Zorro (25 page)
Isabel entertained herself painting watercolor landscapes and portraits. Have I told you that she was a good artist? I think I forgot to mention that an unpardonable omission, seeing that it was her only talent. On the whole, her art won more sympathy among the humble than all Juliana’s charitable works. She could capture a remarkable likeness, but she made her subjects better-looking than they were, giving them more teeth, fewer wrinkles, and a dignified expression they seldom possessed.
But let us go back to Barcelona, where Diego kept busy with his classes, La Justicia, the taverns where he met with other students, and his swashbuckling adventures, which was his romantic way of referring to his escapades. In the meantime Juliana was living the idle life of young women of the period. She could go nowhere, not even to confession, without a chaperone. Nuria was her shadow. Neither could she be seen talking alone with any man under sixty. She went to balls with her father, sometimes accompanied by Diego, whom they introduced as a cousin from the Indies. Juliana showed no sign of being in any hurry to marry, despite the long line of eager suitors. It was her father’s responsibility to arrange a good marriage for her, but he seemed incapable of choosing a son-in-law worthy of his marvelous daughter. In two years Juliana would be twenty, the allowable limit for finding a fiance; if she was not engaged by then, the odds of her marrying would plummet month by month. With his unquenchable optimism, Diego was making the same calculations, and he concluded that time was working in his favor: once Juliana saw that she was withering on the vine, she would marry him to keep from becoming an old maid. He tried to use this curious argument to convince Bernardo, the one person patient enough to listen to his constant ranting about his desperate love.
As 1812 came to a close, Napoleon Bonaparte met defeat in Russia. The emperor had invaded that enormous country with his Grande Armee of nearly two hundred thousand men. The invincible French armies operated under an iron discipline, and they moved at a forced march, much more quickly than their enemies because they carried very little weight and lived off the land they conquered. As they advanced toward the interior of Russia, towns emptied, their inhabitants evaporated, and farmers burned their harvests. With every advance, Napoleon left behind scorched earth. The invaders triumphantly marched into Moscow, where they were welcomed by apocalyptic flames and the isolated fire of sharpshooters hidden in the smoking ruins, ready to die killing. The Muscovites, imitating the example of the brave farmers, had burned their possessions before evacuating the city. No one was left to give the keys of the city to Napoleon, not a single Russian soldier to humiliate, only a few tired prostitutes resigned to entertaining the conquerors now that their usual clients had decamped. Napoleon found himself isolated in the midst of a mountain of ashes. He waited, not knowing what he was waiting for, through the summer. By the time he decided to return to France, the rains had begun, and soon the soil of Russia would be covered with snow as hard as granite. The emperor could never have imagined the terrible trials that his men would have to bear. Added to harassment from the Cossacks and ambushes by farmers, they suffered hunger and a lunar cold that none of his soldiers had ever experienced. Thousands of the French army were turned into statues of eternal ice and left stationed along the ignominious route of the retreat. Soldiers were forced to eat their horses, their boots, at times even the corpses of their comrades. Only ten thousand men, defeated and disillusioned, made it back to their homeland. When he saw his destroyed army, Napoleon knew that the star that had shone so brightly in his prodigious ascent to power was beginning to fade. He had to pull back the troops occupying a large part of Europe. Two-thirds of those sent to Spain were recalled. At last the Spanish could glimpse a victorious end after years of bloody resistance, but that triumph would not come until sixteen months later.
That year, during the same period that Napoleon was licking his wounds after the disastrous retreat to France, Eulalia de Califs sent her nephew Rafael Moncada to the Antilles on a mission to expand her chocolate enterprise. She planned to sell cocoa, almond paste, preserved nutmeats, and refined aromatic sugar to chocolatiers in Europe and the United States. She had heard that all Americans had a sweet tooth. Her nephew’s mission was to weave a network of business contacts in important cities from Washington to Paris.
Moscow was put on hold, since it was in ruins, but Eulalia was confident that as soon as the smoke of war cleared, the Russian capital would be rebuilt in all its previous splendor. Rafael set out on an eleven-month tour, plowing oceans and pounding his kidneys on horseback, all to establish the aromatic brotherhood of chocolate imagined by Eulalia.
Before he left for the Antilles, and without saying a word of his intentions to his aunt, Rafael requested an audience with Tomas de Romeu. He was not received in the de Romeu home but on the neutral terrain of the Geographic and Philosophic Society, of which the older man was a member. The club ran an excellent restaurant on the second floor, and Tomas de Romeu’s admiration for France did not extend to its exquisite cuisine. No canary tongues for him he preferred robust Catalan dishes: escudella, a soup to raise the dead, esto fat de toro, a stew with the firepower of a bomb, and the divine butifarra del obispo, a blood sausage blacker and fatter than most. Rafael Moncada, facing his host across a mountain of meat and fat, was a little pale.
He barely tasted the meal because he had a delicate stomach and was nervous as well. He laid out his personal circumstances to Juliana’s father, from his titles to his financial solvency.
“I deeply regret, Senor de Romeu, that we had to meet on the unfortunate occasion of the duel with Diego de la Vega. He is an impetuous young man, and I myself, I must admit, am often inclined to impulse. We had words, and ended up on the field of honor. Happily, there were no serious consequences. I hope that the incident does not weigh negatively in the judgement you hold of me, sir,” said the candidate for the role of son-in-law.
“Not at all, caballero. The purpose of a duel is to cleanse a stain. Once two gentlemen have fought, no rancor remains between them,” de Romeu replied amiably, although he had not forgotten the details of that particular match.
With the dessert, post re de music, filled with so many dried fruits and nuts that they stuck in one’s teeth, Moncada expressed his desire to ask for Juliana’s hand as soon as he returned from his journey. For a long time, without intervening, Tomas had observed the strange relationship between his daughter and her tenacious suitor. He found it difficult to talk about emotions, and he had never made the effort to approach his daughters. Woman’s talk flustered him, and he preferred to delegate that to Nuria. He had watched Juliana toddle down the stone corridors of his icy home when she was small, had noticed when her permanent teeth came in, and had watched her shoot up in a spurt and navigate through the graceless years of puberty. Then one day she stood before him with little-girl curls and a woman’s body, her dress bursting at the seams. At that point he ordered Nuria to have a proper wardrobe made for her, hire a dancing master, and not let his daughter out of her sight. Now here he was being accosted by Rafael Moncada, among other well-placed caballeros, asking for Juliana’s hand in marriage, and he did not know what to say. Such an alliance would be ideal; any father in his situation would be pleased; but de Romeu did not like Moncada, less because of differences in their ideological positions than for the disturbing gossip he had heard about the man’s character. The generally held opinion was that marriage is a social and financial arrangement in which sentiment plays little part that part of marriage irons out over the years but de Romeu did not agree. He had married for love, and he had been very happy, so much so that he never found a woman to take his wife’s place. Juliana was like him, and to make matters worse, she had filled her head with romantic novels. He was held in check by the enormous respect he had for his daughter. He would have to twist her arm to get her to marry someone she didn’t love, and he did not feel capable of doing that; he wanted her to be happy, and he doubted that Moncada was the man who could achieve that. He would have to report their conversation to Juliana, but he didn’t know how; her beauty and virtue intimidated him. He felt more comfortable with Isabel, whose obvious imperfections made her much more accessible. He realized that he could not put things off, so that very night he communicated Moncada’s proposal to her. She shrugged and without missing a stitch in her embroidery commented that many people had died of malaria in the Antilles, so there was no need to hurry a decision.
Diego was happy. The journey of his dangerous rival presented him with a unique opportunity to gain ground in the race for Juliana’s hand. The girl showed no reaction to Moncada’s absence, but neither did she seem to note Diego’s advances. She continued to treat him with the same tolerant and distracted affection she had always shown, without demonstrating the least curiosity about his mysterious activities. She was similarly unimpressed with his poems. She could not imagine that the teeth like pearls, emerald eyes, and ruby lips of those verses were to be taken seriously. Looking for more excuses to spend time with Juliana, Diego joined dancing classes and turned out to be an elegant and spirited dancer. He was even able to convince Nuria to rattle a bone or two to the tune of a fandango, although he could never get her to intercede with Juliana; on that point, the good woman was always as insensitive as Isabel. Hoping to capture the admiration of the women of the house, Diego cut candles in half with his fencing foil, with such precision that the flame never wavered and the parts of the candle remained in place. He could also extinguish them with the tip of his whip. He perfected the sleight of hand he had been taught by Galileo Tempesta, and performed true miracles with cards. He also juggled lighted torches and escaped unaided from a trunk closed with a padlock and chain. When he ran out of tricks, he tried to impress his beloved with his adventures, including some he had promised Bernardo and Maestro Manuel Escalante never to mention. In one moment of weakness, he hinted about the existence of a secret society to which only a select number of men belonged. Juliana congratulated him, thinking he was referring to a student club that wandered through the streets playing love ballads. Juliana’s attitude was not one of disdain she was fond of Diego nor of malicious ness of which she was incapable: it was merely the effect of the novels. She was waiting for the hero from her books, courageous and tragic, who would rescue her from everyday boredom, and it never occurred to her that that person might be Diego de la Vega. Or Rafael Moncada.
Every day it became more evident that the end of the war was near.
Eulalia de Callis was impatiently preparing for that moment while her nephew secured their business affiliations outside the country. Malaria did not resolve Juliana de Romeu’s problem with Moncada, and in November 1813 he returned, wealthier than ever because his aunt had allocated a high percentage of the bonbon business to him. He had been successful in the best circles in Europe, and in the United States he met no lesser a personage than Thomas Jefferson, to whom he suggested the idea of planting cacao trees in Virginia. As soon as he brushed off the dust of the road, Moncada communicated with Tomas de Romeu, repeating his intention to pay suit to Juliana. He had been waiting for years, and he was not inclined to accept another evasion. Two hours later, Tomas summoned his daughter to the library, the place where he settled most of his affairs and clarified his existential doubts with the help of a glass of cognac, and transmitted her suitor’s message to her.
“You are at an age to marry, my dear daughter. Time passes for everyone,” he argued. “Rafael Moncada is a true gentleman, and upon the death of his aunt he will become one of the wealthiest men in Catalonia. I do not judge people by their financial position, as you know, but I have to think of your security.”
“An unhappy marriage is worse than death for a woman, Father. There is no way out of it. The idea of obeying and serving a man is terrible if there is no trust and affection.”
“That grows after you marry, Juliana.”
“Not always, sir. Besides, there are your needs and my duty to consider. Who will care for you when you grow old? Isabel does not have the temperament for that.”
“For God’s sake, Juliana! I have never suggested that my daughters should look after me in my old age. What I want are grandchildren, and to see you both well placed. I cannot die in peace without leaving you protected.”
“I do not know whether Rafael Moncada is the man for me. I cannot imagine any kind of intimacy with him,” she murmured, blushing.
“You are no different from other girls in that respect, daughter. What virtuous young woman can imagine that?” Tomas de Romeu replied, as embarrassed as she was.
That was a subject he had never expected to discuss with his daughters.
He supposed that at the right moment Nuria would explain what they needed to know, although the chaperone probably was as ignorant about such matters as the girls. Juliana did not choose to tell her father that she talked about those things all the time with Agnes Duchamp, and that she had learned everything she needed to know in her romantic novels.
“I need a little more time to decide, Father,” Juliana pleaded.
Tomas de Romeu had never missed his departed wife so badly; she would have handled the problem wisely and with a firm hand, as mothers do. He was weary of so much hot and cold. He spoke with Rafael Moncada to ask for another postponement, and Moncada had no choice but to agree. Then Tomas ordered Juliana to talk things over with her pillow, and told her that if she did not have an answer in two weeks’ time, he would accept Moncada’s proposal, and that would be the end of that. It was his last word, he concluded, though his voice quavered as he said it. By then Moncada’s long offensive had reached the level of a personal challenge; people were talking about it in the stateliest salons and in the servants’ patios as well, how this young girl who had no fortune and no titles was humiliating the best catch in Barcelona. If his daughter kept asking him to put it off, Tomas de Romeu would be facing a serious confrontation with Moncada, but undoubtedly he would have continued to find excuses had a strange event not precipitated the outcome.