The Marquis of Bolibar

by Leo Perutz

  Eglofstein gave me a terrible glare.

  "Lieutenant Jochberg was speaking in jest," he said, and kicked me on the shin in the lee of the table. "Be silent, you mule, or you'll spoil things for all of us." He readdressed himself to the girl. "Believe me, Monjita, he would never so far forget himself as to force his attentions on a lady."

  "A declaration of love should properly be gentle and tender," said Monjita, "but that gentleman, it seems to me, was downright discourteous."

  "Stand straight!" Don Ramon adjured his Joseph of Arimathea. "The biblical personage you represent was no hunchback."

  "No," I cried, "I'm neither gentle nor tender, for my love is such —"

  "I shall never be done if you continue to swallow and cough, yawn and scratch yourself!" Don Ramon exclaimed angrily. "Remain exactly as I showed you!"

  "My love is such," I repeated, "that frenzied words are all I can find to express what I have to tell you."

  "You're still young," said Monjita, "and love's novitiate is a hard apprenticeship. Doubtless you'll learn how a woman should be treated when you're older."

  I looked at her and was incensed no longer, merely astonished that a woman with the voice of Françoise-Marie should have addressed me in so cold and distant a manner.

  Brockendorf proceeded to take matters in hand in my place, firmly resolved to bring them to a swift and satisfactory conclusion.

  "Why," he asked without ceremony, "would you deny us the little favour you have so readily, willingly and frequently granted our commanding officer?"

  "That is an insulting remark."

  "Insulting? Far from it. In our country, to make such requests of women is customary, not offensive."

  "And in mine," Monjita rejoined curtly, "it is customary to reject them."

  Brockendorf, irked that their conversation had failed to take the turn he desired, grew impatient.

  "What in the world do you see in the colonel?" he demanded. "He's neither young nor handsome. Be honest: nothing about him is apt to tickle a young girl's fancy. He's tyrannical, waspish, and moody in the extreme. What's more, he suffers from the migraine. Whenever I enter his bedchamber I find it full of pill-boxes, large and small."

  "And I thought you were friends of his," said Monjita, quietly and dejectedly.

  "Friends of his? Friends are those with whom one would share one's last sip of brandy and morsel of bread. No man is my friend who hides a tidbit from me and keeps it to himself. If that's friendship, my landlady's chamber pot is a priceless goblet!"

  "Aren't you afraid that I shall tell him all you've said?"

  "Do so by all means!" Brockendorf said brusquely, looking grim. "It's only three months since I left my last man dead on the duelling ground. In Marseille it was, near the Porte Maillot. We fought it out with pistols at six paces." He turned to us. "You remember Captain-General Lenormand, my table companion when I dined with Marshal Soult's staff at Marseille?"

  None of us knew anything of this duel. There was no Porte Maillot in all Marseille, and Lenormand was the name of the humble Rue aux Ours shopkeeper to whom Brockendorf still owed sixty francs for goods supplied: pâté de foie gras, a ham, and two bottles of sherry wine.

  It was clear that Brockendorf had invented the whole story to frighten Monjita, but we behaved as if we remembered the incident perfectly.

  "Yes," said Eglofstein, hurrying to his aid, "except that the lady in question was Lenormand's wife, not his mistress." Musingly, he added, "When a Frenchwoman is pretty, she's pretty with a vengeance."

  I had a brief but vivid recollection of the worthy Madame Lenormand. A gaunt, elderly creature with an exceedingly misshapen body, she would come to our billet to demand her sixty francs of Brockendorf every morning save on Sundays, when she went to church carrying a red velvet missal bag.

  Monjita gave Brockendorf a look of timid entreaty, and we knew that she would say nothing for fear of endangering the colonel's life.

  "He means to make me his wife," she said.

  Brockendorf stared at her in astonishment and began to roar with laughter.

  "Great heavens! Have the musicians been engaged? Is the wedding cake already baked?"

  "What was that?" Eglofstein exclaimed. "His wife, did you say? Has he given you his word on it?"

  "Yes, and he gave the Señor Cura fifty reals to cover the cost of the wedding."

  "And you believe him? You're deceived. Even if he had a mind to marry you, he could never do so. His noble lineage precludes it."

  Monjita looked downcast for a moment. Then she shrugged as if to say that she knew whom to believe and whom not. Don Ramon de Alacho emerged from behind the Entombment of Christ, blue paint dripping from the brush in his hand, and addressed us all in a sombre voice.

  "No man need blush to wed my daughter, be he count or duke. She comes of true Christian stock on both her father's and her mother's side."

  "Don Ramon," Brockendorf told him, very deliberately, "an ancient patent of nobility carries some weight with me, but if yours attests to nothing save your Christian blood - why, a German innkeeper would wipe his counter with it. In Germany, every cobbler comes of Christian stock."

  Joseph of Arimathea threw up his hands in a gesture of dismay and entreaty, the pious woman of Jerusalem shook her head with a look of deepest sorrow, and Don Ramon de Alacho slunk silently back behind his easel.

  It was growing dark, and our impatience had mounted as the time went by. Brockendorf uttered a stream of oaths and vowed, loudly enough for Monjita to hear, that none of us would stir from the spot until the matter was settled, even if we had to stand there all night. Donop, who had hitherto left the talking to us, now took the floor.

  "It would almost seem, Monjita, that you're truly enamoured of our old colonel."

  "What if I am?" she cried fiercely, but it sounded to us as if she was loath to admit, even to herself, that she favoured the colonel over us solely on account of his senior rank, his wealth and generosity.

  "The emotion you feel for the old man cannot be love," Donop said quietly. "True love is a sentiment of a different kind, and one with which you are still unacquainted. Love entails secrecy. I shall wait for you tonight, atremble with impatience and frantic with desire, counting the minutes that separate us. And if you steal away to join me, furtively and filled with trepidation, you will look into your heart on the way and discover a new and unfamiliar emotion: that is love!"

  It was now so dark that I could no longer discern Monjita's face with any clarity, but I heard her laugh - loudly, heartily, and a trifle mischievously.

  "Well, I declare! You've converted me. I'm almost curious to become acquainted with the new and unfamiliar emotion you describe. To my regret, however, I've promised to be true to my lover."

  Our suspicions should, I suppose, have been aroused by her sudden change of tack and mocking tone, but we were all far too impatient and lovesick to heed them.

  "You need not keep that promise," Donop hastened to reassure her, "since you gave it to a man you do not love."

  Don Ramon had meanwhile lit a wax candle in the adjoining room, and a slender shaft of light was streaming through the half-open door.

  "If it's true, as you say, that a promise given to a man one does not love need not be honoured, you have banished all my misgivings. I undertake to come, and gladly."

  There was still a trace of mockery and mischief in her voice, but her face, insofar as I could see it in the candle's meagre light, wore its usual earnest, pensive expression.

  "Spoken like a sensible girl!" Brockendorf cried gaily. "And when, fairest Monjita, may we expect you?"

  "I shall come after Compline, which will, I think, be over by nine o'clock."

  "And which of us will be the lucky one?" Eglofstein insisted eagerly, already jealous of Brockendorf, Donop and myself.

  Monjita looked into our faces one by one. Her eyes lingered on mine longer than any, and I felt at that moment as if her eighteen years had at last made common cause
with my own.

  But she shook her head.

  "If I understood you aright," she said, and again I seemed to detect a hint of mockery in her tone, "- if I understood you aright, I shall not experience the novel and singular emotion you have promised me until I am actually on my way to you. That being so, I cannot now tell in whose arms my journey will end."

  Opening wide the door to the work-room, she told her father that he had painted enough for today and that supper was on the table.

  Don Ramon and the other two were standing before the Entombment of Christ, examining the finished picture by candlelight. The artist seemed dissatisfied with his work.

  "Where physical posture and facial expression are concerned, my Joseph of Arimathea looks truly pitiable."

  "You might have made him a little handsomer," the young man grumbled, plucking at his woefully short sleeves.

  "But his gestures are very lifelike," said the impersonator of the pious woman from Jerusalem, and bent a consoling gaze on the painter and his model.

  Brockendorf could not forbear to pass judgement himself.

  "There are numerous faces in the picture," he said, "and all of them different. "

  "That is because I always paint from life," Don Ramon told him. "There are bad painters who take the finished works of other masters as their models. If you care to purchase this painting, it will cost you only forty reals. As you yourself have observed, it contains a wealth of figures. You could, if you prefer, have two smaller pictures for the same price. The choice is entirely yours."

  "I'll take a brace," said Brockendorf, strongly disposed in the artist's favour by the successful outcome of our venture, "and the bigger they are, the better."

  He produced two gold coins whose existence he had artfully concealed from us, for he owed us all money lost at cards. Don Ramon, having pocketed them, thrust the saintly captain and martyr Achatius into Brockendorfs right hand and the Florentine subdeacon Zenobius into his left.

  It had meanwhile been agreed with Monjita that the four of us would await her that night at St Daniel's Convent. We went off to buy wine and supper. We were all in high spirits, but Brockendorf's exuberance was such that he hardly knew if he was on his head or his heels. He frightened an old woman by hissing at her like a goose, hid the ladder of a dovecote belonging to a nailsmith in the Calle Geronimo, and insisted on entering the shop of the potter's wife, with whom he was wholly unacquainted, and demanding to know why she had last week deceived her husband with the club-footed clerk of the magistrate's court.

  THE SONG OF TALAVERA

  St Daniel's Convent, from which the Calle de los Carmelitas took its name, served us as a powder magazine and workshop. The friars, who belonged to the order of Discalced or Barefoot Carmelites, had long since quit the building to fight against us in the bands of irregulars led by Empecinado and Colonel Saracho. The refectory and dormitory, the friars' cells, the cloisters and the great chapter house - all these were now given over by day to grenadiers from our regiment and the Prince's Own, who were engaged in the manufacture and filling of shells, grenades and fire-balls. The chapel, where Brockendorf proposed to spend the night (each of us performed this duty once a week), was strewn with empty powder bags, nails, axes, hammers, soldering irons, box lids, cooking pots, and brightly painted clay pipes discarded by the grenadiers. Lines drawn in chalk on the stone-flagged floor defined the boundaries between the various squads. Discernible on the walls were faded frescoes that depicted the blinding of Samson and the slaying of the giant Goliath, and some grenadier, by adding a moustache and beard, had transformed the shepherd boy David into a likeness of our majestic regimental drum-major. Above the west door, in a carved and gilded frame, hung the portrait of a monk, a handsome man with an episcopal cross on his chest.

  The two table braziers, which filled the air with dense clouds of smoke, presented us with a choice between suffocating and freezing. We had finished our supper, and Brockendorfs orderly, who was reputed to be the best forager in the army, was clearing away the remains of our meal.

  Across the way from the convent, and separated from it only by the narrow Calle de los Carmelitas, stood the Marquis of Bolibar's town house. By peering through a gap in the broken chapel window we could see into the colonel's brightly illuminated bedchamber. He was seated on his bed, fully clothed, while the surgeon of the Hessian battalion shaved him by the light of two candelabra placed on the table. His tricorn and a brace of pistols lay on a chair.

  The sight of him sent us wild with glee because tonight he would wait in vain for Monjita, who had chosen to come to us instead. We all hated the colonel and feared him at the same time, and Brockendorf gave vent to the rancour in his heart.

  "There sits old Vinegar-Jug with his aching head and his shrivelled heart. Will she come ere long, Colonel? Is she already on her way to you? You rejoice too soon, Colonel. There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip!"

  "Not so loud, Brockendorf, he may hear you."

  "He'll hear nothing, see nothing and know nothing," Brockendorf crowed triumphantly. "When Monjita comes we'll douse the lights. I shall crown him with the Turkish crescent twice over in the dark, and he'll notice nothing."

  "Being as proud as he is of his noble ancestry," sneered Donop, "he can have St Luke's bird added to his coat of arms. That had a pair of horns too."

  "Hush, Donop," Eglofstein whispered uneasily, "he has sharp ears — you don't know him." And he drew us away from the window, though the glass was so thick that the colonel could not have caught a single word of what we were saying about him. "He can hear an old crone cough three miles away, and if he loses his temper he'll have you all manoeuvring for three hours in the middle of a ploughed field, as he did last week."

  "I could have choked, I was so angry," Brockendorf growled, moderating his voice. "It's high time he bit the dust. The way he routs us out of our billets every two minutes!"

  "You're a fine one to talk," Donop protested. "You entered the regiment as a captain, but Jochberg and I! We served under old Vinegar-Jug as officer cadets. A dog's life, it was. Handling currycombs and case-shot every day, carting horse dung out of the stables, toting a week's ration of oats about on our backs ..."

  The church clock of Nuestra Señora del Pilar began to strike. Donop counted the strokes aloud.

  "Nine o'clock. She'll be here soon."

  "Here we all sit," said Eglofstein, resting his head on his hand, "waiting for one lone girl. There must surely be plenty of girls in this town as beautiful as Monjita if not more so, but I'm dazzled, God help me. I can see only the one."

  "Not I," said Brockendorf, and took a generous pinch of snuff. "I have eyes for other girls too. Had you visited my billet on Sunday night, you would have found me with one such: raven-haired, shapely, and quite content with the three groschen I paid her. Her name was Rosina. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say no to Monjita."

  He blew some tobacco dust from his sleeve before continuing.

  "Three groschen is little enough. The whores at Frascati's in Paris and at the Salon des Etrangers have cost me more in their time."

  One of the candles had burned down and was guttering and sizzling. Eglofstein lit another.

  "A great deal more," Brockendorf added with a sigh.

  "Listen!" Donop said suddenly, and gripped me by the shoulder.

  "What is it?"

  "Overhead, didn't you hear? There it goes again! It came from the organ loft!"

  "A bat!" roared Brockendorf. "He's afraid of a bat, the ninny! Look, it's over there now, clinging to the wall. Donop, I do believe you're trembling. You thought His Lordship the Marquis of Bolibar was seated at the organ and about to give the signal."

  He set off up the spiral stairway that led to the organ loft.

  "The Marquis must surely know of some secret passage leading from his house to the convent," said Donop. "Sooner or later he'll climb those stairs and give the second signal, just as he gave the first."

  "Who's afraid of a bat?" Broc
kendorf called down. He fiddled with the keys and stops but failed to produce a single note.

  "Hey, Donop, you learned to play the organ. Come here! Can you find your way around all these flutes and pipes?"

  "Brockendorf," Eglofstein commanded, "leave that organ be and come down here!"

  "How droll," came Brockendorfs disembodied voice from overhead, and the spacious, lofty chapel lent it a menacing, sinister quality, "— how droll to reflect that if I, up here, were to play 'The Song of the Martinmas Goose' or 'Margrete, Margrete, your shift is peeping out', Günther and Saracho would dance a jig in the outwork over yonder."

  Even Eglofstein seemed hugely entertained by Brockendorf's notion. He smote his thighs and laughed till the walls rang.

  "That fellow Günther!" he exclaimed. "The windbag, the braggart! If only I could see his face when the bullets start whistling past his nose!"

  Meantime, Donop had climbed the stairs as well. He inspected the organ and gave us a painstaking description of its ingenious and unusual design.

  It had a wind-chest, pipework, fluework, and reedwork. There were also rows of stops which Donop manipulated and enumerated, each of them having a different name. One was called the principal, another the bourdon or drone, another the spitz-gamba, another the quinte-viola, another the great sub- bass, and yet another the gemshorn.

  "Curious names," mused Brockendorf, "and yet, for all these flutes, pipes and oboes, one cannot strike up an air that's fit for dancing, only a wretched 'Benedicat vos'."

  "But one can play fugues and toccatas, preludes and interludes," said Donop, springing to the defence of his instrument.

  "Tread the bellows for me," Brockendorf urged him. "I've a mind to see if I can manage a 'Gloria'." And he began to sing in a raucous voice.

  Our worthy curate, woe, alas

  forgot his Latin during Mass.

  Kyrie eleison!

  Donop crouched down behind the corpus and trod the bellows while Brockendorf ran both hands wildly over the keys, and all at once the organ emitted a thin, shrill note like the squeak of a rat. Faint as it was, it startled Donop and Brockendorf and sent them scampering down the stairs as fast as if the Devil himself were at their heels.