 | CHAPTER TWELVE Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
12. CHAPTER TWELVE
NOSTROMO had been growing rich very slowly. It was
an effect of his prudence. He could command himself
even when thrown off his balance. And to become the
slave of a treasure with full self-knowledge is an occurrence
rare and mentally disturbing. But it was also
in a great part because of the difficulty of converting
it into a form in which it could become available. The
mere act of getting it away from the island piecemeal,
little by little, was surrounded by difficulties, by the
dangers of imminent detection. He had to visit the
Great Isabel in secret, between his voyages along the
coast, which were the ostensible source of his fortune.
The crew of his own schooner were to be feared as if
they had been spies upon their dreaded captain. He
did not dare stay too long in port. When his coaster
was unloaded, he hurried away on another trip, for he
feared arousing suspicion even by a day's delay.
Sometimes during a week's stay, or more, he could only
manage one visit to the treasure. And that was all. A
couple of ingots. He suffered through his fears as much
as through his prudence. To do things by stealth humiliated
him. And he suffered most from the concentration
of his thought upon the treasure.
A transgression, a crime, entering a man's existence,
eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a
fever. Nostromo had lost his peace; the genuineness of
all his qualities was destroyed. He felt it himself,
and often cursed the silver of San Tomé. His courage,
his magnificence, his leisure, his work, everything was
was real. He clung to it with a more tenacious,
mental grip. But he hated the feel of the ingots.
Sometimes, after putting away a couple of them in his
cabin — the fruit of a secret night expedition to the
Great Isabel — he would look fixedly at his fingers, as if
surprised they had left no stain on his skin.
He had found means of disposing of the silver bars in
distant ports. The necessity to go far afield made his
coasting voyages long, and caused his visits to the Viola
household to be rare and far between. He was fated
to have his wife from there. He had said so once to
Giorgio himself. But the Garibaldino had put the
subject aside with a majestic wave of his hand, clutching
a smouldering black briar-root pipe. There was
plenty of time; he was not the man to force his girls
upon anybody.
As time went on, Nostromo discovered his preference
for the younger of the two. They had some profound
similarities of nature, which must exist for complete
confidence and understanding, no matter what outward
differences of temperament there may be to exercise
their own fascination of contrast. His wife would
have to know his secret or else life would be impossible.
He was attracted by Giselle, with her candid gaze and
white throat, pliable, silent, fond of excitement under
her quiet indolence; whereas Linda, with her intense,
passionately pale face, energetic, all fire and words,
touched with gloom and scorn, a chip of the old block,
true daughter of the austere republican, but with Teresa's
voice, inspired him with a deep-seated mistrust.
Moreover, the poor girl could not conceal her love for
Gian' Battista. He could see it would be violent, exacting,
suspicious, uncompromising — like her soul.
Giselle, by her fair but warm beauty, by the surface
by the charm of her girlish mysteriousness, excited
his passion and allayed his fears as to the future.
His absences from Sulaco were long. On returning
from the longest of them, he made out lighters loaded
with blocks of stone lying under the cliff of the Great
Isabel; cranes and scaffolding above; workmen's figures
moving about, and a small lighthouse already rising
from its foundations on the edge of the cliff.
At this unexpected, undreamt-of, startling sight, he
thought himself lost irretrievably. What could save
him from detection now? Nothing! He was struck
with amazed dread at this turn of chance, that would
kindle a far-reaching light upon the only secret spot of
his life; that life whose very essence, value, reality,
consisted in its reflection from the admiring eyes of
men. All of it but that thing which was beyond common
comprehension; which stood between him and
the power that hears and gives effect to the evil intention
of curses. It was dark. Not every man had
such a darkness. And they were going to put a light
there. A light! He saw it shining upon disgrace,
poverty, contempt. Somebody was sure to. . . .
Perhaps somebody had already. . . .
The incomparable Nostromo, the Capataz, the respected
and feared Captain Fidanza, the unquestioned
patron of secret societies, a republican like old Giorgio,
and a revolutionist at heart (but in another manner),
was on the point of jumping overboard from the deck
of his own schooner. That man, subjective almost to
insanity, looked suicide deliberately in the face. But
he never lost his head. He was checked by the thought
that this was no escape. He imagined himself dead,
and the disgrace, the shame going on. Or, rather, properly
speaking, he could not imagine himself dead. He
a thing of infinite duration in its changes, to
grasp the notion of finality. The earth goes on for
ever.
And he was courageous. It was a corrupt courage,
but it was as good for his purposes as the other kind.
He sailed close to the cliff of the Great Isabel, throwing
a penetrating glance from the deck at the mouth of the
ravine, tangled in an undisturbed growth of bushes.
He sailed close enough to exchange hails with the workmen,
shading their eyes on the edge of the sheer drop
of the cliff overhung by the jib-head of a powerful crane.
He perceived that none of them had any occasion even
to approach the ravine where the silver lay hidden; let
alone to enter it. In the harbour he learned that no
one slept on the island. The labouring gangs returned
to port every evening, singing chorus songs in the
empty lighters towed by a harbour tug. For the
moment he had nothing to fear.
But afterwards? he asked himself. Later, when a
keeper came to live in the cottage that was being built
some hundred and fifty yards back from the low light-
tower, and four hundred or so from the dark, shaded,
jungly ravine, containing the secret of his safety, of his
influence, of his magnificence, of his power over the future,
of his defiance of ill-luck, of every possible betrayal
from rich and poor alike — what then? He could
never shake off the treasure. His audacity, greater
than that of other men, had welded that vein of silver
into his life. And the feeling of fearful and ardent subjection,
the feeling of his slavery — so irremediable and
profound that often, in his thoughts, he compared
himself to the legendary Gringos, neither dead nor
alive, bound down to their conquest of unlawful wealth
on Azuera — weighed heavily on the independent Captain
whose smart appearance (and fabulous good-luck in
trading) were so well known along the western seaboard
of a vast continent.
Fiercely whiskered and grave, a shade less supple in
his walk, the vigour and symmetry of his powerful
limbs lost in the vulgarity of a brown tweed suit, made
by Jews in the slums of London, and sold by the clothing
department of the Compañia Anzani, Captain
Fidanza was seen in the streets of Sulaco attending to
his business, as usual, that trip. And, as usual, he allowed
it to get about that he had made a great profit
on his cargo. It was a cargo of salt fish, and Lent was
approaching. He was seen in tramcars going to and
fro between the town and the harbour; he talked with
people in a café or two in his measured, steady voice.
Captain Fidanza was seen. The generation that would
know nothing of the famous ride to Cayta was not born
yet.
Nostromo, the miscalled Capataz de Cargadores, had
made for himself, under his rightful name, another
public existence, but modified by the new conditions,
less picturesque, more difficult to keep up in the increased
size and varied population of Sulaco, the progressive
capital of the Occidental Republic.
Captain Fidanza, unpicturesque, but always a little
mysterious, was recognized quite sufficiently under the
lofty glass and iron roof of the Sulaco railway station.
He took a local train, and got out in Rincon, where he
visited the widow of the Cargador who had died of his
wounds (at the dawn of the New Era, like Don José
Avellanos) in the patio of the Casa Gould. He consented
to sit down and drink a glass of cool lemonade
in the hut, while the woman, standing up, poured a
perfect torrent of words to which he did not listen.
children, growing up and well schooled, calling him
uncle, clamoured for his blessing. He gave that, too;
and in the doorway paused for a moment to look at the
flat face of the San Tomé mountain with a faint frown.
This slight contraction of his bronzed brow casting a
marked tinge of severity upon his usual unbending expression,
was observed at the Lodge which he attended
— but went away before the banquet. He wore it at
the meeting of some good comrades, Italians and Occidentals,
assembled in his honour under the presidency
of an indigent, sickly, somewhat hunchbacked little
photographer, with a white face and a magnanimous
soul dyed crimson by a bloodthirsty hate of all capitalists,
oppressors of the two hemispheres. The heroic
Giorgio Viola, old revolutionist, would have understood
nothing of his opening speech; and Captain
Fidanza, lavishly generous as usual to some poor comrades,
made no speech at all. He had listened, frowning,
with his mind far away, and walked off unapproachable,
silent, like a man full of cares.
His frown deepened as, in the early morning, he
watched the stone-masons go off to the Great Isabel,
in lighters loaded with squared blocks of stone, enough
to add another course to the squat light-tower. That
was the rate of the work. One course per day.
And Captain Fidanza meditated. The presence of
strangers on the island would cut him completely off the
treasure. It had been difficult and dangerous enough
before. He was afraid, and he was angry. He thought
with the resolution of a master and the cunning of a
cowed slave. Then he went ashore.
He was a man of resource and ingenuity; and, as
usual, the expedient he found at a critical moment was
effective enough to alter the situation radically. He
this incomparable Nostromo, this "fellow in a thousand."
With Giorgio established on the Great Isabel,
there would be no need for concealment. He would be
able to go openly, in daylight, to see his daughters —
one of his daughters — and stay late talking to the old
Garibaldino. Then in the dark . . . Night after
night . . . He would dare to grow rich quicker
now. He yearned to clasp, embrace, absorb, subjugate
in unquestioned possession this treasure, whose tyranny
had weighed upon his mind, his actions, his very sleep.
He went to see his friend Captain Mitchell — and the
thing was done as Dr. Monygham had related to Mrs.
Gould. When the project was mooted to the Garibaldino,
something like the faint reflection, the dim ghost
of a very ancient smile, stole under the white and enormous
moustaches of the old hater of kings and ministers.
His daughters were the object of his anxious care. The
younger, especially. Linda, with her mother's voice,
had taken more her mother's place. Her deep, vibrating
"Eh, Padre?" seemed, but for the change of the
word, the very echo of the impassioned, remonstrating
"Eh, Giorgio?" of poor Signora Teresa. It was his
fixed opinion that the town was no proper place for
his girls. The infatuated but guileless Ramirez was
the object of his profound aversion, as resuming the
sins of the country whose people were blind, vile
esclavos.
On his return from his next voyage, Captain Fidanza
found the Violas settled in the light-keeper's cottage.
His knowledge of Giorgio's idiosyncrasies had not
played him false. The Garibaldino had refused to entertain
the idea of any companion whatever, except
his girls. And Captain Mitchell, anxious to please his
poor Nostromo, with that felicity of inspiration which
Linda Viola as under-keeper of the Isabel's Light.
"The light is private property," he used to explain.
"It belongs to my Company. I've the power to nominate
whom I like, and Viola it shall be. It's about the
only thing Nostromo — a man worth his weight in gold,
mind you — has ever asked me to do for him."
Directly his schooner was anchored opposite the New
Custom House, with its sham air of a Greek temple, flat-
roofed, with a colonnade, Captain Fidanza went pulling
his small boat out of the harbour, bound for the Great
Isabel, openly in the light of a declining day, before
all men's eyes, with a sense of having mastered the
fates. He must establish a regular position. He
would ask him for his daughter now. He thought of
Giselle as he pulled. Linda loved him, perhaps, but
the old man would be glad to keep the elder, who had
his wife's voice.
He did not pull for the narrow strand where he had
landed with Decoud, and afterwards alone on his first
visit to the treasure. He made for the beach at the
other end, and walked up the regular and gentle slope
of the wedge-shaped island. Giorgio Viola, whom he
saw from afar, sitting on a bench under the front wall
of the cottage, lifted his arm slightly to his loud hail.
He walked up. Neither of the girls appeared.
"It is good here," said the old man, in his austere,
far-away manner.
Nostromo nodded; then, after a short silence —
"You saw my schooner pass in not two hours ago?
Do you know why I am here before, so to speak, my
anchor has fairly bitten into the ground of this port of
Sulaco?"
"You are welcome like a son," the old man declared,
quietly, staring away upon the sea.
"Ah! thy son. I know. I am what thy son would
have been. It is well, viejo. It is a very good welcome.
Listen, I have come to ask you for —"
A sudden dread came upon the fearless and incorruptible
Nostromo. He dared not utter the name in his
mind. The slight pause only imparted a marked weight
and solemnity to the changed end of the phrase.
"For my wife!" . . . His heart was beating
fast." It is time you —"
The Garibaldino arrested him with an extended arm.
"That was left for you to judge."
He got up slowly. His beard, unclipped since
Teresa's death, thick, snow-white, covered his powerful
chest. He turned his head to the door, and called out
in his strong voice —
"Linda."
Her answer came sharp and faint from within; and the
appalled Nostromo stood up, too, but remained mute,
gazing at the door. He was afraid. He was not afraid
of being refused the girl he loved — no mere refusal could
stand between him and a woman he desired — but the
shining spectre of the treasure rose before him, claiming
his allegiance in a silence that could not be gainsaid.
He was afraid, because, neither dead nor alive, like the
Gringos on Azuera, he belonged body and soul to the
unlawfulness of his audacity. He was afraid of being
forbidden the island. He was afraid, and said
nothing.
Seeing the two men standing up side by side to await
her, Linda stopped in the doorway. Nothing could alter
the passionate dead whiteness of her face; but her black
eyes seemed to catch and concentrate all the light of the
low sun in a flaming spark within the black depths,
covered at once by the slow descent of heavy eyelids.
"Behold thy husband, master, and benefactor." Old
the whole gulf.
She stepped forward with her eyes nearly closed, like a
sleep-walker in a beatific dream.
Nostromo made a superhuman effort. "It is time,
Linda, we two were betrothed," he said, steadily, in his
level, careless, unbending tone.
She put her hand into his offered palm, lowering her
head, dark with bronze glints, upon which her father's
hand rested for a moment.
"And so the soul of the dead is satisfied."
This came from Giorgio Viola, who went on talking
for a while of his dead wife; while the two, sitting side by
side, never looked at each other. Then the old man
ceased; and Linda, motionless, began to speak.
"Ever since I felt I lived in the world, I have lived
for you alone, Gian' Battista. And that you knew!
You knew it . . . Battistino."
She pronounced the name exactly with her mother's
intonation. A gloom as of the grave covered Nostromo's
heart.
"Yes. I knew," he said.
The heroic Garibaldino sat on the same bench bowing
his hoary head, his old soul dwelling alone with its
memories, tender and violent, terrible and dreary —
solitary on the earth full of men.
And Linda, his best-loved daughter, was saying, "I
was yours ever since I can remember. I had only to
think of you for the earth to become empty to my eyes.
When you were there, I could see no one else. I was
yours. Nothing is changed. The world belongs to
you, and you let me live in it." . . . She dropped
her low, vibrating voice to a still lower note, and found
other things to say — torturing for the man at her side.
Her murmur ran on ardent and voluble. She did not
she was embroidering in her hands, and passed in front
of them, silent, fresh, fair, with a quick glance and a
faint smile, to sit a little away on the other side of
Nostromo.
The evening was still. The sun sank almost to the
edge of a purple ocean; and the white lighthouse, livid
against the background of clouds filling the head of the
gulf, bore the lantern red and glowing, like a live ember
kindled by the fire of the sky. Giselle, indolent and
demure, raised the altar-cloth from time to time to hide
nervous yawns, as of a young panther.
Suddenly Linda rushed at her sister, and seizing her
head, covered her face with kisses. Nostromo's brain
reeled. When she left her, as if stunned by the violent
caresses, with her hands lying in her lap, the slave of
the treasure felt as if he could shoot that woman. Old
Giorgio lifted his leonine head.
"Where are you going, Linda?"
"To the light, padre mio."
"Si, si — to your duty."
He got up, too, looked after his eldest daughter; then,
in a tone whose festive note seemed the echo of a mood
lost in the night of ages —
"I am going in to cook something. Aha! Son! The
old man knows where to find a bottle of wine, too."
He turned to Giselle, with a change to austere tenderness.
"And you, little one, pray not to the God of priests
and slaves, but to the God of orphans, of the oppressed,
of the poor, of little children, to give thee a man like
this one for a husband."
His hand rested heavily for a moment on Nostromo's
shoulder; then he went in. The hopeless slave of the
San Tomé silver felt at these words the venomous fangs
by the novelty of the experience, by its force,
by its physical intimacy. A husband! A husband
for her! And yet it was natural that Giselle should
have a husband at some time or other. He had never
realized that before. In discovering that her beauty
could belong to another he felt as though he could
kill this one of old Giorgio's daughters also. He muttered
moodily —
"They say you love Ramirez."
She shook her head without looking at him. Coppery
glints rippled to and fro on the wealth of her gold
hair. Her smooth forehead had the soft, pure sheen
of a priceless pearl in the splendour of the sunset, mingling
the gloom of starry spaces, the purple of the sea, and
the crimson of the sky in a magnificent stillness.
"No," she said, slowly. "I never loved him. I
think I never . . . He loves me — perhaps."
The seduction of her slow voice died out of the air,
and her raised eyes remained fixed on nothing, as if
indifferent and without thought.
"Ramirez told you he loved you?" asked Nostromo,
restraining himself.
"Ah! once — one evening . . ."
"The miserable . . . Ha!"
He had jumped up as if stung by a gad-fly, and stood
before her mute with anger.
"Misericordia Divina! You, too, Gian' Battista!
Poor wretch that I am!" she lamented in ingenuous
tones. "I told Linda, and she scolded — she scolded.
Am I to live blind, dumb, and deaf in this world? And
she told father, who took down his gun and cleaned it.
Poor Ramirez! Then you came, and she told you."
He looked at her. He fastened his eyes upon the
hollow of her white throat, which had the invincible
Was this the child he had known? Was it possible?
It dawned upon him that in these last years he had
really seen very little — nothing — of her. Nothing.
She had come into the world like a thing unknown.
She had come upon him unawares. She was a danger.
A frightful danger. The instinctive mood of fierce
determination that had never failed him before the
perils of this life added its steady force to the violence
of his passion. She, in a voice that recalled to him the
song of running water, the tinkling of a silver bell,
continued —
"And between you three you have brought me here
into this captivity to the sky and water. Nothing else.
Sky and water. Oh, Sanctissima Madre. My hair
shall turn grey on this tedious island. I could hate you,
Gian' Battista!"
He laughed loudly. Her voice enveloped him like a
caress. She bemoaned her fate, spreading unconsciously,
like a flower its perfume in the coolness of the evening,
the indefinable seduction of her person. Was it her
fault that nobody ever had admired Linda? Even
when they were little, going out with their mother to
Mass, she remembered that people took no notice of
Linda, who was fearless, and chose instead to frighten
her, who was timid, with their attention. It was her
hair like gold, she supposed.
He broke out —
"Your hair like gold, and your eyes like violets, and
your lips like the rose; your round arms, your white
throat." . . .
Imperturbable in the indolence of her pose, she
blushed deeply all over to the roots of her hair. She
was not conceited. She was no more self-conscious than
a flower. But she was pleased. And perhaps even a
and added, impetuously —
"Your little feet!"
Leaning back against the rough stone wall of the
cottage, she seemed to bask languidly in the warmth
of the rosy flush. Only her lowered eyes glanced at
her little feet.
"And so you are going at last to marry our Linda.
She is terrible. Ah! now she will understand better
since you have told her you love her. She will not be so
fierce."
"Chica!" said Nostromo, "I have not told her anything."
"Then make haste. Come to-morrow. Come and
tell her, so that I may have some peace from her scolding
and — perhaps — who knows . . ."
"Be allowed to listen to your Ramirez, eh? Is that
it? You . . ."
"Mercy of God! How violent you are, Giovanni,"
she said, unmoved. "Who is Ramirez . . .
Ramirez . . . Who is he?" she repeated, dreamily,
in the dusk and gloom of the clouded gulf, with a
low red streak in the west like a hot bar of glowing
iron laid across the entrance of a world sombre as a
cavern, where the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores
had hidden his conquests of love and wealth.
"Listen, Giselle," he said, in measured tones; "I
will tell no word of love to your sister. Do you want
to know why?"
"Alas! I could not understand perhaps, Giovanni.
Father says you are not like other men; that no one had
ever understood you properly; that the rich will be
surprised yet. . . . Oh! saints in heaven! I am
weary."
She raised her embroidery to conceal the lower
lantern was shaded on the land side, but slanting
away from the dark column of the lighthouse they
could see the long shaft of light, kindled by Linda, go
out to strike the expiring glow in a horizon of purple
and red.
Giselle Viola, with her head resting against the wall of
the house, her eyes half closed, and her little feet, in
white stockings and black slippers, crossed over each
other, seemed to surrender herself, tranquil and fatal,
to the gathering dusk. The charm of her body, the
promising mysteriousness of her indolence, went out
into the night of the Placid Gulf like a fresh and
intoxicating fragrance spreading out in the shadows,
impregnating the air. The incorruptible Nostromo
breathed her ambient seduction in the tumultuous
heaving of his breast. Before leaving the harbour
he had thrown off the store clothing of Captain Fidanza,
for greater ease in the long pull out to the islands. He
stood before her in the red sash and check shirt as he
used to appear on the Company's wharf — a Mediterranean
sailor come ashore to try his luck in Costaguana.
The dusk of purple and red enveloped him, too — close,
soft, profound, as no more than fifty yards from that
spot it had gathered evening after evening about the
self-destructive passion of Don Martin Decoud's utter
scepticism, flaming up to death in solitude.
"You have got to hear," he began at last, with perfect
self-control. "I shall say no word of love to your
sister, to whom I am betrothed from this evening,
because it is you that I love. It is you!" . . .
The dusk let him see yet the tender and voluptuous
smile that came instinctively upon her lips shaped for
love and kisses, freeze hard in the drawn, haggard lines
of terror. He could not restrain himself any longer.
out to him, abandoned and regal in the dignity of her
languid surrender. He held her head in his two hands,
and showered rapid kisses upon the upturned face that
gleamed in the purple dusk. Masterful and tender,
he was entering slowly upon the fulness of his possession.
And he perceived that she was crying. Then the incomparable
Capataz, the man of careless loves, became
gentle and caressing, like a woman to the grief of a
child. He murmured to her fondly. He sat down by
her and nursed her fair head on his breast. He called
her his star and his little flower.
It had grown dark. From the living-room of the
light-keeper's cottage, where Giorgio, one of the Immortal
Thousand, was bending his leonine and heroic
head over a charcoal fire, there came the sound of
sizzling and the aroma of an artistic frittura.
In the obscure disarray of that thing, happening like a
cataclysm, it was in her feminine head that some gleam
of reason survived. He was lost to the world in their
embraced stillness. But she said, whispering into his
ear —
"God of mercy! What will become of me — here —
now — between this sky and this water I hate? Linda,
Linda — I see her!" . . . She tried to get out of his
arms, suddenly relaxed at the sound of that name. But
there was no one approaching their black shapes, enlaced
and struggling on the white background of the
wall. "Linda! Poor Linda! I tremble! I shall die
of fear before my poor sister Linda, betrothed to-day
to Giovanni — my lover! Giovanni, you must have been
mad! I cannot understand you! You are not like
other men! I will not give you up — never — only to
God himself! But why have you done this blind, mad,
cruel, frightful thing?"
Released, she hung her head, let fall her hands. The
altar-cloth, as if tossed by a great wind, lay far away
from them, gleaming white on the black ground.
"From fear of losing my hope of you," said Nostromo.
"You knew that you had my soul! You know everything!
It was made for you! But what could stand
between you and me? What? Tell me!" she repeated,
without impatience, in superb assurance.
"Your dead mother," he said, very low.
"Ah! . . . Poor mother! She has always . . .
She is a saint in heaven now, and I cannot give you
up to her. No, Giovanni. Only to God alone. You
were mad — but it is done. Oh! what have you done?
Giovanni, my beloved, my life, my master, do not leave
me here in this grave of clouds. You cannot leave me
now. You must take me away — at once — this instant
— in the little boat. Giovanni, carry me off to-night,
from my fear of Linda's eyes, before I have to look at
her again."
She nestled close to him. The slave of the San Tomé
silver felt the weight as of chains upon his limbs, a pressure
as of a cold hand upon his lips. He struggled
against the spell.
"I cannot," he said. "Not yet. There is something
that stands between us two and the freedom of the
world."
She pressed her form closer to his side with a subtle
and naïve instinct of seduction.
"You rave, Giovanni — my lover!" she whispered,
engagingly. "What can there be? Carry me off — in
thy very hands — to Doña Emilia — away from here.
I am not very heavy."
It seemed as though she expected him to lift her up at
once in his two palms. She had lost the notion of all
impossibility. Anything could happen on this night of
aloud —
"I tell you I am afraid of Linda!" And still he did not
move. She became quiet and wily. "What can there
be?" she asked, coaxingly.
He felt her warm, breathing, alive, quivering in the
hollow of his arm. In the exulting consciousness of his
strength, and the triumphant excitement of his mind, he
struck out for his freedom.
"A treasure," he said. All was still. She did not
understand. "A treasure. A treasure of silver to buy
a gold crown for thy brow."
"A treasure?" she repeated in a faint voice, as if
from the depths of a dream. "What is it you say?"
She disengaged herself gently. He got up and looked
down at her, aware of her face, of her hair, her lips, the
dimples on her cheeks — seeing the fascination of her
person in the night of the gulf as if in the blaze of noonday.
Her nonchalant and seductive voice trembled
with the excitement of admiring awe and ungovernable
curiosity.
"A treasure of silver!" she stammered out. Then
pressed on faster: "What? Where? How did you
get it, Giovanni?"
He wrestled with the spell of captivity. It was as if
striking a heroic blow that he burst out —
"Like a thief!"
The densest blackness of the Placid Gulf seemed to
fall upon his head. He could not see her now. She had
vanished into a long, obscure abysmal silence, whence
her voice came back to him after a time with a faint
glimmer, which was her face.
"I love you! I love you!"
These words gave him an unwonted sense of freedom;
they cast a spell stronger than the accursed spell of the
dead thing into an exulting conviction of his power.
He would cherish her, he said, in a splendour as great
as Doña Emilia's. The rich lived on wealth stolen
from the people, but he had taken from the rich nothing
— nothing that was not lost to them already by their
folly and their betrayal. For he had been betrayed —
he said — deceived, tempted. She believed him. . . .
He had kept the treasure for purposes of revenge; but
now he cared nothing for it. He cared only for her.
He would put her beauty in a palace on a hill crowned
with olive trees — a white palace above a blue sea. He
would keep her there like a jewel in a casket. He would
get land for her — her own land fertile with vines and
corn — to set her little feet upon. He kissed them. . . .
He had already paid for it all with the soul of a woman
and the life of a man. . . . The Capataz de
Cargadores tasted the supreme intoxication of his generosity.
He flung the mastered treasure superbly at
her feet in the impenetrable darkness of the gulf, in
the darkness defying — as men said — the knowledge
of God and the wit of the devil. But she must let him
grow rich first — he warned her.
She listened as if in a trance. Her fingers stirred in
his hair. He got up from his knees reeling, weak, empty,
as though he had flung his soul away.
"Make haste, then," she said. "Make haste,
Giovanni, my lover, my master, for I will give thee
up to no one but God. And I am afraid of Linda."
He guessed at her shudder, and swore to do his best.
He trusted the courage of her love. She promised to be
brave in order to be loved always — far away in a white
palace upon a hill above a blue sea. Then with a timid,
tentative eagerness she murmured —
"Where is it? Where? Tell me that, Giovanni."
He opened his mouth and remained silent — thunder-
struck.
"Not that! Not that!" he gasped out, appalled at
the spell of secrecy that had kept him dumb before so
many people falling upon his lips again with unimpaired
force. Not even to her. Not even to her. It was too
dangerous. "I forbid thee to ask," he cried at her,
deadening cautiously the anger of his voice.
He had not regained his freedom. The spectre of the
unlawful treasure arose, standing by her side like a figure
of silver, pitiless and secret, with a finger on its pale lips.
His soul died within him at the vision of himself creeping
in presently along the ravine, with the smell of earth, of
damp foliage in his nostrils — creeping in, determined in
a purpose that numbed his breast, and creeping out
again loaded with silver, with his ears alert to every
sound. It must be done on this very night — that work
of a craven slave!
He stooped low, pressed the hem of her skirt to his
lips, with a muttered command —
"Tell him I would not stay," and was gone suddenly
from her, silent, without as much as a footfall in the
dark night.
She sat still, her head resting indolently against the
wall, and her little feet in white stockings and black
slippers crossed over each other. Old Giorgio, coming
out, did not seem to be surprised at the intelligence as
much as she had vaguely feared. For she was full of
inexplicable fear now — fear of everything and everybody
except of her Giovanni and his treasure. But that was
incredible.
The heroic Garibaldino accepted Nostromo's abrupt
departure with a sagacious indulgence. He remembered
his own feelings, and exhibited a masculine penetration
of the true state of the case.
"Va bene. Let him go. Ha! ha! No matter how
fair the woman, it galls a little. Liberty, liberty.
There's more than one kind! He has said the great
word, and son Gian' Battista is not tame." He seemed
to be instructing the motionless and scared Giselle.
. . . "A man should not be tame," he added, dogmatically
out of the doorway. Her stillness and silence
seemed to displease him. "Do not give way to the
enviousness of your sister's lot," he admonished her,
very grave, in his deep voice.
Presently he had to come to the door again to call in
his younger daughter. It was late. He shouted her
name three times before she even moved her head. Left
alone, she had become the helpless prey of astonishment.
She walked into the bedroom she shared with
Linda like a person profoundly asleep. That aspect
was so marked that even old Giorgio, spectacled, raising
his eyes from the Bible, shook his head as she shut the
door behind her.
She walked right across the room without looking at
anything, and sat down at once by the open window.
Linda, stealing down from the tower in the exuberance
of her happiness, found her with a lighted candle at her
back, facing the black night full of sighing gusts of wind
and the sound of distant showers — a true night of the
gulf, too dense for the eye of God and the wiles of the
devil. She did not turn her head at the opening of the
door.
There was something in that immobility which
reached Linda in the depths of her paradise. The elder
sister guessed angrily: the child is thinking of that
wretched Ramirez. Linda longed to talk. She said
in her arbitrary voice, "Giselle!" and was not answered
by the slightest movement.
The girl that was going to live in a palace and walk on
for anything in the world would she have turned her
head to face her sister. Her heart was beating madly.
She said with subdued haste —
"Do not speak to me. I am praying."
Linda, disappointed, went out quietly; and Giselle
sat on unbelieving, lost, dazed, patient, as if waiting for
the confirmation of the incredible. The hopeless blackness
of the clouds seemed part of a dream, too. She
waited.
She did not wait in vain. The man whose soul was
dead within him, creeping out of the ravine, weighted
with silver, had seen the gleam of the lighted window,
and could not help retracing his steps from the
beach.
On that impenetrable background, obliterating the
lofty mountains by the seaboard, she saw the slave of
the San Tomé silver, as if by an extraordinary power
of a miracle. She accepted his return as if henceforth
the world could hold no surprise for all eternity.
She rose, compelled and rigid, and began to speak long
before the light from within fell upon the face of the
approaching man.
"You have come back to carry me off. It is
well! Open thy arms, Giovanni, my lover. I am
coming."
His prudent footsteps stopped, and with his eyes
glistening wildly, he spoke in a harsh voice:
"Not yet. I must grow rich slowly." . . . A
threatening note came into his tone. "Do not forget
that you have a thief for your lover."
"Yes! Yes!" she whispered, hastily. "Come nearer!
Listen! Do not give me up, Giovanni! Never,
never! . . . I will be patient! . . ."
Her form drooped consolingly over the low casement
the room went out, and weighted with silver, the magnificent
Capataz clasped her round her white neck in the
darkness of the gulf as a drowning man clutches at a
straw.
| CHAPTER TWELVE Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |