Autumn, A Love Season, by Horacio Quiroga

Otoño – Una estación de amor – – de Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte, de Horacio Quiroga – 1898 – Translated from Spanish 🇪🇸 into English 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 by Enzo Martinelli – Autumn – A Love Season – Stories of Love, Madness and Death

©️ Enzo Martinelli 2024

Summer, A Love Season, by Horacio Quiroga

One afternoon, in Buenos Aires, Nébel had just got on the tramway when the car stopped for a moment longer than was convenient, and he, who was reading, finally turned his head. A woman with a slow, unsteady gait was advancing.

After a quick glance at the awkward person, he resumed reading. The lady sat down beside him, and as she did so she looked at Nébel intently. Nébel, though he felt the occasional foreign glance upon him, continued his reading; but at last he grew weary, and raised his face in surprise.

– I thought it was you,” exclaimed the lady, “though I still doubted…. You don’t remember me, do you?

– Yes,” replied Nébel, opening her eyes, “Mrs. Arrizabalaga…. She saw Nébel’s surprise, and smiled with the air of an old courtesan still trying to look good to a boy.

When Nébel had met her eleven years before, all that remained of her were her eyes, though they were more sunken and dull. The yellow complexion, with greenish tones in the shadows, cracked into dusty furrows. The cheekbones now bulged, and the lips, always thick, pretended to conceal a set of decayed teeth. Beneath the emaciated body, morphine was alive, coursing through exhausted nerves and watery arteries, until it had turned into that skeleton, the elegant woman who once leafed through the Illustration at her side.

– Yes, I am very old… and ill; I have already had attacks of the kidneys… and you,” she added, looking at him tenderly, “always the same! You’re not yet thirty…. Lydia looks the same too. Nébel raised his eyes:

– Single?

– Yes… How glad she’ll be when I tell her! Why don’t you give the poor thing a treat? Won’t you come and see us?

– With pleasure,’ murmured Nébel.

– Yes, go quickly; you know what we have been to….. Anyway, Boedo, 1483; flat 14…. Our position is so petty…

– Oh,” he protested, getting up to go. He promised to go very soon. Twelve days later Nébel was due to return to the mill, and he wanted to keep his promise first. He went there – a miserable slum flat – and Mrs. Arrizabalaga received him while Lidia was getting ready.

– So, eleven years! -How time flies, and you could have a great many children with Lidia!

– Surely,” smiled Nébel, looking round.

– Oh, we’re not very well! And especially how your house must be laid out….. I always hear about your reed beds…. Is that your only establishment?

– Yes… in Entre Rios too…

– How happy I am! If only one could… Always wishing to go and spend a few months in the countryside, and always wishing!

He fell silent, casting a fleeting glance at Nébel. His heart clenched, he relived the impressions buried eleven years in his soul.

– And all this for lack of relations? It is so difficult to have a friend in such conditions!

Nébel’s heart contracted more and more, and Lydia came in. She was also very changed, because the charm of the candour and freshness of fourteen years of age is no longer to be found in a woman of twenty-six. But always beautiful. His masculine sense of smell sensed in the gentle tranquillity of her gaze, in her morbid neck, and in all the indefinable things that denounce to man the love already enjoyed, which he had to keep veiled for ever, the memory of the Lydia he had known. They talked of very trivial things, with the perfect discretion of mature people. When she had gone out again for a moment, her mother resumed:

– Yes, she is a little weak… And when I think that in the country he would recover at once…. You see, Octavian, will you allow me to be frank with you? You know that I have loved you like a son…. Could we not spend some time in your establishment? How much good it would do Lydia!

– I am married,” replied Nébel.

The lady made a gesture of lively contrariety, and for an instant her disappointment was sincere; but then she folded her hands comically:

– Married, you! Oh, what a disgrace, what a disgrace; forgive me, you know! I don’t know what I’m saying… And does your mistress live with you at the wit’s end?

– Yes, generally… Now she’s in Europe.

– What a disgrace! That is to say… Octavian! -she added, opening her arms with tears in her eyes: “I can tell you, you have been almost my son….. We are almost destitute! Why don’t you want me to go to Lidia? I’m going to have a mother’s confession with you,” she concluded with a pasty smile, and lowering her voice, “you know Lydia’s heart well, don’t you?

He waited for a reply, but Nébel remained silent.

– Yes, you know her! And do you think that Lydia is a woman capable of forgetting when she has wanted to?

Now he had reinforced his insinuation with a slight wink. Nébel then suddenly appreciated the abyss into which she might have fallen before. She was always the same mother, but already debased by her own old soul, morphine and poverty. And Lydia… Seeing her again I had felt a sharp pang of desire for the present full-throated and already quivering woman. Faced with the business deal offered to him, he threw himself into the arms of this rare conquest that fate had in store for him.

– Don’t you know, Lydia? -Octavio invites us to spend some time in his establishment. What do you think?

Lidia’s eyebrows twitched and she regained her composure.

– Very well, mother…

– Ah! don’t you know what he says? He’s married. He’s still so young! We are almost his family…

Lydia then turned her eyes to Nebel, and looked at him for a moment with painful gravity.

– Has it been a long time? -she murmured.

– Four years,” he replied quietly. Still, he could not bring himself to look at her.