Story of the Month — From Life's Window

Modern literature is distinguished by its penetration into psychological studies which the older literature neglected absolutely, and by its care to trace the states stirred up by the awakening of emotion in the young, or its aging in youth, or its coldness in the old. These are new circles and arenas which modern literature opens, and which yesterday lay in the forbidden unknown.

What are life's impressions upon the fresh souls of the young? How do poetry, art, and music work upon certain dreaming little girls? And what do they feel before certain palaces shut in the face of their imagination?

In the story published here, Mrs. Elena Silveira, the Brazilian woman of letters who has become known to the readers of this magazine, tells us everything charming and delightful.

In that period, the period of my violin lessons, I would go twice a week to Dona Mirtes's house and spend the rest of the days waiting for the lessons to come; my heart had bound itself to my teacher and to the world of melody, and I gave myself over to her, and both became part of me — for Dona Mirtes's thin, graceful hands had the power to make of the violin a tormented being that moaned, giving voice to the sorrows of the whole world.

And my teacher was generous: after the lesson she would play for me whatever I wished; and she was indulgent and tender toward my first years of girlhood, thirsty for everything beautiful and imprisoned within a narrow horizon — the horizon of Casa Branca, the country town where we lived.

And when the melodies poured down upon me and built about me a dome in which enchantment echoed, my teacher would change — in my eyes — from a spinster, neat of dress, artless of glance, fidgety of movement, into another person created for me by my sweet dreams! The traces of the years would be wiped away from the thin face bent over the violin, from the sparse hair and the worn-out body, and I would see her a beautiful young woman, burning with the heat of youth, whom no one had heeded, so that she withered away waiting for the prince of her dreams!

In those minutes my imagination would take revenge upon the life that had been so hard on my teacher: it would create for her a bewitching beauty, set beside her an adoring young man, and lodge her in a house of luxury and elegance surrounded by an English garden with green terraces sloping down and down to the shore of a blue lake...

And when the violin's last notes died in the air, my teacher would lean tenderly over me, and I would breathe the scent of cologne and see her sweet face, its wrinkles traced like threads; the tears would spring to my eyes, and she would kiss me in silence, and I would take leave of her with a gesture, emotion gripping my throat so tight that not a word came out.

★

As for my madness for music, it showed itself the day we went down to the city of São Paulo to spend a few weeks, and my family took me to a cinema hall.

A man appeared on the stage and began to play the violin, and the colored lights poured over him and gave him a strange shape. He began to play a piece by the composer Dvořák, and the melodies rose little by little until they took possession of me and of my senses. The hall darkened, and everything around me vanished: the face of a boy among the spectators whom I had begun to love vanished; the beauty of my elder sister Livia vanished; everything vanished, and nothing remained but the graceful hands and the angular face — that demonic face bent over the violin. I yielded like one given a drug, and went with the melodies into an enchanted world, and plunged into deep, clear waters, and kissed — as they do in the cinema — the face of an unknown young man over whom yellow lights poured.

The melodies strolled over my tender girlhood as along a red road going deep into the earth, passing... and passing... descending with me into fathomless chasms, then drawing me up and walking with me and showing me unknown horizons and unfamiliar landscapes.

When the hall was lit again I was a thing to stir pity, shaken by sobs; my mother mocked me, and eyes turned toward me because the box we were in faced the spectators' seats. Eleonor and Livia began to laugh at me, so I strove with myself and tried to think of cheerful things, and buried my reddened nose in the collar of my dress, while my tears fell, drop by drop, upon the green baize. And here my father comes to my rescue: he touches my shoulder lightly and says:

— Come close to me, here at the back of the box; the place is better than where you are.

I sit at his side, and his tenderness toward me deepens my emotion — that silent, watchful, unbidden tenderness; and I fall to thinking, as my small trembling hand is lost in his strong one, that he is the only person in the world who understands me, and a delicious warmth steals through me...

Then the actress Alma Rubens appeared on the screen, with her fugitive smile, her restless figure, her sorrowful, grieving mouth; and I wished I might become like her when I grew to be a young lady, and might have the fine beauty of her movement! But how could I, with my round face, full of health, so different from that pure oval face framed in that frame of beautiful black hair.

All through the picture my father kept patting my hand, while Alma Rubens suffered as she embraced an officer maimed in the war, and the music softly accompanied the scenes of gloom and sorrow, and my tears followed one another in great drops, and the spirit of art latent within me took body little by little.

*

"In Latin America there is a worship with three hypostases. They worship God, and wallow in His love, and surrender themselves to Him; the rest of the Christian lands may envy them a faith than which I have never seen any deeper, or more splendid, or one that clings closer to souls. And they worship woman... And they worship music — that lofty, exalted music; and you see them, while North America tries to invade them with the new music, that clamorous, brazen, wanton, sneering music, straining to repel it and clinging to the dearest of all their dead:

Verdi, and Beethoven, and Chopin, and Liszt, and Ravel, and all the happy immortal company, which I do not doubt is playing today in one of the far-off worlds, pure and exalted."

*

Music!

And my father orders a violin for me.

Ah, how splendid the day they brought it to the house! My father had arranged for the lessons with Dona Mirtes, and I was waiting for the instrument, and the bitter waiting was blowing my days to dust.

When the porter set the crate on the floor, I felt that a choir of angels surrounded me, blowing on their trumpets the anthem of victory.

— Little one! Do you want me to open the crate?

— Of course I want it.

What joy was mine when I heard the clatter of the crate's boards being pried off, board by board, and the papers being unwound from the violin, one by one, and the violin's case, dressed in black leather, appearing at the bottom of the crate like a living creature asleep. I imagined then that in its taut strings and in the suppleness of its yielding bow dwelt all the songs of the world.

I took the violin in my trembling hands and fondled it a long while; then I carried it and went flying about the passages of the house and its halls; I was a flame of gaiety and joy, whirling with it as though in a mad dance! In the dining room I was seized with dizziness and collapsed into the net hammock slung there, and I saw my mother and my sister spinning, and likewise the painted angels on the walls, carrying their woven garlands of flowers. It seemed to me that no beauty equaled the beauty of our house, that I did not live in that old house in the interior, but in a world adorned with lovely, harmonious colors! It seemed to me that my sister Livia had the beauty of the dwellers on Olympus, that my sister Eleonor was a maiden out of dreams, and that my mother was the very mine of goodness.

And my father? Who had given me the violin? He was a demigod!

*

And the lessons began. And since I was extreme in all things, I threw myself body and soul into the art, which I began to learn with astonishing ease, and I became — heeding nothing else — like a dweller on the moon.

One day my father called me into the study and shut the door on us. He said:

— A complaint reached me today from the mathematics teacher. If you fail and stay down in your class, the violin lessons end.

In those days my father spoke with a terrifying brevity.

Terror seized me! Could this monstrous thing happen? Give up my music lessons because an ugly old teacher saw fit to "fail" me in the examination? And where should I find the time to study? And how should I study? And how should I leave the world of fancy and dreams to drown in the world of numbers, the world of goblins? After those enchanted melodies, could I bear to do sums like a little clerk in a shop?

Ah, how heavy is life's injustice upon a girl thirsty for fancy!

When I left Dona Mirtes's house that day I did not walk the usual road, but went wandering aimlessly through streets and alleys. Hugging my violin to my breast, I was like the mother of a little girl shielding her darling from evil men. I walked with a tragedy in my heart that made a martyr of me. I pictured myself with the violin torn from me, lifting my arms in supplication to a tyrant father. And I almost wished it might be taken from me, so that I might struggle for its sake as a lovesick girl suffers for her beloved! And I began to recall the many creatures who had struggled for the sake of art, and I saw myself starving in a dark hovel and walking barefoot upon the snow.

*

What a strange girl I was, living in dreams and not content with the life that made my two sisters happy — the life of quiet evenings by lamplight, when the music of the phonograph records played, and the hammock swayed, going and coming, and the shadows lengthened on the walls, and my father sat talking with our neighbor at one end of the table while the knot of women gathered at the other. How peace reigned at the hour coffee was taken! And those sweets from the hands of our cook Umbelina, those sweets perfumed with aniseed — never in my life shall I taste their like!

And yet, for all that, there was that period of my life without savor! My God! Why was this discontent born in me to poison my life? And why do I remain so, knowing the worth of things only after they have gone from my hands?

Those hours, the hours of my first girlhood — would that they might return! Would that I might go back to the big blue house near the garden ringed with the silvered railing! Would that I might return once more and take flesh as a girl roaming the streets of the town of Casa Branca — that is, "the White House" — carrying in her arms a violin and carrying in her breast rebellion! Rebellion against lessons, against the family, against the powers that steer this world and make it hateful to a girl who lives in the world of dreams.

*

... Have we grown-ups ever withdrawn into ourselves and asked how far the cinema affects our children's lives? Have we reviewed the stirring impressions bred by the pictures of the actresses' wantonness, and their jewels, and their extravagance, and... their motorcars? And the tales of infatuation?? And some films — from first to last — are nothing but storms of scenes of exciting love?...

*

I suppose that day I walked a long while, and evening was drawing near when I arrived close to that house...

I stopped, tired, and leaned my violin against the railing; and the roses peered out as if spying on me, and stirred, swayed by the breeze, from side to side, and I felt a festival of flowers entering through my eyes into the depths of my soul. And behind the roses a woman appeared.

In her hand was a green watering can, which she tilted, letting the abundant water stream from it over the shrubs of the garden. The drops of water glittered on the shining leaves like the stones of jewels. And in the young woman's hair were combs of tortoiseshell set with beads of diamond. She wore a loose, flowing gown that showed the lines of her body indistinctly, while her two white arms wound among the flowers, twisting and supple, as serpents undulate. And her strange, beautiful face was unlike any face I had ever seen! A luminous face, deep in meaning like a watercolor. As for her lashes, they had — when she lowered them against the glare of the sun — light flutterings like the startled stumblings of frightened birds.

She said:

— Do you love roses?

I nodded, overcome with shyness. She went toward a kind of tent over which the plants had made an arbor, and came back carrying a scissors, with which she cut me four great roses. I thanked her lovingly, my eyes fastened upon her face. Never in my life had I seen a creature of flesh and bone of such beauty.

And, so as to say something, I asked:

— Is the house yours?

— Yes, it is my house. Do you find it beautiful?

Of course I found it beautiful, like the mansions of the cinema, with its red tiles and the vines embracing its walls. On the small square windows were curtains of dotted organza — "Indian gauze" — and before the entrance, beds planted with red geraniums.

Then the young woman gathered her gown about her white neck, and with an elegant motion bent her head in a gentle bow and began to withdraw; and I raised my eyes to her golden hair and to a face of hers that had no like!

And I went on thinking of her as of a strange vision. I spoke of her to no one. When night came and I went into my room, I resolved to ask my mother, when she went to São Paulo, to buy a loose "kimono" embroidered with flowers and birds. And I shut my eyes, striving to picture my mother in that gown, watering the flowers like that woman. The vision did not satisfy me...

For the hair was not that hair, and the figure was not that figure...

And suddenly it burst upon me that I was a dreadful girl!!

And I went back many times to spy upon the house from afar, in the grip of a violent attraction. In the hot hours I would see the windows shut, and the bees droning in the air, and the roses weighing down the branches, and I would picture that creature asleep in a soft bed, her hair spread out and her white neck rising through clouds of lace.

One day, in the afternoon, I saw her accompanying a man walking in the garden; they did not see me. It was the hour of scorching heat, when the streets empty of people. When they reached the outer gate he wrapped his arm around her waist and kissed her on her mouth. It was a swift scene that lasted only a moment, and I was thrown into confusion, for I had never before seen such a kiss except at the cinema. I moved away with long strides and vanished around the bend of the street like a fugitive.

After this I became restless, unable to gather my thoughts. And again and again Dona Mirtes recalled me to attention during the lessons, saying:

— Your mind is wandering. Look here.

And I no longer asked her at the end of the lessons to play me her beautiful pieces, and I saw her face again as it really was, with the vexing freckles on the cheeks and that sickly hollow about the eyes. My straying imagination deserted her and began to circle about another person, and to walk in the quiet little street and see the wall with the roses hanging over it.

And my poor teacher felt that someone was stealing something from her, and she became shrunken and sad, her heart overflowing with those stirring expressions for which the spinsters of the countryside are famous. I stood, and it seemed to me that she hesitated; perhaps she saw the longing in my eyes, for she walked as far as the outer gate and opened it and said simply:

— Come, come in.

We passed through the little garden; I walked on the pebbles of the path as though I were treading upon clouds. We entered the house, and the fierce glare of the sun outside made the interior seem dark. After a moment the ornaments showed themselves to me: colored china vases full of flowers, and cushions scattered here and there over the chairs and on the divan; and I saw an oil painting of a blue-eyed little girl with thick chestnut hair falling in twisted ringlets, ring upon ring.

And I felt a great shyness. The mistress of the house seated me beside her on the settee, and her perfume enveloped me, and her bosom showed dazzling white in the wide opening of her gown. Then she lit a cigarette and set it between her crimson lips, and held out to me a big box of chestnuts.

I gazed at her and thought myself in a dream. Was it possible that such a young woman lived in a country town like ours and no one felt her presence?

She said:

— Do you take lessons on the violin,

The moment the lesson is over I hurry out, and on the way I set myself to rights; and when I come near the house with the red tiles I walk with quick, elegant steps, and if I see the young woman in the garden I greet her and walk on, as though the road were the road to my own house.

*

... Are they fallen in body or in soul, these whom we call "daughters of pleasure"? Are they unworthy to kiss a baby and to clasp a child? How many a storm of feeling lies behind those walls which people suppose hide nothing but sin and profligacy? And how many a woman writhes, aching and weeping, over a life gone desolate of children and of children's abiding!!...

*

One day I left the house before the appointed time, meaning to pass in front of her house before the lesson.

I found her sitting under the eaves of the house, near the railing; she caught sight of me and beckoned with her hand, an affectionate gesture with which the sleeve of her gown fell back to the elbow. She was wearing a gown of red velvet that wrapped her body close and showed the beauty of her high bosom, narrowing at her waist and then falling loose. I held my breath, so strongly did the sight of her move me, and she went on smiling at me, her head in the shadow.

She said:

— Are you coming back from your violin lesson?
— No, madam, I am going to the lesson. How fierce this heat is!

And she was studying me with pleasure.

— Do you like chestnut sweets?
— I do.
— Then come in.
— No, madam. That would be a trouble to you.

What trouble could it be? Do you love music?

And she left me no time to answer, but went on warmly:

— I have loved music all my life. I was a little girl like you, just like you. That day, when I saw you standing before me, emotion overcame me, and I seemed to see "myself" standing before me. That self of mine which I shall never be again.

Myself at twelve years of age...

And she laughed lightly, with trembling tears on the tips of her lashes; and I took her hand, to say to her: "I am here — do not grieve!" At that she drew me to her with a violent movement and took my head between her hands and kissed me on my hair and my eyes and my face.

I nearly choked with emotion, and she noticed my fright and the flush of my face and said in a voice of utmost sweetness:

— Are you afraid of me?

— No, madam! You are kind, and very beautiful; never in my life have I seen anyone like you.

And I felt that I had spoken like a simpleton,

(The remainder of this piece is on page 33)

for that was not what I had meant to say; but the words kept escaping me.

She rose, and stood for a while with her back to me and her eyes on the street, while I busied myself with eating the chestnuts. Then she turned toward the vase and began arranging the roses and putting gentle questions to me:

— How old are you? Have you been to São Paulo? Do you work hard at your lessons? Are you religious? Have you made your First Communion?

— I have made my First Communion, but I have not yet been confirmed. When I am confirmed I shall ask you to be my godmother.

And suddenly a cloud spread over her beautiful face, and her eyes froze, terror showing in them as they looked toward the door; and I saw a fat man advancing toward us. He was strange-looking, wearing on his middle finger a great diamond ring, while a gold chain hung with charms dangled over his white waistcoat. The man shouted:

My darling! My darling!

Then he came toward her with arms outspread, smiling a strange smile that swelled two thick lips, while two reddened eyes bulged.

That figure stirred disgust, and the entrance of such a person into the elegant house seemed strange and unseemly; and I began to tremble, something within me whispering that an extraordinary thing was happening. The young woman moved quickly and pressed me to her breast and flattened herself against the wall, to widen the distance between us and the visitor; and as he still kept coming she roared:

— Don't you see the little one? Stop! Stop! And get away from before the door!!

He drew back, astounded, as far as the window. Then with a swift movement she took the box of chestnuts and pushed me outside.

She was trembling like one stricken with malaria, and her yellowed face wrung the heart. I understood nothing, nor did I try to understand; I let her lead me, and when we reached the outer gate we stopped. She looked at me — and never have I seen a look more loving or more sweet! She pushed me gently, and when I was in the street I saw her through the railing, and she seemed to me a prisoner, looking at me and at the world with a look of anxiety and grief! The marks of that grandeur she used to display, like a goddess, were gone from her. She was a humbled creature, speaking imploringly:

— Tell no one, my treasure, that you were here. I ought never to have let you enter this house! I yielded to temptation, and it was my duty to resist it... It was your freshness and your purity, and your likeness to a little one I once knew who was called Maria... But there is no excuse for me, none! I shall never forgive myself. Do not pass this way again, my darling! This street has no place in your world... Make a wide circle when you go to your music lesson, but do not pass this way again!

*

And nights passed while I lay awake in my bed, living those scenes over again. I told no one what had happened; it was as if something in my inmost self imposed silence upon me. In the hours of sleeplessness I would whisper the young woman's name and feel it burn my lips.

And I grew up, and the matter became clear to me the day my companions began to speak in whispers of sin and of the women who live the life of temptation.

And the memory of this woman has remained in my life. She has gone on looking at me through the bars of the railing with those two eyes full of kindness and sweetness and purity!