Bonifacio concealed from his wife his role in these dealings, that he was the prime mover behind the planned party; however, she knew there was to be a concert, and that Bonifacio would be the master of revels, and that it would be a very special occasion. She knew other things, and had for some time, but she had said nothing to him or only indirectly and unemphatically; now, however, it suited her to show him that she knew what was going on; and so one evening, over dessert, when Nepomuceno was there, she said, “Now then, why have you said nothing about this surprise you’re hatching?”
“What surprise?”
“The concert. I know that you and others want to find a discreet way to help out those poor singers who have been stranded in the town and are doubtless having a rough time of it. Fine, I’m all in favor. It’s a wonderful idea and a very charitable one too. We can do our bit for the artists and have fun at the same time. Perfect. An excellent idea, don’t you think, uncle?”
“Excellent,” agreed Nepomuceno, wiping his lips with his napkin and nodding.
“You can count on me and on my friend Señorita Marta, Marta Körner, you know, the engineer’s daughter. She’ll come with me. And my uncle will come too, isn’t that right? And possibly cousin Sebastián, who’ll be here for the fair. You’ll have your work cut out, mind. Now don’t play the innocent, we know you’re the organizer in chief. And that’s good. I’m pleased to see you doing something useful. I’m just annoyed that you never told me you were such good friends with the singers. Did you think I wouldn’t approve? Why? I’m not so proud as to think that my name might be tainted because my husband knows some artists. On the contrary. If I were a man, I’d do the same. Didn’t the famous La Tiplona marry a gentleman of the town? It’s true, isn’t it, uncle, that we didn’t disapprove at all when we found out about Bonifacio being on such good terms with the singers? Señorita Körner told us, didn’t she, uncle? I felt rather proud actually.”
Bonifacio was staring fixedly at his wife, caught between two contrary currents. Blind instinct was telling him: Careful! Don’t trust her, say nothing, this is a trick! The other powerful, irresistible current made him see the clouds roll away and almost brought tears to his eyes. Was his wife really capable of understanding him, of understanding his love of art and artists? He did not go so far as to expect her to forgive his affair with Serafina; indeed, it was vital that she should know nothing about that; but as for the rest, why not? Well, not, of course, about his debts and the “loans” he had made. He looked first at Emma, then at her uncle. Either there was no such thing in the world as honesty, frankness, and loyalty, or they were there to be seen on the faces and especially in the eyes of uncle and niece.
He confessed to as much as he deemed appropriate and was thanked for his candor, and both uncle and niece expressed their genuine delight at the wonderful prospect of hours of fun and honest joy that Bonifacio described to them with such moving eloquence. Although Nepomuceno and Emma both had ulterior motives, their enthusiasm and support for Bonifacio’s plans were in part sincere. As for needing to excuse her husband’s artistic interests and his dealings with the singers, no explanation was required. After all, he, too, was a musician. And it was hardly surprising that, when not at home, he should use his leisure hours to cultivate the friendship of those excellent people who knew so much about music, were so easy to get on with, and were nothing like the town’s more envious inhabitants, who were narrow-minded, limited, boring, and generally unbearable.
Nepomuceno talked more than usual; he, too, was an artist or, rather, a musician; he had helped create the classes for singing and piano at the local Society for Trade and Commerce. “Music is a fine thing, I believe. Soothes the savage breast and all that.”
“It certainly does,” said Bonifacio warmly.
And he gave them his version of the myth of Orpheus, which was entirely new to Emma, who seemed to find it genuinely interesting.
“Talking about the piano . . . although I realize you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I’d like to learn how to play a little, even if it was only so that I could pick out with one finger the tunes you play on the flute.”
Bonifacio thought this a most praiseworthy project. He thought again, although without much hope, about what Nepomuceno had said about music soothing the savage breast, and said, “Well, you know, if you’re serious, Minghetti, the baritone, is an excellent teacher. . . .”
Emma blushed scarlet and leapt to her feet, and making no attempt to conceal her excitement, she started clapping and saying, “Oh, yes, yes, that would sublime. What a wonderful idea . . . the baritone . . . yes, and we would pay him well too. It would be another charitable deed. Ah, but what a shame . . . won’t he be leaving soon?”
“That all depends on the circumstances, on the subscription being renewed, on the quartet re-forming . . . on their receiving help—”
“We’ll help them, won’t we, uncle?”
Her uncle nodded again. The plans she had buzzing in her head! Her shining eyes were fixed on the tablecloth, speaking in their fixity of a hundred ideas, none of which she put into words but which were there nonetheless.
The night of the concert arrived. The rooms at the club were opened to the public, as if the club were a branch of the Café de la Oliva; contrary to what the board had agreed, there was even a small buffet supper, and the crème de la crème of the town gathered to eat ice creams and to observe close at hand the “famous” singers in evening dress whom they had often applauded onstage, where they appeared replete with beads and gold braid.
A solemn night for Bonifacio! A solemn night for Emma! A solemn night for Nepomuceno!
12
DOZENS of candles burned in the crystal chandeliers; at the far end of the salon, on an improvised stage, sat the worthy orchestra—made up largely of local teachers—who opened the party with a symphony from their ancient repertoire: There was the horn, equally resistant to Italian and to tuning; there was the violinist Secades, who had dreamed of becoming a second Paganini and had spent nights and nights, days and days, seeking to draw from the strings caressed by his bow both the laments of sublime love and an exact imitation of natural sounds, for example, the braying of a donkey. He had mastered the braying, but—O ironies of fate!—while his bow could speak like Balaam’s ass, the strings had clearly reserved for another bow the ineffable songs of love and the sighs of sublime passion. Secades was now an older and a disappointed man and had gradually turned his attentions to his other job as a broker (unqualified) and spent more time studying the banking world and its perquisites than the art that had stirred his childhood dreams. He played for a pittance, half asleep like his colleagues, with no ambition or faith, but was still filled with a little melancholy affection and a superstitious respect for good music, in the old style, despising the novelties that visiting companies had brought to the town over the years. There, too, was bald, dignified, paunchy Don Romualdo, who played the oboe in the cathedral and the ophicleide on more profane occasions; he came closest to being a local glory. Everyone in town, even the deaf, agreed that it was marvelous what he could do with that strange instrument; he could make it weep, laugh, and even, almost, cough. Despite this fine reputation, time and a dimming of that admiration had cast a thick pall of public indifference over Don Romualdo’s fame; he knew very well that, without for a moment doubting his greatness, his fellow townsfolk had grown weary of admiring him, and he overcame these unavoidable vexations with a philosophical, taciturn melancholy; he continued to play as beautifully as ever, but to no avail. In short, he was as sad and disillusioned as his colleague Secades; having lost his illusions and any dreams of glory, he occupied the same furrow of cold, bitter resignation carved out by Secades on his way to celebrity. Never to have ascended to the temple of Fame or to have been there and come back, what did it matter? It was all the same. Even though these and other notable players were among those worthy teachers, the orchestra sounded like the screws of a machine in need of oiling; the stri
ngs were asthmatic and savored of the wood, the way cider tastes of the barrel; the brass section was pitilessly strident; indeed, just one of those musical serpents would have been enough to bring down the walls of five Jerichos. Fortunately, though, their playing was water off a duck’s back to the music-loving audience.
Emma entered the salon after the first item on the program was over; she attracted everyone’s eye for two reasons: because of her striking and very expensive dress, and because she arrived on the arm of the German, Engineer Körner, a tall, fat, florid man with the eyes of a tearful child, pale blue and very deep-set. He looked like a carefully fattened pig, ripe for slaughter, but he was a very “spiritual” man, in love with Mozart and the fate of Prussia. He spoke Spanish as if he were inventing a language made up of almost-Spanish words and almost-German turns of phrase. He was a dreamer but capable of running a factory with one finger, and as he himself said, as an accountant he was without equal. He was well-informed, secretly despised the Spaniards, worshipped his daughter, Marta, and had come to Spain in order to get rich.
Behind them came Marta Körner and Bonifacio, also arm in arm, and they were followed, in turn, by Don Juan Nepomuceno, whose side-whiskers gleamed like pure silver as if he had coated them in mercury. Marta Körner was a young blond woman, twenty-eight years old, gentle, glossy, and plump; indeed, her main physical attraction was her flesh; however, she prided herself on her grace of expression and the depth and distinction of her ideas and feelings. She always spoke from the heart, pressing her marvelous hand to her beating breast, a masterpiece in mother-of-pearl. She attributed the real treasures of her person to the subsoil of her interesting terrain, but the more enlightened, Nepomuceno among them, gave more importance to her delicious surface.
Marta might disagree with her father as regards musical tastes—for she favored Beethoven—but where they agreed was on the un-doubted need to make a fortune or half a fortune as quickly as possible. Körner had come straight from Saxony to manage a foundry set up by an industrialist near some iron ore mines, in the most mountainous region of the province, where the poorer, shyer members of the Valcárcel family had their lairs. Cousin Sebastián—who was rather more communicative and came and went between city and mountains—introduced Herr Körner to Nepomuceno. At first, the German and his daughter lived up there in the wilds, unaware that only a few leagues away lay a town that might, however remotely, remind them of the civilization and culture they had left behind in Saxony. For although, as Sebastián explained, they were surrounded by all the comforts that could, so to speak, be winched up to the heights where they lived, the Germans led a very village existence as regards their social relations. When they started learning Spanish it was in the form of the obscure, corrupt local dialect; all their “spiritual” ideas were gradually fading, and however hard they tried to keep the sacred flame of the ideal alive—with Marta playing classical sonatas on a grand piano, and with books and illustrated magazines sent from Germany—their environment was steadily invading and transforming them; the scorn with which they had initially regarded and treated those rough rural people, in whose midst they had to live, shifted imperceptibly into curiosity, which became, in turn, interest, imitation, emulation, until their pride no longer consisted in scorning but in dazzling. Körner wanted to excel among those rude mountain folk, and since they remained unimpressed by his skills as a dilettante in various arts and as a reader of sentimental novels, he had to resort to other qualities more appreciated in that land, such as, for example, the strength and capacity of his stomach. They did not take to him with quite the alacrity he had hoped until news spread throughout those mountain municipalities that, in a bet with a mining foreman, the foreman had only managed to eat a dozen and a half fried eggs, while he, Körner, had easily managed the full two dozen and completed this feat by devouring two whole bream. This was quite another matter. Only then did those who had remained indifferent to the glorious wars of Frederick the Great—of whom Körner was as proud as if he had been the illustrious monarch’s grandson—and those who had listened unmoved when he spoke to them of Goethe and Heine and Hegel, only then did they recognize the glorious future of a race that could produce such excellent stomachs. Added to this was the fact that the engineer was particularly skilled at skittles, which he toppled with the ease and strength of several horses or at least a couple of village men. With these and other analogous qualities, he won the sympathy and even the admiration he had so longed for. However, he soon wearied of such glory and, in the end, was repelled by the evident danger of turning into a bear, a metaphysical, music-loving bear, but a bear nonetheless, or into a flesh-and-blood Atta Troll. He was growing very fat, he forgot to do his meditation, and his simple tastes, so easily satisfied by that mountain life, were distracting him from the complicated plans to grow rich and live a life of ease that had brought him there in the first place. Besides, despite being well paid, respected, and amply supplied with material comforts—for he had a fine house and enjoyed many other advantages—he was still not on the way to becoming properly rich. He attempted to be made a partner in the business, but gave up when faced by the many obstacles placed in his path by the foundry’s sly owner. He then grew embittered and began to long to leave that troglodyte life, to assert himself, and to place within reach of the “marriage market” the ever-more exuberant charms of his daughter, Marta, for whom the years were also passing up there in the mountains—but all in vain. Körner did not leave the foundry, but, on the pretext of work, his visits to the provincial capital became more frequent, on the hunt for some business enterprise that seemed to him to promise a better future; and it was on one such visit that cousin Sebastián introduced him to Nepomuceno. The German, who was very astute and a man of the world, quickly grasped Nepomuceno’s role in his niece’s house: He saw clearly that there was money there, and that the money was flowing fast, and that the river of silver was—for he knew nothing about currents—heading straight into Nepomuceno’s pocket, albeit with great losses and diversions, in a veritable delta of extravagances that would add to the wealth of dressmakers, drapers, hatters, and jewelers, not to mention shops selling imported foodstuffs, cakes, fish, and meat, etc. Körner began to flatter Nepomuceno, persuading him that he, Nepomuceno, had a real talent as an accountant, that he was indeed another Jacques Necker, living in obscurity with no scope for his talents, when in other latitudes, he would shine like a star of the first magnitude in the heaven of the government or the treasury. According to Körner, he should, in all conscience, apply those abilities to a worthier task than that of mere administrator. More than that, in the interests of the ruinous Valcárcel household, which, it would seem, was going downhill thanks to Emma’s extravagance and her husband’s secret spending, Nepomuceno should put to work what little healthy capital remained in order to produce something more than the laughable percentage generated by land rents. Too many taxes, too many fingers in pies, it was ridiculous. Sursum corda! Fear not, help was at hand! If he put that stock in industry, then he would see. To these arguments were added, by way of adornment, aperitif, and complement, other arguments of a more general nature, for example, the backwardness of Spain, despite the riches above ground and below; Körner blamed, first, the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and second, the inefficiently run constitutional regime which was, in itself, not a good thing. He would then go on to bemoan Spain’s general decline, and even spoke to Nepomuceno of a possible renaissance in Spanish drama if everyone did as he advised and put their capital to good use and made the most of the treasures beneath the earth. Körner did not realize that this argument was unlikely to sway Nepomuceno, who had no idea that, centuries ago, Spain had been noted for its drama; and so while Nepomuceno remained unmoved by the patriotic idea of contributing to the rebirth of the national spirit through a well-managed industrial movement, Marta’s eyes and, even more, her flesh exercised a magnetic hold on Nepomuceno’s senses. When he saw her, on the first visit he made to Körner’s house so that K
örner could show him his pet project—the plans and budget for a factory producing chemical products—he stood there openmouthed, amazed, his throat tickling, and coursing through his body, a surge of youthful energy such as he had never really experienced before. There was the flesh he had dreamed of!
The door was opened to him by a rather skimpily clad and rumpled-looking Marta, and the very scantiness of her clothing only made her all the more striking and seductive. Nepomuceno assumed she was the maid. He went in, greeted Körner, and, shortly afterward, feeling that he simply must see the young woman again, he said, “Would you mind asking someone to bring me a glass of water?”
Nepomuceno’s plan was to steal Körner’s maid and set her up as his mistress, and even, if necessary, marry her. He had to have her. What eyes, what flesh!
However, a real kitchen maid brought him the water. It wasn’t until the next day, when Nepomuceno described her to Sebastián, that he discovered that his sweet tormentor was none other than . . . Körner’s daughter.
A week later, Marta was seated at the piano singing a sentimental song, a lieder entitled “Vergissmeinicht,” “do not forget me,” not the poem by Goethe but something rather more sentimental; and when, with languid gestures and expressive eyes, she dedicated it to the administrator with the silvery side-whiskers, she rendered him forever subject to her charms and made him a co-participant in those feelings of Sehnsucht that he did not even know existed. In the days that followed, Nepomuceno found out who Faust was and about the pact he had made with the Devil; and he imagined the fair, poorly dressed Margaret on her way to the fountain, eyes modestly lowered and a pitcher beneath one arm. Margaret was his Marta, that opulent, spiritual young woman, with her fine white skin, who, in a matter of hours, had revealed a whole new world to him, that of intense, poetic love. He wanted to be Faust in order to regain his youth, but without having to sell his soul to the Devil, for the very good reason that the Devil would not accept the bargain. Nor did he consider dyeing his side-whiskers but, rather, gilding them, by allowing the Körners to think that not for nothing had he been chancellor of the exchequer to the Valcárcel household for years and years. It did not take long for the German to notice the effect his daughter had on the guardian of Emma’s income; and through the many discussions they had about the planned factory, he gradually drew him into their family. Soon Nepomuceno could not go a single day without having one of their discussions about plans and budgets. On the improvised desk in Körner’s office (for although he and Marta were living only temporarily in the town, they had a house there, which belonged to the company he worked for), he always kept a pile of fat account books, full of hypothetical calculations and plans—a kind of imaginary novel of accountancy. Despite his knowledge and experience of complicated, obscure accounts, Nepomuceno did not understand a word. Next to these books, which resembled the Escorial missals, Körner would spread out his plans exquisitely drawn on graph paper. This was something that Nepomuceno could spontaneously admire, for he knew that Marta herself had helped her father draw those thick, rainbow-colored lines. She was often present, in the role of assistant, during Nepomuceno’s discussions with her father, and she would furl and unfurl the different plans, placing one fine finger on the particular points he should notice; and for that and other reasons, she was frequently by Nepomuceno’s side, brushing against him with her dress, and even, on occasions, pressing the sweet, troubling weight of her body against his; in short, she was making him dizzy, driving him mad, and soon Nepomuceno could not live without those financial-technical debates about the factory. He even came to imagine that he was in love with the project itself and the factory that was sure to produce whole heaps of gold, for even though it only existed on paper at the moment, for him it was already a working chemical factory, and the brief hours they spent in interesting discussion flew by like minutes. Both men agreed that all they lacked was the money needed for that colossal project to be put seamlessly into practice. They did not have that money, but it was sure to turn up. Meanwhile, Nepomuceno insinuated into the minds of both father and daughter the need to respond kindly to his discreet avowals of affection. Far from rejecting his implicit confession of love—which she would be the last to dismiss as that of an old man—far from rejecting the veiled attentions of her father’s new friend, Marta gave him to understand, through the restful, philosophical, transcendent music she played, that, despite appearances, she gave little importance to the physical, scorned the action of time on the body, and paid heed only to the eternal element of love, which is ageless. Anyway, all they lacked was money; factory and passion would then keep perfect pace with each other and would prosper as soon as the necessary capital came along to set both in motion. By hints and even signs, the Körners understood that it would be a good idea to establish the warmest of relations with Emma Valcárcel. This proved surprisingly easy for Nepomuceno, who set out to initiate this friendship at precisely the moment when Emma had decided to launch herself upon the world and enjoy her shrinking wealth and whatever else she possessed without limits and without regrets. Thus, the superficial, merely nodding acquaintance that had existed for some time between Emma and the Germans, through the intermediary of Sebastián, easily became an assiduously cultivated, almost close friendship, which became closer and closer as Emma traveled further and further down the broad, gentle paths of her new life. As mentioned earlier, Emma included in her plans for revenge on her “thieving uncle” the idea of corrupting Marta once she had married Nepomuceno, an idea she found vastly amusing, which is why she was so eager to get to know the Körners better. However, she had not expected to become so fond of Marta or that Marta would win her vehement affection with her singularly seductive blend of sensitive, womanly warmth, a piquant and infectious quality that was entirely new to poor Emma, whose natural depravity had hitherto remained untouched by the world of letters, still less by German romanticism. Marta, though a virgin, was a bacchante in thought, and the wild, unbuttoned books she read had opened up for her the picturesque horizons of literary lust and taught her a highly flexible morality that was, at once, corrupt, capricious, intricate, and basically cynical. However close a relationship a man might have with Señorita Körner, he would never plumb the depths of her thoughts and her vices, because all that remained of her modesty was the instinct to pretend and a genuine, albeit hypocritical, defensive reflex against all attacks by the male of the species; Marta would be quite capable of keeping up with whatever lubricious adventures he might lead her into, but she would always keep hidden from him a different kind of moral corruption and intellectual depravity, which she carried inside herself and would only confide to another woman who shared her temperament and her sentimental extravagances. Emma and Marta immediately understood each other, and after only a few weeks of frequent, intimate meetings, they could often be heard, in the distance, in Emma’s boudoir, laughing loudly and hysterically; and when they came across Nepomuceno, Körner, or Bonifacio after one of those cheerful exchanges of confidences, full of secrets and naughtiness, they would smile with smiles that were like barely disguised signals and jokes at the expense of those poor men, who were quite incapable of penetrating the mysteries of the playful, gossipy friendship that had sprung up between Spaniard and German. Marta prided herself on her complex character, incomprehensible to the common herd; she talked a lot about “ordinary morality,” although only, of course, when she was speaking with people who would understand what she meant. Her joy, her delight in playing, in jumping, in getting up in the middle of the night in her nightdress to frighten the maids by running through the house only to return, throbbing with excitement and a kind of roistering voluptuousness, to the warmth of her bed, all of this, according to her, was a contrast to, the “antithesis” of her exquisite sensibility, the clair de lune that she carried in her soul. And too bad if those fools couldn’t understand such contradictions. She was a Catholic, like her father, and affected to have embraced the devout manner of Spanish women, as i
f, as regards religion, her soul had been by nature Spanish before it was born in Germany. There was, however, a modern note to her religiosity, an artistic note that would not be found in the average Spanish lady. Marta was an enthusiastic reader of Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity, which she interpreted very much after her own fashion, mixing it up with the Gothic romanticism of the German poets and novelists, which she then varnished with the hundred bright colors of her love for the decorative arts and her own pictorial fancies. She loved music, but loved color for its own sake and gave great importance to the blue of the Conception and the dark brown of Our Lady of Mount Carmel; she spoke about the Sistine Chapel, a topic of conversation unknown in Spain at the time, and of the marvels she had seen in Florence and other Italian cities, where she had traveled with her father. Marta did not, however, own up to the fact that she derived the greatest and most intense pleasure from being tickled, especially on the soles of her feet. Many people, even men, had tickled her under her arms, on her back, and on her throat, but when it came to the soles of her feet, she had only occasionally managed to find someone prepared to afford her that special delight: a maid she had grown close to or a female friend in the village . . . and now Emma, from whom, after only two months of knowing each other, she had exacted that sybaritic favor, which Emma, laughing herself silly, happily supplied. She had wanted to experience for herself the strange pleasure so beloved of her friend, but didn’t enjoy it at all and couldn’t stand it for more than half a second, finding it an utterly pointless excitement. Her friend tickled Emma’s soul, though, with her literary and psychological subtleties. The things she knew! There were in the world, although Emma did not realize it, two kinds of beings: the chosen and the not chosen, the superior souls and the ordinary ones. The trick was to be one of those chosen, superior souls because then you could do as you pleased and ignore all “ordinary morality,” social ties, everything; all you had to do was keep up appearances and avoid scandal. Love and art reigned supreme in the spiritual world, and the privilege of being one of those “ideal” superior women consisted in using art in the service of love. The beautiful, sentimental, poetic dilettante was the artist’s reward, and the pleasure of rewarding the genius was the most sublime that God had bestowed on his creatures. When she was still very young, Marta had been engaged, in Saxony, to a great musician, an organist; and she had given favors of an intimate nature to a painter and imitator of Rembrandt, although without, of course, damaging her physical virginity, which had to be reserved for the philistine—her word—whom she would agree to marry. For she needed to be rich, and for a very good reason: to be able to satisfy her aesthetic needs, which did not come cheap, given that “aesthetics” included comfort, fine furniture, works of art, and, if possible, a box at the opera. Her ideal was to marry an ordinary but very wealthy man, and to use the money of that “ordinary creature” to protect great artists, reserving her love for one or more of them, because remaining constant to one person was also “ordinary.” Marta read a lot of Spanish literature from the golden age, which was fashionable among the literati in Germany, and she cited as the model for her theory the wife of “The Jealous Extremaduran”—one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories—for the aforementioned wife, without committing what could strictly be called adultery, had slept in the arms of the gallant Loyasa, sinning only in thought. The Jealous Extremaduran, Carrizales, had been such a noble character that when he died, he left his fortune to his wife and charged her to marry her lover; but since modern husbands in the impure real world were not as generous as Carrizales, what the superior woman had to do was suck the financial juice out of her husband as quickly as possible. All these things, couched in a very different but nonetheless pedantic style, began to worm their way into Emma’s desire, for—given the blend of physical fatigue and subtle, convoluted moral depravity that formed the very basis of her nature—she took a particular delight in adventures in which malice and deceit outweighed any actual pleasure gained from such tricks. Deceiving for deceiving’s sake was always best. Nevertheless, she recognized that to have “relations” with a superior man such as an artist—for example, with a handsome, famous baritone like the celebrated Minghetti—must be very much like Heaven. Marta, far from contradicting her friend and thrilled at this exchange of confidences, received Emma’s secret admission of her flirtation with the baritone from the bankrupt opera company with glad benevolence. Deep down, she felt sorry for Emma, for although she herself had often observed with some pleasure the fine physique or the close-fitting breeches of whatever king Minghetti happened to be playing in this or that opera, that very attractive singer could hardly be described as superior or as a true artist. But one must not be too exacting. She, of course, was above such pastimes. Her “hobby,” apart from being tickled, was writing enthusiastic, confiding letters to her favorite authors, some of whom replied while others did not; she usually included a picture of herself along with her epistolary confessions and, given the lovely envelope containing that repugnant mind, more than one writer had taken it upon himself to respond; and thus she now had two or three ideal, platonic lovers-cum-correspondents. She also had a “friendship album,” full of many unfamiliar signatures and a few notable ones, in which people responded to the usual trite questions: What is your favorite color? And your favorite virtue? Who is your favorite author? Etc. A woman who knew, for example, that Liszt liked truffles and who had wept privately over the hidden sorrows of a poet belonging to the Young Germany movements, was unlikely to be impressed by the baritone in Mochi’s company, however handsome.