by Jan Potocki
The next day I asked for news of Hermosito. I was told that he was no longer in the house.
Three days later, as I was ready to retire to bed, la Menzia handed me a letter from the duke. It consisted only of the following words:
Do what Doña Menzia tells you to do. I, your husband and your judge, command you so to do.
La Menzia bound my eyes with a handkerchief. I felt my arms seized and I was led down to this vault.
I heard the rattle of chains. My blindfold was removed; I saw Hermosito attached by the neck to the pillar against which you are leaning. There was no life in his eyes. He was extremely pale.
‘Is that you?’ he said in a dying voice. ‘I find it difficult to speak to you. I am not given any water. My tongue is stuck to my palate. My agony will not be long. If I go to heaven I shall speak there about you.’
As Hermosito uttered these words a gunshot, which came from the slit you see in this wall, shattered his arm. He cried out, ‘Oh God, forgive my executioners.’
A second shot rang out from the same direction. I don’t know what effect it had for I lost consciousness.
When I recovered the use of my senses I was surrounded by my ladies-in-waiting, who seemed to me to know nothing. All that they told me was that la Menzia had left the house. In the course of the morning an equerry came from my husband. He told me that the duke had gone to France on a secret mission and would not be back for some months. Left to myself I pulled myself together. I laid my case before the supreme judge of all and gave all my attention to my daughter.
Three months later la Girona appeared. She had come back from America and had already looked for her son in Madrid, in the monastery where he was to undertake his noviciate. Not having found him there, she had gone to Bilbao and had followed Hermosito’s tracks to Burgos. Fearing her distress and her anger, I told her part of the truth. She was able to drag the rest out of me.
As you know, the woman has a hard and violent character. Fury, rage and every terrible, destructive feeling took hold of her heart. I was too distressed myself to be able to bring her relief from her sorrows.
One day la Girona, while rearranging her room, discovered a door hidden behind a wall-hanging, and through it went down to the vault. She recognized the pillar which I had described to her. It was still stained with blood. She came to see me in a state bordering on frenzy. Thereafter she shut herself away in her room, or rather she went down into that awful vault to think of ways of exacting vengeance.
A month later, I was told that the duke had returned. He came in in a calm and composed manner, greeted my daughter affectionately and then, asking me to sit down, seated himself beside me.
‘Señora,’ he said. ‘I have thought long and hard about how I should behave towards you. I will not alter my behaviour. In the house you will be served with the same degree of respect and you will receive from me in appearance, at least, the same signs of esteem. This will last until your daughter reaches the age of sixteen years…’
‘And when my daughter is sixteen, what will happen?’ I asked the duke.
At this moment la Girona came in, bringing chocolate. The idea crossed my mind that it was poisoned.
But the duke spoke again and said, ‘When your daughter is sixteen, I shall say to her, “Daughter, your features remind me of those of a woman whose story I shall tell you. She was beautiful and her soul seemed even more so. But her virtue was feigned. By putting on appearances, she managed to make the greatest match in Spain. One day her husband had to leave her for a few weeks. At once she summoned from her province a little wretch. They remembered their previous loves and fell into each other’s arms. Daughter, there is that execrable hypocrite. She is your mother.” Then I will banish you from my presence, and you will go away to shed tears on the tomb of a mother who was as unworthy as you are.’
The injustice of the situation so hardened my soul that this awful speech had little effect on me. I took my daughter up in my arms and withdrew to another room.
Unfortunately I forgot about the chocolate. As I learnt later the duke had eaten nothing for two days. The cup had been placed in front of him. He drained it to the last drop.
Then he went into his own apartment. Half an hour later he ordered Dr Sangre Moreno to be brought to the house and that no one else but him should be admitted.
Someone went to the doctor’s house. He had left it for a house in the country where he practised dissection. This was quickly visited but he was no longer there. He was looked for on his usual round of visits, but arrived only three hours later and found the duke dead.
Sangre Moreno examined the body very carefully. He looked at the nails, eyes and tongue. He had a number of flasks brought for some purpose or other. Then he came to see me and said, ‘Señora, you may be certain that the duke died from the effect of a detestable but skilful mixture of narcotic resin and a corrosive metal. It is not my profession to call for blood, and I leave the task of uncovering crimes to the supreme judge above. I shall announce that the duke died of apoplexy.’
Other doctors then came and confirmed Sangre Moreno’s opinion.
I summoned la Girona and relayed to her what the doctor had said. Her distress betrayed her.
‘You have poisoned my husband!’ I said to her. ‘How could a Christian commit such a crime?’
‘I am a Christian,’ she said. ‘But I was a mother. If someone slit the throat of your child you would perhaps become more cruel than a raging lioness.’
I pointed out to her that she could have poisoned me instead of the duke.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was looking through the keyhole. If you had but touched the cup, I would have come in at once.’
Then the Capuchins arrived to ask for the duke’s body. And as they brandished an order from the archbishop it could not be refused them.
La Girona, who up till then had shown great intrepidity, seemed all at once to be anxious and nervous. She was afraid that during the embalming of the body traces of poison would be found. She was haunted by this idea to the point where her very sanity was threatened. Her pleas forced me into the abduction which has procured for us the honour of having you with us. The exaggerated speech I made in the cemetery was designed to fool my servants. When we saw that it was you who had been carried off it was necessary to fool them again. Another body has been buried in the garden chapel.
But in spite of all these precautions, la Girona is not easy in her mind. She speaks of returning to America and wants you to be locked away until she has decided what to do. As for me, I have no fears. If ever I am questioned I shall tell the truth. I have let la Girona know that. The duke’s injustice and cruelty rid me of all affection for him and I would never have been able to bring myself to live with him. All my hopes of happiness lie with my daughter and I am not worried about her future. Twenty grandeeships have accumulated in her person. That is enough to ensure that she will be well received into some family.
And that, young friend, is what you wanted to know. La Girona knows that I have told you the whole of our story. She thinks you should not be left knowing just half of it.
But the atmosphere of this vault is stifling. I am going upstairs to breathe more freely.
Having finished her sad story, the duchess left the vault, saying, as we have heard, that she was suffocating. After she had gone, I cast my eyes about me and found that the place really did have something stifling about it. The tomb of the young martyr and the pillar to which he had been bound seemed to me to be very gloomy furnishings. I had been pleased with that prison while I was still afraid of the Theatine tribunal, but since my affair had been settled I began no longer to like it. I laughed at la Girona’s confident expectation that I could be kept in it for two years. The two ladies knew little about the profession of gaoler. They left the door of their vault open, believing perhaps that the iron grille which separated me from it was an insurmountable obstacle. I had, though, not only made a plan of escape but even worked out how I woul
d spend the two years my penance should last. I’ll tell you what my ideas were.
Throughout my time at the Theatine college I often thought about the good fortune which the few small beggars who stood at the door of our church seemed to enjoy. Their fate seemed clearly preferable to mine. Indeed, while I grew pale over my books without any chance of completely satisfying my masters, these young children of poverty roamed the streets and played cards for chestnuts on the steps of the church. They fought each other without being forcibly separated. They got dirty without being made to wash. They undressed in the street and washed their shirts in the gutter. Could there be any more pleasant way of passing the time?
These thoughts on the happy lives of these young urchins came back to me in my prison. And thinking about the best course of action for me to follow, it seemed to me to be that of adopting the profession of beggar for the time my penance was to last. It is true that I had had an education which might have given me away through my having more polished speech than my colleagues, but I hoped to take on their accent and manners without difficulty and return to my own in due course. This decision was odd but at bottom it was the best I could take in the situation in which I found myself.
Once I had made my mind up, I broke the blade of a knife and started working on one of the iron bars of the grille. It took me five days to work it free. I carefully collected up the bits of stone and put them back around the bar so nothing could be seen.
The day I finished this task la Girona brought me my basket. I asked her whether she wasn’t afraid that it might come to be known that she was supplying food to a young man in the cellar of the house.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘the trap-door through which you came down leads into a separate building, the one where you had been laid out. I have had the door bricked up on the pretext that it brought back sad memories to the duchess. The passage by which we come down ends in my bedroom and the entry to it is hidden by a wall-hanging.’
‘I trust that there’s a good iron door at that end,’ I said.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘The door is quite light but it’s very well hidden. In any case, I keep my bedroom door locked. In this house I believe there to be other similar vaults, put there by other jealous husbands who have committed similar crimes.’
Having said this, la Girona seemed to want to go away.
‘Why go away so soon?’ I asked her.
‘Because the duchess wants to go out. Today she has completed the first six weeks of her mourning and she wants to go for a ride.’
Having learnt what I needed to know, I did not detain la Girona any longer. She went away again without closing the vault door. I hastily wrote a letter of apology and thanks to the duchess, and put it on the bars. Next I loosened the iron bar and entered first the vault of the two ladies, and then a dark passage which ended in a door which I found shut. I heard the sounds of a coach and horses and concluded that the duchess had gone out and that the nurse was not in her room.
I set myself to the task of breaking the door down. It was half-rotten and yielded as soon as I tried to break it. I then found myself in the nurse’s bedroom and, knowing that she took care to keep the door locked, I thought that I could stay there in safety.
I saw my face in a mirror and decided that my appearance did not yet correspond to the profession I was to embrace. I took a piece of charcoal from a grate and used it to dull the colour of my skin. After that I made some rents in my shirt and clothing. Then I went to the window. It looked out on to a small garden, once favoured by the presence of the masters of the house but now utterly abandoned. I opened the window and could see no other which looked out in the same direction. It wasn’t very high and I could have jumped down into the garden but I preferred to use la Girona’s sheets. After that, the frame of an old bower afforded me the means of climbing up on to the wall, from which I took flight into the countryside, delighted to be able to breathe the country air and yet more so to be free of Theatines, Inquisitions, duchesses and their nurses.
I saw the city of Burgos far off, but went in the opposite direction. I reached a low tavern. I showed the innkeeper’s wife a twenty-real coin which I had carefully wrapped in paper, and told her I wanted to spend all the money in her inn. She began to laugh and gave me bread and onions worth double the sum. I had some money but was afraid of letting it be seen, so I went to the stable and there I slept as one sleeps when one is sixteen years old.
I reached Madrid without anything happening to me which is worth relating. I entered the city at nightfall. I was able to find my aunt’s house and I leave it to your imagination how pleased she was to see me. But I only spent a moment there for fear of giving my presence away. I went right across Madrid, came to the Prado and there I lay down on the ground and fell asleep.
As soon as it was light I went around the streets and squares to select a place where I intended mainly to practise my profession. Passing by the Calle de Toledo, I met a servant girl carrying a bottle of ink. I asked her whether she wasn’t from the house of Señor Avadoro.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I have come from the house of Don Felipe del Tintero Largo.’
So it was that I discovered that my father was still known by the same name and still passed his time in the same pursuits.
Meanwhile I had to think about a place to live. Under the portals of St Roch, I caught sight of a few urchins of my age with faces which predisposed me in their favour. I went up to them and said that I was a boy from the provinces; I had come to Madrid to commend myself to charitable souls, I had a small handful of reals left and if there was a common kitty I would willingly place this money in it.
This first speech predisposed them in my favour. They said that they indeed had a common kitty which was kept by a chestnut-seller whose pitch was at the end of the street. They took me to her and then we all came back to the portal, where we started playing tarot.
As we were engrossed in this game, which requires quite a lot of attention, a well-dressed man appeared and seemed to examine us all closely, first one then another. Then, apparently deciding on me, he called me over and told me to follow him. He led me into a quiet street and said, ‘My boy, I have preferred you to your comrades because your face indicates that you have more wit than they and that will be needed for the task I want you to do for me. This is what it is about. Many women will pass by this spot, all wearing black velvet dresses and a black lace mantilla which hides their faces so well that it is impossible to see who they are. But luckily the patterns of the velvet and the lace are not the same and thus are ways of detecting who these unknown beauties are. I am the lover of one such person, who loves me and who seems to have a propensity to be inconsistent. I have decided to discover whether this is so or not. Here are two samples of velvet and two of lace. If two women go by whose clothes correspond, you will look closely to see whether they go into this church or into the house opposite, which is that of the Knight of Toledo. And then you will come to the tavern at the end of the street and tell me. Here is a gold piece. You will be given another if you acquit yourself well of this mission.’
While the man was speaking to me, I had examined him very closely. He didn’t seem to me to look like a lover, but rather a husband. The rage of the Duke of Sidonia came back to my mind. I jibbed at sacrificing the interests of love to the dark suspicions of marriage. So I decided to accomplish only half the mission, that is to say, if the two women went into the church I decided that I would tell the jealous husband, but if they went elsewhere I would, on the contrary, warn them of the danger which threatened them. I returned to my comrades, telling them to continue their game without paying attention to me. Then I lay down behind them, keeping my eye on the samples of velvet and lace.
Soon many women came in pairs, and eventually two who were indeed wearing the materials of which I had samples. The two women made as if to go into the church, but they stopped under the portal, looked all around them to see if they were being followed and then hurried
across the street as fast as they could and went into the house opposite.
When the gypsy had reached this point in his story, he was called away to his band.
Velásquez then spoke and said, ‘Really, this story alarms me. All the gypsy’s stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can already predict the end. But things turn out quite differently. The first story engenders the second, from which a third is born, and so on, like periodic fractions resulting from certain divisions which can be indefinitely prolonged. In mathematics there are several ways of bringing certain progressions to a conclusion, whereas in this case an inextricable confusion is the only result I can obtain from all the gypsy has related.’
‘In spite of that you derive great pleasure from listening to them,’ said Rebecca. ‘If I am not mistaken, you were to go directly to Madrid, yet you can’t bear to leave us.’
‘There are two reasons which keep me in this place,’ replied Velásquez. ‘First, I have begun important calculations which I want to finish here. Second, Señora, I must confess to you that I have never found so much pleasure in the company of a woman as I have in yours or rather, to be more precise, that you are the only woman whose conversation gives me pleasure.’
‘Señor duque,’ replied the Jewess, ‘I would indeed be happy if the secondary reason became the primary one.’
‘You shouldn’t be too upset about whether I think of you before or after I think about geometry,’ said Velásquez. ‘What upsets me is something else – not knowing what to call you. I am reduced to designating you by the symbol x, y or z, which we use in algebra for unknown quantities.’
‘I would willingly entrust to you the secret of my name,’ said the Jewess, ‘if I did not have to fear the results of your absent-mindedness.’
‘There is nothing to fear,’ interrupted Velásquez. ‘Through the frequent practice of substitution in calculations I have acquired the habit of always designating the same values in the same way. As soon as you have given me your name you couldn’t change it even if you wanted to.’
