother's side and because he was born in the
neighboring land of Valencia. There was great need of men of fortune
and energy to take part in the government. Blanes was entering local
politics with the enthusiasm of a middle-class man for novel adventure.

Cinta never said a word to influence her husband. She was the daughter
of a sailor and had accepted the life of a sailor's wife. Furthermore,
she looked upon matrimony in the light of the old familiar
traditions:--the woman absolute mistress of the interior of the home,
but trusting outside affairs to the will of the lord, the warrior, the
head of the hearth, without permitting herself opinions or objections
to their acts.

It was Ulysses, therefore, who decided to abandon the seafaring life.
Worked upon by the suggestions of his cousins, it needed only a little
dispute with one of the directors of the shipping firm to make him hand
in his resignation, and refuse to reconsider it, although urged by the
protests and entreaties of the other stockholders.

In the first months of his existence ashore, he was amazed at the
desperate immovability of everything. The world was made up of
revolting rigidity and solidity. He felt almost nauseated at seeing all
his possessions remain just where he left them, without the slightest
fluctuation, or the least bit of casual caprice.

In the mornings upon opening his eyes, he at first experienced the
sweet sensation of irresponsible liberty. Nothing affected the fate of
that house. The lives of those that were sleeping on the other floors
above and below him had not been entrusted to his vigilance.... But in
a few days he began to feel that there was something lacking, something
which had been one of the greatest satisfactions of his existence,--the
sensation of power, the enjoyment of command.

Two maids were now always hastening to him with a frightened air at the
sound of his voice, or the ringing of his bell. That was all that was
left to him who had commanded dozens of men of such ugliness of temper
that they struck terror to all beholders when they went ashore in the
ports. Nobody consulted him now, while on the sea everybody was seeking
his counsel and many times had to interrupt his sleep. The house could
go on without his making the rounds daily from the cellars to the roof,
overseeing even the slightest spigot. The women who cleaned it in the
mornings with their brooms were always obliging him to flee from his
office. He was not permitted to make any comment nor could he extend a
gold-striped arm as when he used to scold the barefooted, bare-breasted
deck-swabbers, insisting that the deck should be as clean as the
saloon. He felt himself belittled, laid to one side. He thought of
Hercules dressed as a woman and spinning wool. His love of family life
had made him renounce that of a powerful man.

Only the considerate treatment of his wife, who surrounded him with
assiduous care as though wishing to compensate for their long
separations, made the situation bearable. Furthermore, his conscience
was enjoying a certain satisfaction in being a land-father, taking much
interest in the life of his son who was beginning to prepare to enter
the institute, looking over his books, and aiding him in understanding
the notes.

But even these pleasures were not of long duration. The family
gatherings in his home or at his relatives' bored him unspeakably; so
did the conversations with his cousins and nephews about profits and
business deals, or about the defects of centralized tyranny. According
to them, all the calamities of heaven and earth were coming from
Madrid. The governor of the province was the "Consul of Spain."

These merchants interrupted their criticisms only to listen in
religious silence to Wagner's music banged out on the piano by the
girls of the family. A friend with a tenor voice used to sing
_Lohengrin_ in Catalan. Enthusiasm made the most excitable roar, "the
hymn ... the hymn!" It was not possible to misunderstand. For them
there was only one hymn in existence, and in a trilling undertone they
would accompany the liturgic music of _Los Segadores_ (The Reapers).
[The revolutionary song of Catalunia, originated by a band of reapers
in the seventeenth century.]

Ulysses used to recall with homesickness his life as commander of a
transatlantic liner,--a wide, universal life of incessant and varied
horizons, and cosmopolitan crowds. He could see himself detained on
deck by groups of elegant maidens who would beg him for new dances in
the coming week. His footsteps were surrounded with white fluttering
skirts, veils that waved like colored clouds, laughter and trills,
Spanish chatter that appeared set to music:--all the frolicsome jargon
of a cage of tropical birds.

Ex-presidents of the South American republics,--generals or doctors who
were going to Europe to rest,--used to relate to him on the bridge,
with Napoleonic gravity, the principal events in their history. The
business men starting out for America confided to him their stupendous
plans:--rivers turned from their courses, railroads built across the
virgin forests, monstrous electric forces extracted from huge
waterfalls varying in breadth, cities vomited from the desert in a few
weeks, all the marvels of an adolescent world that desires to realize
whatever its youthful imagination may conceive. He was the demi-urge of
this little floating world: he disposed of joy and love as the spirit
moved him.

In the scorching evenings around the equator, it was enough for him to
give an order to rouse things and beings from their brutish drowsiness.
"Let the music begin, and refreshments be served." And in a few moments
dancers would be revolving the whole length of the deck, and smiling
lips and eyes would become brilliantly alight with illusion and desire.
Behind him, his praises were always being sounded. The matrons found
him very distinguished. "It is plain to be seen that he is an
exceptional person." Stewards and crew circulated exaggerated accounts
of his riches and his studies. Some young girls sailing for Europe with
imaginations seething with romance were very much aghast to learn that
the hero was married and had a son. The solitary ladies stretched out
on a _chaise-longue,_ book in hand, upon seeing him would arrange the
corolla of their petticoats, hiding their legs with so much
precipitation that it always left them more uncovered; then fixing upon
him a languishing glance, they would begin a dialogue always in the
same way.

"How is it that any one so young as you has already become a
captain?..."

Ah, the misery of it!... He who had gallantly passed many years
cruising from one extreme of the Atlantic to the other with a rich,
gay, perfumed world, at times resisting feminine caprice through mere
prudence, yielding at others with the secrecy of a discreet sailor, now
found himself with no other admirers than the mediocre tribe of the
Blanes, with no other hallucinations than those which his cousin the
manufacturer might suggest, when waxing enthusiastic because the great
apostles of politics were taking a certain interest in the captain.

Every morning, on awaking, his taste now received a rude shock. The
first thing that he contemplated was a room "without personality," a
dwelling that was not characteristic of him in any way, arranged by the
maids with excessive cleanliness and a lack of logic that was
constantly changing the situation of his things.

He recalled with longing his compact and well-ordered stateroom where
there was not a piece of furniture that could escape his glance nor a
drawer whose contents he did not know down to the slightest detail. His
body was accustomed to slip without embarrassment through the spaces of
his cabin furnishings. He had adapted himself to all incoming and
outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the
winding curves of its shells. The cabin seemed formed by the secretions
of his being. It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one
extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high
temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on
approaching the polar seas.

His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his
cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a
tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ashore in most curious and
foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books
untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his
photographs fixed on the walls. The daily spectacle of seas and lands
was always changing--the temperature, the course of the stars, and the
people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were
clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of
another hemisphere.... Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the
same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the
variations of this world.

Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a
greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in
the bottom of an enchanted lake. The sun traced over the whiteness of
his ceiling and sheets a restless network of gold whose meshes
constantly succeeded each other. This was the reflection of the
invisible water. When his ship was immovable in the ports, there always
came in through his window the whirling noise of the cranes, the cries
of the stevedores and the voices of those who were in the neighboring
vessels. On the high sea the cool and murmuring silence of immensity
used to fill his sleeping room. A wind of infinite purity that came
perhaps from the other side of the planet--slipping past thousands of
leagues, over the salty deserts without touching a single bit of
corruption--would come stealing into Ferragut's throat like an
effervescent wine. His chest always expanded to the impulses of this
life-giving draught as his eyes roved over the sparkling, luminous blue
of the horizon.

Here in his home, the first thing that he saw through the window upon
awaking was a Catalunian edifice, rich and monstrous, like the palaces
that the hypnotist evolves in his dreams,--an amalgamation of Persian
flowers, Gothic columns, trunks of trees, with quadrupeds, reptiles and
snails among the cement foliage. The paving wafted up to him through
its drains the fetidity of sewers dry for lack of water; the balconies
shed the dust of shaken rugs; the absurd palace appropriated, with the
insolence of the new-rich, all the heaven and sun that used to belong
to Ferragut.

One night he surprised his relatives by informing them that he was
about to return to the sea. Cinta assented to this resolution in
painful silence, as though she had foreseen it long before. It was
something inevitable and fatal that she must accept. The manufacturer,
Blanes, stammered with astonishment. Return to his life of adventures,
when the great gentlemen of the district were becoming interested in
his personality!... Perhaps in the next elections they might have made
him a member of the municipal council!

Ferragut laughed at his cousin's simplicity. He wanted to command a
vessel again, but one of his own, without being obliged to consider the
restrictions of the ship owners. He could permit himself this luxury.
It would be like an enormous yacht, ready to set forth according to his
tastes and convenience, yet at the same time bringing him in untold
profits. Perhaps his son might in time become director of a maritime
company, this first ship laying the foundation of an enormous fleet in
the years to come.

He knew every port in the world, every highway of traffic, and he would
be able to find the places where, lacking transportation facilities,
they paid the highest freight rates. Until now he had been a salaried
man, brave and care-free. He was going to begin an absolutely
independent life as a speculator of the sea.

Two months afterwards he wrote from England saying that he had bought
the _Fingal_, a mail packet of three thousand tons that had made trips
twice a week between London and a port of Scotland.

Ulysses appeared highly delighted with the cheapness of his
acquisition. The _Fingal_ had been the property of a Scotch captain
who, in spite of his long illness, had never wished to give up command,
dying aboard his vessel. His heirs, inland men tired by their long
wait, were anxious to get rid of it at any price.

When the new proprietor entered the aft saloon surrounded with
staterooms,--the only habitable place in the ship,--memories of the
dead came forth to meet him. On the wall-panels were painted the heroes
of the Scotch Iliad,--the bard Ossian with his harp, Malvina with the
round arms and waving golden tresses, the undaunted warriors with their
winged helmets and protruding biceps, exchanging gashes on their
shields while awaking the echoes of the green lochs.

A deep and spongy arm chair opened its arms before a stove. There the
owner of the ship had passed his last years, sick at heart and with
swollen legs, directing from his seat a course that was repeated every
week across the foggy winter waves tossing bits of ice snatched from
the icebergs. Near the stove was a piano and upon its top an orderly
collection of musical scores yellowed by time,--_La Sonnambula, Lucia_,
Romances of Tosti, Neapolitan songs, breezy and graceful melodies that
the old chords of the instrument sent forth with the fragile and
crystalline tinkling of an old music box. The poor old captain with
sick heart and legs of stone had always turned to the sea of light for
distraction. It was music that made appear in the foggy heavens the
peaks of Sorrento covered with orange and lemon trees, and the coast of
Sicily, perfumed by its flaming flora.

Ferragut manned his boat with friendly people. His first mate was a
pilot who had begun his career in a fishing smack. He came from the
same village as Ulysses' ancestors, and he remembered the _Dotor_ with
respect and admiration. He had known this new captain when he was a
little fellow and used to go fishing with his uncle. In those days Toni
was already a sailor on a coast-trading vessel, and his superiority in
years had then justified his using the familiar thee and thou when
talking with the lad Ulysses.

Finding himself now under his orders, he wished to change his mode of
address, but the captain would not permit it. Perhaps he and Toni were
distant relatives,--all those living in that village of the _Marina_
had become related through long centuries of isolated existence and
common danger. The entire crew, from the first engineer to the lowest
seaman, showed an equal familiarity in this respect. Some were from the
same land as the captain, others had been sailing a long time under his
orders.

As shipowner, Ulysses now underwent numberless experiences whose
existence he had never before suspected. He went through the anguishing
transformation of the actor who becomes a theatrical manager, of the
author who branches out into publishing, of the engineer with a hobby
for odd inventions who becomes the proprietor of a factory. His
romantic love for the sea and its adventures was now overshadowed by
the price and consumption of coal, by the maddening competition that
lowered freight rates, and by the search for new ports with fast and
remunerative freight.

The _Fingal_ which had been rebaptized by its new proprietor with the
name of _Mare Nostrum_, in memory of his uncle, turned out to be a
dubious purchase in spite of its low price. As a navigator Ulysses had
been most enthusiastic upon beholding its high and sharp prow disposed
to confront the worst seas, the slenderness of the swift craft, its
machinery, excessively powerful for a freight steamer,--all the
conditions that had made it a mail packet for so many years. It
consumed too much fuel to be a profitable investment as a transport of
merchandise. The captain during his navigation could now think only of
the ravenous appetite of the boilers. It always seemed to him that the
_Mare Nostrum_ was speeding along with excess steam.

"Half speed!" he would shout down the tube to his first engineer.

But in spite of this and many other precautions, the expense for fuel
was enormously disproportioned to the tonnage of the vessel. The boat
was eating up all the profits. Its speed was insignificant compared
with that of a transatlantic steamer, though absurd compared with that
of the merchant vessels of great hulls and little machinery that were
going around soliciting cargo at any price, from all points.

A slave of the superiority of his vessel and in continual struggle with
it, Ferragut had to make great efforts in order to continue sailing
without actual heavy loss. All the waters of the planet now saw the
_Mare Nostrum_ specializing in the rarest kind of transportation.
Thanks to this expedient, the Spanish flag waved in ports that had
never seen it before.

Under this banner, he made trips through the solitary seas of Syria and
Asia Minor, skirting coasts where the novelty of a ship with a smoke
stack made the people of the Arabian villages run together in crowds.
He disembarked in Phoenician and Greek ports choked up with sand that
had left only a few huts at the foot of mountains of ruins, and where
columns of marble were still sticking up like trunks of lopped-off palm
trees. He anchored near to the terrible breakers of the western coast
of Africa under a sun which scorched the deck, in order to take on
board india-rubber, ostrich feathers, and elephants' tusks, brought out
in long pirogues by negro oarsmen, from a river filled with crocodiles
and hippopotamuses, and bordered by groups of huts with straw cones for
roofs.

When there were no more of these extraordinary voyages, the _Mare
Nostrum_ turned its course towards South America, resigning itself to
competition in rates with the English and Scandinavians who are the
muleteers of the ocean. His tonnage and draught permitted him to sail
up the great rivers of North America, even reaching the cities of the
remote interior where rows of factory chimneys smoked on the border of
a fresh-water lake converted into a port.

He sailed up the ruddy Paraná to Rosario and Colastiné, in order to
load Argentine wheat; he anchored in the amber waters of Uruguay
opposite Paysandú and Fray Ventos, taking on board hides destined to
Europe and salt for the Antilles. From the Pacific he sailed up the
Guayas bordered with an equatorial vegetation, in search of cocoa from
Guayaquil. His prow cut the infinite sheet of the Amazon,--dislodging
gigantic tree-trunks dragged down by the inundations of the virgin
forest--in order to anchor opposite Pará or Manaos, taking on cargoes
of tobacco and coffee. He even carried from Germany implements of war
for the revolutionists of a little republic.

These trips that in other times would have awakened Ferragut's
enthusiasm now resulted disastrously. After having paid all expenses
and lived with maddening economy, there was scarcely anything left for
the owner. Each time the freight boats were more numerous and the
transportation rates cheaper. Ulysses with his elegant _Mare Nostrum_
could not compete with the southern captains, drunken and taciturn,
eager to accept freight at any price in order to fill their miserable
transports crawling across the ocean at the speed of a tortoise.

"I can do no more," he said sadly to his mate. "I shall simply ruin my
son. If anybody will buy the _Mare Nostrum,_ I'm going to sell it."

On one of his fruitless expeditions, just when he was most discouraged,
some unexpected news changed the situation for him. They had just
arrived at Teneriffe with maize and bales of dry alfalfa from
Argentina.

When Toni returned aboard after having cleared the vessel, he shouted
in Valencian, the language of intimacy, "War, _Che_!"

Ulysses, who was pacing the bridge, received the news with
indifference. "War?... What war is that?..." But upon learning that
Germany and Austria had begun hostilities with France and Russia, and
that England was just intervening in behalf of Belgium, the captain
began quickly to calculate the political consequences of this
conflagration. He could see nothing else.

Toni, less disinterested, spoke of the future of the vessel.... Their
misery was at last at an end! Freightage at thirteen shillings a ton
was going to be henceforth but a disgraceful memory. They would no
longer have to plead for freight from port to port as though begging
alms. Now they were on the point of achieving importance, and were
going to find themselves solicited by consignors and disdainful
merchants. The _Mare Nostrum_ was going to be worth its weight in gold.

Such predictions, though Ferragut refused to accept them, began to be
fulfilled in a very short time. Ships on the ocean routes suddenly
became very scarce. Some of them were taking refuge in the nearest
neutral ports, fearing the enemy's cruisers. The greater part were
mobilized by their governments for the enormous transportation of
material that modern war exacts. The German corsairs, craftily taking
advantage of the situation, were increasing with their captures the
panic of the merchant marine.

The price of freight leaped from thirteen shillings a ton to fifty,
then to seventy, and a few days later to a hundred. It couldn't climb
any further, according to Captain Ferragut.

"It will climb higher yet," affirmed the first officer with cruel joy.
"We shall see tonnage at a hundred and fifty, at two hundred.... We are
going to become rich!..."

And Toni always used the plural in speaking of the future riches
without its ever occurring to him to ask his captain a penny more than
the forty-five dollars that he was receiving each month. Ferragut's
fortune and that of the ship, he invariably looked upon as his own,
considering himself lucky if he was not out of tobacco, and could send
his entire wages home to his wife and children living down there in the
_Marina_.

His ambition was that of all modest sailors--to buy a plot of land and
become an agriculturist in his old age. The Basque pilots used to dream
of prairies and apple orchards, a little cottage on a peak and many
cows. He pictured to himself a vineyard on the coast, a little white
dwelling with an arbor under whose shade he could smoke his pipe while
all his family, children and grandchildren, were spreading out the
harvest of raisins on the frame-hurdles.

A familiar admiration like that of an ancient squire for his paladin,
or of an old subaltern for a superior officer, bound him to Ferragut.
The books that filled the captain's stateroom recalled his agonies upon
being examined in Cartagena for his license as a pilot. The grave
gentlemen of the tribunal had made him turn pale and stutter like a
child before the logarithms and formulas of trigonometry. But just let
them consult _him_ on practical matters and his skill as master of a
bark habituated to all the dangers of the sea, and he would reply with
the self-possession of a sage!

In the most difficult perils,--days of storm and sinister shoals in the
neighborhood of the treacherous coasts, Ferragut could decide to rest
only when Toni replaced him on the bridge. With him, he had no fear
that, through carelessness, a wave would sweep across the deck and stop
the machinery, or that an invisible ledge would drive its stony point
into the vitals of the vessel. He held the helm to the course
indicated. Silent and immovable he stood, as though sleeping on his
feet; but at the right moment he always uttered the brief word of
command.

He was very skinny, with the dried up leanness of the bronzed
Mediterranean. The salt wind more than his years had tanned his face,
wrinkling it with deep crevices. A capricious coloring had darkened the
depths of these cracks while the part exposed to the sun appeared
washed several shades lighter. His short stiff beard extended over all
the furrows and crests of his skin. Furthermore, he had hair in his
ears, hair in the nasal passages, coarse and vibrating growths, ready
to tremble in moments of wrath or admiration.... But this ugliness
disappeared under the light of his little eyes with pupils between
green and olive color,--mild eyes with a canine expression of
resignation, when the captain made fun of his beliefs.

Toni was a "man of ideas." Ferragut only knew of his having four or
five, but they were hard, crystallized, tenacious, like the mollusks
that stick to the rocks and eventually become a part of the stony
excrescence. He had acquired them in twenty-five years of Mediterranean
coast service by reading all the periodicals of lyric radicalism that
were thrust upon him on entering the harbors. Furthermore, at the end
of every journey was Marseilles; and in one of its little side alleys
was a red room adorned with symbolic columns where sailors of all races
and tongues met together, fraternally understanding each other by means
of mysterious signs and ritual words.

Whenever Toni entered a South American port after a long absence, he
particularly admired the rapid progress of the new villages,--enormous
wharves constructed within the year, interminable streets that were not
in existence on his former voyage, shady and elegant parks, replacing
old, dried-up lakes.

"That's only natural," he would affirm roundly. "With good reason they
are republics!"

Upon entering the Spanish ports, the slightest deviation in the
docking, a discussion with the official employees, the lack of space
for a good anchorage would make him smile with bitterness. "Unfortunate
country!... Everything here is the work of the altar and the throne!"

In the Thames, and before the docks of Hamburg, Captain Ferragut would
chaff his subordinate.

"There's no republic here, Toni!... But, nevertheless this is rather
worth while."

But Toni never gave in. He would contract his hairy visage, making a
mental effort to formulate his vague ideas, clothing them with words.
In the very background of these grandeurs existed the confirmation of
the idea he was so vainly trying to express. Finally he admitted
himself checkmated, but not convinced.

"I don't know how to explain it; I haven't the words for it ... but ...
it's the _people_ who are doing all this."

Upon receiving in Teneriffe the news of war, he summed up all his
doctrines with the terseness of a victor.

"In Europe there are too many kings.... If all the nations could be
republics!... This calamity just had to come!"

And this time Ferragut did not venture to ridicule the
single-mindedness of his second.

All the people of the _Mare Nostrum_ showed great enthusiasm over the
new business aspect of things. The seamen who in former voyages were
taciturn, as though foreseeing the ruin or exhaustion of their captain,
were now working as eagerly as though they were going to participate in
the profits.

In the forward mess room many of them set themselves to work on
commercial calculations. The first trip of the war would be equal to
ten of their former ones; the second, perhaps, might bring in the
profit of twenty. And recalling their former bad business ventures,
they rejoiced for Ferragut, with the same disinterestedness as the
first officer. The engineers were no longer called to the captain's
cabin in order to contrive new economies in fuel. They had to take
advantage of the time and opportunity; and the _Mare Nostrum_ was now
going at full steam, making fourteen knots an hour, like a passenger
vessel, stopping only when its course was blocked at the entrance of
the Mediterranean by an English destroyer, sending out an officer to
make sure that they were not carrying on board enemy passengers.

Abundance reigned equally between bridge and forecastle where were the
sailors' quarters and the galley,--the space respected by every one on
the boat as the incontestable realm of Uncle Caragol.

This old man, nicknamed "Caracol" (snail), another old friend of
Ferragut's, was the ship's cook, and, although he did not dare to talk
as familiarly to the captain as in former times, the tone of his voice
made it understood that mentally he was continuing to use the old,
affectionate form. He had known Ulysses when he used to run away from
the classrooms to row in the harbor and, on account of the bad state of
his eyes, he had finally retired from the navigation of coast vessels,
descending to be a simple bargeman. His gravity and corpulence had
something almost priestly in character. He was the obese type of
Mediterranean with a little head, voluminous neck and triple chin,
seated on the stern of his fishing skiff like a Roman patrician on the
throne of his trireme.

His culinary talent suffered eclipse whenever rice did not figure as
the fundamental basis of his compositions. All that this food could
give of itself, he knew perfectly. In the tropical ports, the crews
surfeited with bananas, pineapples, and alligator-pears, would greet
with enthusiasm the apparition of a great frying pan of rice with cod
and potatoes, or a casserole of rice from the oven with its golden
crust perforated by the ruddy faces of garbanzos and points of black
sausage. At other times, under the leaden-colored sky of the northern
seas, the cook made them recall their distant native land by giving
them the monastic rice dish with beet roots, or buttery rice with
turnips and beans.

On Sundays and the fiestas of the Valencian saints who for Uncle
Caragol were the first in heaven,--_San Vicente Mártir, San Vicente
Ferrer, La Virgin de los Desamparados_ and the _Cristo del Grao_--would
appear the smoking _paella_, a vast, circular dish of rice upon whose
surface of white, swollen grains were lying bits of various fowls. The
cook loved to surprise his following by distributing rotund, raw
onions, with the whiteness of marble and an acrid surprise that brought
tears to the eyes. They were a princely gift maintained in secret. One
had only to break them with one blow and their sticky juices would gush
forth and lose themselves in the palate like crisp mouthfuls of a sweet
and spicy bread, alternating with knifefuls of rice. The boat was at
times near Brazil in sight of Fernando de Noroña,--yet even while
viewing the conical huts of the negroes installed on an island under an
equatorial sun, the crews could almost believe--thanks to Uncle
Caragol's magic--that they were eating in a cabin of the farmland of
Valencia, as they passed from hand to hand the long-spouted jug filled
with strong wine from Liria.

When they anchored in ports where fish was abundant, he achieved the
great work of cooking a rice _abanda_. The cabin boys would bring to
the captain's table the pot in which was boiled the rich sea food mixed
with lobsters, mussels, and every kind of shell-fish available, but the
_chef_ invariably reserved for himself the honor of offering the
accompanying great platter with its pyramid, of rice, every grain
golden and distinct.

Boiled apart (_abanda_) each grain was full of the succulent broth of
the stew-pot. It was a rice dish that contained within it the
concentration of all the sustenance of the sea. As though he were
performing a liturgical ceremony, the _chef_ would go around delivering
half a lemon to each one of those seated at the table. The rice should
only be eaten after moistening it with this perfumed dew which called
to mind the image of an oriental garden. Only the unfortunate beings
who lived inland were ignorant of this exquisite confection, calling
any mess of rice a Valencian rice dish.

Ulysses would humor the cook's notions, carrying the first spoonful to
his mouth with a questioning glance.... Then he would smile, giving
himself up to gastric intoxication. "Magnificent, Uncle Caragol!" His
good humor made him affirm that only the gods should be nourished with
rice _abanda_ in their abodes on Mount Olympus. He had read that in
books. And Caragol, divining great praise in all this, would gravely
reply, "That is so, my captain." Toni and the other officers by this
time would be chewing away with heads down, only interrupting their
feast to regret that the old Ganymede should have skimped them when
measuring the ambrosia.

In his estimation, oil was as precious as rice. In the time of their
money-losing navigation, when the captain was making special efforts at
economy, Caragol used to keep an especially sharp eye on the great oil
bottles in his galley, for he suspected that the cabin boys and the
young seamen appropriated it to dress their hair when they wanted to
play the dandy, using the oil as a pomade. Every head that put itself
within reach of his disturbed glance he grasped between his arms,
raising it to his nose. The slightest perfume of olive oil would arouse
his wrath. "Ah, you thief!"... And down would fall his enormous hand,
soft and heavy as a fencing gauntlet.

Ulysses believed him quite capable of climbing the bridge, and
declaring that navigation could not go on because of his having
exhausted the leathern bottles of amethyst-colored liquid proceeding
from the Sierra de Espadán.

In the ports, his short-sighted eyes recognized immediately the
nationality of the boats anchored on both sides of the _Mare Nostrum_.
His nose would sniff the air sadly. "Nothing!..." They were unsavory
barks, barks from the North that prepared their dinner with lard or
butter,--Protestant barks, perhaps.

Sometimes he would sneak along the gunwale, following an intoxicating
trail until he planted himself in front of the galley of the
neighboring boat, breathing in its rich perfume. "Hello, brothers!"
Impossible to fool him, they were probably Spaniards and, if not, they
were from Genoa or Naples,--in short, were compatriots accustomed to
live and eat in all latitudes just as though they were in their own
little inland sea. Soon they would begin a speech in the Mediterranean
idiom, a mixture of Spanish, Provençal and Italian, invented by the
hybrid peoples of the African coast from Egypt to Morocco. Sometimes
they would send each other presents, like those that are exchanged
between tribes,--fruits from distant countries. At other times,
suddenly inimical, without knowing why, they would shake their fists
over the railing, yelling insults at each other in which, between every
two or three words, would appear the names of the Virgin and her holy
Son.

This was the signal for Uncle Caragol, religious soul, to return in
haughty silence to his galley. Toni, the mate, used to make fun of his
devout enthusiasm. On the other hand, the foremast hands, materialistic
and gluttonous, used to listen to him with deference, because he was
the one who doled out the wine and the choicest tid-bits. The old man
used to speak to them of the _Cristo del Grao_, whose pictures occupied
the most prominent site in the kitchen, and they would all listen as to
a new tale, to the story of the arrival by sea of the sacred image,
mounted upon a ladder in a boat that had dissolved in smoke after
discharging its miraculous cargo.

This had been when the _Grao_ was no more than a group of huts far from
the walls of Valencia and threatened by the raids of the Moorish
pirates. For many years Caragol, barefooted, had carried this sacred
ladder on his shoulder on the day of the fiesta. Now other men of the
sea were enjoying such honor and he, old and half-blind, would be
waiting among the public for the procession to pass in order that he
might throw himself upon the enormous relic, touching his clothes to
the wood.

All his outer garments were sanctified by this contact. In reality they
weren't very many, since he usually strolled about the boat very
lightly clad, with the immodesty of a man who sees poorly and considers
himself above human preoccupations.

A shirt with the tail always floating, and a pair of pantaloons of
dirty cotton or yellow flannel, according to the season, constituted
his entire outfit. The bosom of the shirt was open on all occasions,
leaving visible a thatch of white hair. The pantaloons were fastened
together with a single button. A palm leaf hat always covered his head
even when he was working among his cooking pots.

The _Mare Nostrum_ could not be shipwrecked nor suffer any harm while
it carried him aboard. In the days of tempest, when waves were sweeping
the deck from prow to poop, and the sailors were treading warily,
fearing that a heavy sea might carry them overboard, Caragol would
stick his head out through the door of the galley, scorning a danger
which he could not see.

The great water-spouts would pass over him, even putting out his fires,
but only increasing his faith. "Courage, boys! Courage, lads!" The
_Cristo del Grao_ had special charge of them and nothing bad could
happen to the ship... Some of the seamen were silent, while others said
this and that about the image without arousing the indignation of the
old devotee. God, who sends dangers to the men of the sea, knows that
their bad words lack malice.

His religiosity extended to the very deeps. He did not wish to say
anything about the ocean fish, for they inspired him with the same
indifference as those cold and unperfumed boats that were ignorant of
olive oil, and all that was cooked with "pomade." They must be
heretics.

He was better acquainted with the fish of the Mediterranean and even
came to believe that they must be good Catholics, since in their own
way they proclaimed the glory of God. Standing near the taffrail on
torrid evenings in the tropics, he would recount, in honor of the
inhabitants of his distant sea, the portentous miracle which had taken
place in the glen of Alboraya.

A priest was one day fording on horseback the mouth of a river in order
to carry the eucharist to a dying person, when his beast stumbled and
the ciborium, falling open, the Hosts fell out and were carried off by
the current. From that time on, mysterious lights glowed every night on
the water, and at sunrise a swarm of little fishes would come to range
themselves opposite the glen, their heads emerging from the water, in
order to show the Host which each one of them was carrying in his
mouth. In vain the fishermen wished to take them away from them. They
fled to the inland sea with their treasures. Only when the clergy, with
cross erect and with the same priest, fell on their knees in the glen
did they decide to approach; and one after the other deposited his Host
in the ciborium, retiring then from wave to wave, gracefully waggling
their little tails.

In spite of the vague hope for a jug of choice wine that was animating
most of his hearers, a murmur of incredulity always arose at the end of
this tale. The devout Caragol then became as wrathful and foul-mouthed
as a prophet of old when he considered his faith in danger. "Who was
that son of a flea?... Who _was_ that son of a flea daring to doubt
what I myself have seen?..." And what he had seen was the fiesta of the
_Peixet_ that was celebrated every year, simply listening to most
learned men discoursing about the miracle in a commemorative chapel
built on the banks of the glen.

This prodigy of the little fishes was almost always followed with what
he called the miracle of the _Peixot_, endeavoring with the weight of
such a marvelous fish tale to crush the doubts of the impious.

The galley of Alphonso V of Aragon (the only sailor king of Spain),
upon coming out of the Gulf of Naples, once struck a hidden rock near
the island of Capri which took away a side of the ship without making
it leak; and the vessel continued on with all sails spread, carrying
the king, the ladies of his court, and the retinue of mail-clad barons.
Twenty days afterward they arrived at Valencia safe and sound like all
sailors who in moments of danger ask aid of the _Virgen del Puig_. Upon
inspecting the hull of the galley, the master calkers beheld a
monstrous fish detach itself from its bottom with the tranquility of an
upright person who has fulfilled his duty. It was a dolphin sent by the
most holy Señora in order that his side might stop up the open breach.
And thus, like a plug, it had sailed from Naples to Valencia without
allowing a drop of water to pass in.

The _chef_ would not admit any criticisms nor protests. This miracle
was undeniable. He had seen it with his own eyes, and they we

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