Sónnica. Vicente Blasco Ibanez

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      "Do not thank me," she continued. "It is I who should be grateful for the joy of feeding you. What is this? I know not. Never has a man approached me before without giving me something; some give me copper coins, others a piece of cloth or a patera of wine; most of them blows and bites; all have given me something, and I have accepted, though I detested them. But you, who come poor and hungry, who do not seek me but reject me, who give me nothing, just your being near me has made a new pleasure surge through my body. As I give you food I feel intoxicated, as if I were fresh from a banquet. Tell me, Greek, are you really a man, or are you the father of the gods, descending to earth to honor me?"

      Exalted by her own words, she arose, standing half way up the marble steps, and extending her rigid arms toward the temple, bathed in moonlight, exclaimed:

      "Aphrodite! My goddess! If some day I manage to get together the price of two white doves, I will present them on thy altar, adorned with flowers and fire-colored ribbons, in memory of this night."

      The Greek drank the bitter liquid from the jar and offered it to the woman, whose lips sought the same spot on the rim which had been touched by his.

      She did not taste the supper which the Greek held out to her; she continued drinking, and the wine made her more talkative.

      "If you only knew what it has cost me to get all this! The lanes are full of drunken men, who wallow in the mire and drag themselves along on their hands, tearing one's clothing and biting one's legs. Wine runs out of the doorways of the inns. They were fighting on the wharf a little while ago. Some Africans were holding one of their companions head down in the water to cure his broken skull; a Celtiberian had opened a great gash in it with his clenched fist. Others amused themselves by catching Tuga, an Iberian girl, by the feet, and thrusting her head in the biggest vat in the tavern as long as they dared. She was half drowned when they pulled her out. It is their usual diversion. I saw poor Albura, a friend of mine, seated on the ground covered with blood, holding in the palm of her hand one of her eyes which a drunken Egyptian had knocked out with a fisticuff. This kind of thing happens every night! And yet, all at once, I have become afraid. I have only just met you, and still it seems to me as if I were living in a new world, and that for the first time I give heed to my surroundings."

      She told him the story of her life. They called her Bacchis, and she was uncertain what was her native land. No doubt she was born in some other port, for she vaguely remembered in her childhood a long voyage in a ship. Her mother must have been a lupa also, and she herself the result of a meeting with a mariner. The name of Bacchis, which had been given her when she was little, had been borne by many famous courtesans of Greece. No doubt she had been sold to some old woman by the pilot who had brought her to Saguntum, and, while still a child, long before coming to maturity, was visited in the old woman's hut by aged merchants of the port or libertines of the city.

      When her owner died she became a lupa, and passed into submission to mariners, fishermen, shepherds from the mountains, and to all the brutal horde which swarmed around the port. She was not yet twenty, but she was aged, disfigured, wasted by excesses and by blows. She had always seen the city from a distance. She had only entered it twice. The lupas were not tolerated there. They were allowed to remain near the fane of Aphrodite, as a guarantee of the security of Saguntum, that thus the rabble which came to the port from all lands might be held at a distance, but in the city the Iberians of cleanly habits became indignant at the mere sight of the wantons, and the corrupt Greeks were too refined in their tastes to feel pity for those sellers of the body who fell like beasts beside the roadway for a bunch of grapes or a handful of nuts.

      There in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite she had spent her life, ever awaiting new ships and new men, hairy and obscene, brutal as satyrs, made ferocious by the abstinence of the sea, to be at last assassinated in some mariners' fight, or found the victim of hunger, dead beside some abandoned boat.

      "And you—who are you?" Bacchis asked at last. "What is your name?"

      "My name is Actæon; my native land is Athens. I have traveled over the world; in some parts I have been a soldier, in others a navigator; I have fought, I have trafficked, and I have even written verses, and discussed with philosophers things which you do not understand. I have been rich many times, and now you give me food. That is all my story."

      Bacchis looked at him with eyes full of admiration, divining through his concise words a past crammed with adventures, with terrible dangers and prodigious changes of fortune. She thought of the deeds of Achilles, and of the adventurous life of Ulysses, so often heard in the verses declaimed by Greek mariners when they were drunk.

      The courtesan, reclining on the Greek's breast, fondled his hair. The Greek, grateful, smiled fraternally on Bacchis, with indifference, as if she were a child.

      Two mariners came out from among the huts, and began to stagger along the wharf. A penetrating howl, which seemed to cleave the air, sounded close to Actæon's ears. His companion, impelled by habit, with the instinct of the vendor who sees a customer in the distance, had arisen to her feet.

      "I will return, my master. I had almost forgotten the terrible Lais. I must give her her money before the sun rises. She will beat me as she has done before if I do not fulfill my promise. Wait for me here."

      Repeating her wild howl, she went in search of the sailors, who had stopped, hailing the "she-wolf's" cries with loud laughter and obscene words.

      When the Greek found himself alone, his hunger placated, he felt a certain disgust in thinking of his recent adventure. Actæon the Athenian, he for whom the richest hetæræ of the beautiful city used to dispute in the Cerameicus, protected and adored by a strumpet of the port! To avoid meeting her again he hurriedly left the temple steps, losing himself in the streets by the harbor.

      Again he stopped before the hostelry in the doorway of which he had experienced the torment of hunger. The sailors were in the midst of an orgy. The tavern keeper could barely command respect behind the counter. The slaves, terrified by blows, had taken refuge in the kitchen. Some amphoræ lay broken on the floor letting the wine escape like streams of blood, and the drunken men wallowed in the gurgling liquid as it soaked into the earthen floor, calling for drinks of which they had vaguely heard on distant voyages, or for fantastic dishes conceived by the little tyrants of Asia. One Herculean Egyptian was running on all fours imitating the growl of the jackal, and biting the women who had entered the tavern. Some negroes were disporting with feminine movements, as if hypnotized by the whirling of the umbilical dance. In the corners, on the stone benches, men and women embraced in the crude light of the torches; the smell of bare and sweaty flesh mingled with the aroma of wine; in the atmosphere of viands and of wild-beast odor, seamen, forgetting shame, committed crimes peculiar to the aberration of the epoch.

      In the midst of this disorder a few men stood motionless near the counter, arguing with apparent calmness. They were two Roman soldiers, an old Carthaginian mariner, and a Celtiberian. The torpid slowness of their words, which in their anger acquired flute-like tones, their inflamed and blood-shot eyes, and their hawk-like noses, seeming to grow sharper as they talked, revealed that terrible drunkenness, stubborn and quarrelsome, which culminates in murder.

      The Roman was telling of his presence in the combat on the Ægates islands, fourteen years before.

      "I know you," he said insolently to the Carthaginian. "You are a republic of merchants born for lying and bad faith. If someone who knows how to sell at top prices and cheat the buyer is wanted, I agree that you stand first; but talking of soldiers, of men, we are the best, we sons of Rome, who grasp the plow in one hand and the lance in the other."

      He proudly raised his round head with its close-cropped hair and shaven cheeks, on which the chin-straps СКАЧАТЬ