Her face was an inspiring thing to look upon.
She seemed to have gone mad! Her blond hair had
fallen awry and was flecked with leaves and grass
and bark. Her green eyes flashed with metallic
glints, like daggers. Her lips were pale from
emotion. And in that wild posture, whether through
force of habit, or the suggestiveness of the effort
she had made, she raised her warcry—a piercing,
savage “Hojotoho!” that rent the
calm of the orchard, frightening the hens and sending
them scampering off over the paths. Her parasol
she brandished as if it were the lance of Wotan’s
daughter, and several times she aimed it at Rafael’s
eyes, as if she intended to spear him blind.
The youth seemed to have collapsed less from the violence
of the struggle than from an overpowering sense of
shame. He lay motionless on the ground, without
protesting, and as if not caring ever to rise again—longing
to die under the pressure of that foot which was so
heavily weighing down upon him, taking away his breath.
Leonora regained her composure, and slowly stepped
back. Rafael sat up, and reached for his hat.
It was a painful moment. They stood there cold,
as if the sun had gone out and a glacial wind were
blowing through the orchard.
Rafael kept his eyes to the ground, afraid to look
up and meet her gaze, ashamed at the thought of his
disordered clothes, which were soiled with dirt; humiliated
at having been beaten and pummeled like a robber caught
by a victim he had expected to find powerless.
He heard Leonora’s voice addressing him with
the scornful “tu” a lady might
use toward her lowest inferiors.
“Go!”
He raised his head and found Leonora looking at him,
her eyes ablaze with anger and offended dignity.
“I’m never taken by force,” she
said coldly. “I give myself ... if I feel
like it.”
And in the gesture of scorn and rage with which she
dismissed him, Rafael thought he caught a trace of
loathing at some memory of Boldini—that
repugnant lecher, who had been the only person in the
world to win her by violence.
Rafael tried to stammer an excuse, but that hateful
association of the brutal scene rendered her implacable.
“Go! Go, or I’ll beat you again!...
And never come back!”
And to emphasize the words, as Rafael, humiliated
and covered with dirt, was leaving the garden, she
shut the gate behind him with such a violent slam
that the bars almost went flying.
Dona Bernarda was much pleased with Rafael. The
angry glances, the gestures of impatience, the wordless
arguments between mother and son, which the household
had formerly witnessed in such terror, had come to
an end.
The boy had not been visiting the Blue House for some
time. She knew that with absolute certainty,
thanks to the gratuitous espionage conducted for her
by persons attached to the Brull family. He scarcely
ever left the house; a few moments at the Club after
lunch; and the rest of the day in the dining-room,
with her and family friends; or else, shut up in his
room, with his books, probably, which the austere senora
revered with the superstitious awe of ignorance.
