Carmen by Prosper Mérimée (most read books of all time .TXT) 📕
I had thought I was so tired that I should be able to sleep even in such a lodging. But within an hour a most unpleasant itching sensation roused me from my first nap. As soon as I realized its nature, I rose to my feet, feeling convinced I should do far better to spend the rest of the night in the open air than beneath that inhospitable roof. Walking tiptoe I reached the door, stepped over Don Jose, who was sleeping the sleep of the just, and managed so well that I got outside the building without waking him. Just beside the door there was a wide wooden bench. I lay down upon it, and settled myself, as best I could, for the remainder of the night. I was just closing my eyes for a second time when I fancied I saw the shadow of a man and then the shadow o
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“‘Compadre,’ said she, in the Andalusian fashion, ‘won’t you give me your chain for the keys of my strong box?’
“‘It’s for my priming-pin,’ said I.
“‘Your priming-pin!’ she cried, with a laugh. ‘Oho! I suppose the gentleman makes lace, as he wants pins!’
“Everybody began to laugh, and I felt myself getting red in the face, and couldn’t hit on anything in answer.
“‘Come, my love!’ she began again, ‘make me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker!’
“And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me. I didn’t know which way to look. I sat stock-still, like a wooden board. When she had gone into the factory, I saw the acacia blossom, which had fallen on the ground between my feet. I don’t know what made me do it, but I picked it up, unseen by any of my comrades, and put it carefully inside my jacket. That was my first folly.
“Two or three hours later I was still thinking about her, when a panting, terrified-looking porter rushed into the guard-room. He told us a woman had been stabbed in the great cigar-room, and that the guard must be sent in at once. The sergeant told me to take two men, and go and see to it. I took my two men and went upstairs. Imagine, sir, that when I got into the room, I found, to begin with, some three hundred women, stripped to their shifts, or very near it, all of them screaming and yelling and gesticulating, and making such a row that you couldn’t have heard God’s own thunder. On one side of the room one of the women was lying on the broad of her back, streaming with blood, with an X newly cut on her face by two strokes of a knife. Opposite the wounded woman, whom the best-natured of the band were attending, I saw Carmen, held by five or six of her comrades. The wounded woman was crying out, ‘A confessor, a confessor! I’m killed!’ Carmen said nothing at all. She clinched her teeth and rolled her eyes like a chameleon. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. I had hard work to find out what had happened, for all the work-girls talked at once. It appeared that the injured girl had boasted she had money enough in her pocket to buy a donkey at the Triana Market. ‘Why,’ said Carmen, who had a tongue of her own, ‘can’t you do with a broom?’ Stung by this taunt, it may be because she felt herself rather unsound in that particular, the other girl replied that she knew nothing about brooms, seeing she had not the honour of being either a gipsy or one of the devil’s godchildren, but that the Senorita Carmen would shortly make acquaintance with her donkey, when the Corregidor took her out riding with two lackeys behind her to keep the flies off. ‘Well,’ retorted Carmen, ‘I’ll make troughs for the flies to drink out of on your cheeks, and I’ll paint a draught-board on them!’ * And thereupon, slap, bank! She began making St. Andrew’s crosses on the girl’s face with a knife she had been using for cutting off the ends of the cigars.
ship. Most Spanish vessels of this description have a
checkered red and white stripe painted around them.
“The case was quite clear. I took hold of Carmen’s arm. ‘Sister mine,’ I said civilly, ‘you must come with me.’ She shot a glance of recognition at me, but she said, with a resigned look: ‘Let’s be off. Where is my mantilla?’ She put it over her head so that only one of her great eyes was to be seen, and followed my two men, as quiet as a lamb. When we got to the guardroom the sergeant said it was a serious job, and he must send her to prison. I was told off again to take her there. I put her between two dragoons, as a corporal does on such occasions. We started off for the town. The gipsy had begun by holding her tongue. But when we got to the Calle de la Serpiente—you know it, and that it earns its name by its many windings—she began by dropping her mantilla on to her shoulders, so as to show me her coaxing little face, and turning round to me as well as she could, she said:
“‘Oficial mio, where are you taking me to?’
“‘To prison, my poor child,’ I replied, as gently as I could, just as any kind-hearted soldier is bound to speak to a prisoner, and especially to a woman.
“‘Alack! What will become of me! Senor Oficial, have pity on me! You are so young, so good-looking.’ Then, in a lower tone, she said, ‘Let me get away, and I’ll give you a bit of the bar lachi, that will make every woman fall in love with you!’
“The bar lachi, sir, is the loadstone, with which the gipsies declare one who knows how to use it can cast any number of spells. If you can make a woman drink a little scrap of it, powdered, in a glass of white wine, she’ll never be able to resist you. I answered, as gravely as I could:
“‘We are not here to talk nonsense. You’ll have to go to prison. Those are my orders, and there’s no help for it!’
“We men from the Basque country have an accent which all Spaniards easily recognise; on the other hand, not one of them can ever learn to say Bai, jaona!*
“So Carmen easily guessed I was from the Provinces. You know, sir, that the gipsies, who belong to no particular country, and are always moving about, speak every language, and most of them are quite at home in Portugal, in France, in our Provinces, in Catalonia, or anywhere else. They can even make themselves understood by Moors and English people. Carmen knew Basque tolerably well.
“‘Laguna ene bihotsarena, comrade of my heart,’ said she suddenly. ‘Do you belong to our country?’
“Our language is so beautiful, sir, that when we hear it in a foreign country it makes us quiver. I wish,” added the bandit in a lower tone, “I could have a confessor from my own country.”
After a silence, he began again.
“‘I belong to Elizondo,’ I answered in Basque, very much affected by the sound of my own language.
“‘I come from Etchalar,’ said she (that’s a district about four hours’ journey from my home). ‘I was carried off to Seville by the gipsies. I was working in the factory to earn enough money to take me back to Navarre, to my poor old mother, who has no support in the world but me, besides her little barratcea* with twenty cider-apple trees in it. Ah! if I were only back in my own country, looking up at the white mountains! I have been insulted here, because I don’t belong to this land of rogues and sellers of rotten oranges; and those hussies are all banded together against me, because I told them that not all their Seville jacques,** and all their knives, would frighten an honest lad from our country, with his blue cap and his maquila! Good comrade, won’t you do anything to help your own countrywoman?’
** Bravos, boasters.
“She was lying then, sir, as she has always lied. I don’t know that that girl ever spoke a word of truth in her life, but when she did speak, I believed her—I couldn’t help myself. She mangled her Basque words, and I believed she came from Navarre. But her eyes and her mouth and her skin were enough to prove she was a gipsy. I was mad, I paid no more attention to anything, I thought to myself that if the Spaniards had dared to speak evil of my country, I would have slashed their faces just as she had slashed her comrade’s. In short, I was like a drunken man, I was beginning to say foolish things, and I was very near doing them.
“‘If I were to give you a push and you tumbled down, good fellow-countryman,’ she began again in Basque, ‘those two Castilian recruits wouldn’t be able to keep me back.’
“Faith, I forgot my orders, I forgot everything, and I said to her, ‘Well, then, my friend, girl of my country, try it, and may our Lady of the Mountain help you through.’
“Just at that moment we were passing one of the many narrow lanes one sees in Seville. All at once Carmen turned and struck me in the chest with her fist. I tumbled backward, purposely. With a bound she sprang over me, and ran off, showing us a pair of legs! People talk about a pair of Basque legs! but hers were far better—as fleet as they were well-turned. As for me, I picked myself up at once, but I stuck out my lance* crossways and barred the street, so that my comrades were checked at the very first moment of pursuit. Then I started to run myself, and they after me—but how were we to catch her? There was no fear of that, what with our spurs, our swords, and our lances.
“In less time than I have taken to tell you the story the prisoner had disappeared. And besides, every gossip in the quarter covered her flight, poked scorn at us, and pointed us in the wrong direction. After a good deal of marching and countermarching, we had to go back to the guard-room without a receipt from the governor of the jail.
“To avoid punishment, my men made known that Carmen had spoken to me in Basque; and to tell the truth, it did not seem very natural that a blow from such a little creature should have so easily overthrown a strong fellow like me. The whole thing looked suspicious, or, at all events, not over-clear. When I came off guard I lost my corporal’s stripes, and was condemned to a month’s imprisonment. It was the first time I had been punished since I had been in the service. Farewell, now, to the sergeant’s stripes, on which I had reckoned so surely!
“The first days in prison were very dreary. When I enlisted I had fancied I was sure to become an officer, at all events. Two of my compatriots, Longa and Mina, are captains-general, after all. Chapalangarra was a colonel, and I have played tennis a score of times with his brother, who was just a needy fellow like myself. ‘Now,’ I kept crying to myself, ‘all the time you served without being punished has been lost. Now you have a bad mark against your name, and to get yourself back into the officers’ good graces you’ll have to work ten times as hard as when you joined as a recruit.’ And why have I got myself punished? For the sake of a gipsy hussy, who made
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