— Vaya Usted con Dios. . y que no haya novedad, Jacinta said opening the front door and wishing him off, and Mr. Yak repeated that phrase as he came out to the wet street, to crowd out other things from his mind. Novedad?. . novelty, newness, change. . That you go with God, and have no… novedad. He hurried down back streets, and then out past the Cortes, to the Palace Hotel, to leave a reassuring note for Mr. Kuvetli, saying that he had located what Mr. Kuvetli sought, and for a reasonable sum could see to its turning up within a few days; but he had forgotten his passport and was unable to remember his full name, though he did know the initial to his Christian name was J, and so he signed it J. Yak, and returned quickly to the streets.
The streets were thronged with people wherever he turned, crowds parading with such animation that one might at first think some major holiday, or grand catastrophe, had brought them out. He found himself approaching the Plaza Tirso de Molina, saw a blond boy pass on the arm of a man and someone said, — Los turistas, si… pero los marecones. . He bought some raisins from a cart, an unidentified flower for his buttonhole, and stopped in at Chispero's for coffee, glancing round him all this time but without much hope in his eyes of seeing anyone he knew. From the stage in the hall beyond the bar he could hear heels pounding, where Adelita Beltrán sang La Sebastiana, and he found himself mumbling along with the words, — Aunque tiene siete colchones… as he returned to the street, more nervous each minute at putting off his return to the pension, and his work. — Un falsifi-cador? he muttered, bumping people in the Calle de Atocha, — even though he has seven mattresses, la Sebastiana can't sleep. .? How. .?
— Adiós…
— Dios…
People passed in the wet recommending each other to God, instead of God to each other.
— Y que no haya novedad… he repeated to himself, approaching the Plaza Santa Ana, and glanced down in the shaft of light from the Villa Rosa. It was the remnant of a rose in his buttonhole. He brought his hands up before him to clap for the sereno, and they hung there, as he did, standing unsteadily, overwhelmed in the chill rain at being engulfed in Spain's time, and that like his guest awaiting him upstairs he would never leave it.
— Adiós. .
—. .?
Pastora stood in the doorway of the Villa Rosa, the strap on her high-heeled sandal still broken, the cerise blouse pulled and protruding from her skirt where the zipper was broken. — Buenas noche, Señor, she repeated timidly, her coarse black hair standing out round her face, and her lip drawn back from her large teeth no longer in the snarl he remembered, though it was the same expression but now pathetically defiant, waiting, alone, staring at him and waiting. He moved his arms with a quick shrug of his shoulders, and clapped for the sereno who came stumbling up with the keys and the usual observation on his job, — The worse I do my work the more people clap for me. . and the street door came open.
— Adiós. . Pastora repeated, desolately, without a look from him as he entered and climbed the stairs, muttering against the hollow sound of his feet on them. Jacinta let him in, and he hurried down the dark passages to his own room, still muttering something about the work, the work.
He pulled on the light and stared at the figure laid out on the uneven parquet of the floor. — Why would I have said… a thing like that? he mumbled, motionless, — The love hoarded all your life. . for the work, and his lips still moved silently over that last word as he locked the door behind him, and continued to move, repeating it, until he saw them moving in the mirror where he went to pull off his hair, tug at the mustache, and startle when it failed to come off. He turned away from the glass to remove the plexiglas collar, though the gold and purple cord remained strung at his throat, and he crossed himself when his eyes fell on Jesus del Gran Poder hung upright over a faded length on the wall, forming a cross so. — All this, he muttered, and drew his hand across his chin. — Y que no haya novedad. .
Then he snorted with impatience. A light came in his eyes, as he picked up the penknife and knelt at the left flank of the figure laid on the floor. As he commenced to work the light became brighter, until his eyes shone as though alive with sparks. Sounds still rose from below, the measured clatter of heels and palms, a voice in a constricted wail, from the Villa Rosa, and still he worked.
Then the blade stopped: the heart, was it? or the brain?
Until at last the only sounds were from the ends of the empty alley below, where the tapping sticks of two blind people approached each other in the darkness, that, and the scraping edge of the penknife, as the hag of the moon, the dark winnower, rose in its last quarter.
IV
If the sun and moon should doubt, They'd immediately go out.
— Blessed Mary went a-walking. .
The prow of the ship lifted from a swell, remained suspended and then dropped into the trough that followed. Everything shook.
— Over Jordan river. .
— Please, don't sing that, Stanley interrupted. — Not here, not right now anyhow. Clinging to the rail, he looked uncomfortably over his shoulder, where Father Martin paced the deck reciting the appointed section of his breviary. She stopped, and gazed silently out to sea. Stanley looked at her face, the only one which (next to Father Martin when he was engaged in such supramundane past-times as the one occupying him now) had preserved its equanimity throughout the voyage thus far.
It was not proving an easy crossing: several times Stanley himself had felt the saliva mounting in the back of his mouth, and tried to put his mind on something sublime and far away, or at least extra-corporeal; but sounds and signs of adjacent suffering usually recalled him to the immanent prospect of his own, and he swallowed with great effort. He did so now. Behind him, beyond Father Martin's path, a mound of human misery heaved in a deck chair, clutching a small machine which clicked at regular intervals. It was a woman who had several times made the flat reasonable demand that the captain halt the ship. She was one of the Pilgrims; and as such, firmly convinced that the sea was aroused specifically for her and her fellows, whom she was ready to inform, at one moment, that infernal hands were responsible, working from anfractuous residencies far below to hinder them on their pious mission, and at other moments quite prepared to accuse the very Deity this voyage was designed to placate. In that case, He was certainly intent upon making it as memorably uncomfortable an excursion as any those medieval pilgrims enjoyed, setting off from Venice in the most deplorable conditions that could be arranged, which, for their times, is saying a good deal. Right now, the sky was blue and brilliantly clear, permitting a moment of hope, until the ship rolled and the boiling sea was raised before her eyes, which she closed forthwith and tried to dwell on the felicitous snarl of misconceptions which she had, over many devout years, managed to accumulate about her destination. They were not, after all, going to Jerusalem, and once landed did not run the risk of being stoned by Saracens, or offered for sale such articles of commerce as the bodies of the Holy Innocents. Neither the prospect of getting hold of a shred of the True Cross, nor a casket containing the tears of the Virgin, nor even the toenail parings of some venerable ecclesiastic, all opportunities of which their earliest forebears had taken full advantage, drew them forth: but rather the reward of indulgences. That, and the spectacle of the canonization of the little Spanish martyr, whose reputation a number of these Pilgrims, and this woman foremost among them, were importunately trying to enhance by seeking her intervention in this present misfortune.