Isolde’s Death, by Horacio Quiroga

Isolde’s Death – de Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte, de Horacio Quiroga – 1917 – Translated from Spanish 🇪🇸 into English 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 by Enzo Martinelli – Stories of Love, Madness and Death

©️ Enzo Martinelli 2025

Short Stories of Love, Death and Nature, by Horacio Quiroga

The first act of Tristan and Isolde was coming to an end. Tired of the agitation of the day, I remained in my seat, quite content with my solitude. I turned my head to the hall, and immediately caught sight of a low box.

Evidently, a married couple. He, an ordinary husband, and perhaps because of his mercantile vulgarity and the difference in years with his wife, less than ordinary. She, young, pale, with one of those profound beauties that more than in the face – though beautiful – lies in the perfect solidarity of gaze, mouth, neck, way of squinting. She was, above all, a beauty for men, without being in the least provocative; and this is precisely what women will never understand.

I looked at her for a long time with my eyes uncovered, because I could see her very well, and because when a man is thus under the strain of staring at a beautiful body, he does not resort to the feminine arbitrariness of glasses. The second act began. I still turned my head to the box, and our eyes met. I, who had already appreciated the charm of that gaze wandering from one side of the room to the other, experienced in a second, as I felt her leaning directly on me, the most adorable dream of love I have ever had.

It was very quick: the eyes fled, but two or three times, in my long minute of insistence, they returned fleetingly to me. It was also, with the sudden happiness of having dreamed me for a moment her husband, the quickest disenchantment of an idyll. Her eyes turned again, but at that instant I felt my neighbour on the left look that way, and, after a moment’s immobility on both sides, they greeted each other.

I had not, therefore, the remotest right to consider myself a happy man, and I looked at my companion. He was a man of more than thirty-five, with a blond beard and blue eyes and a clear, slightly hard look, expressing an unmistakable will.

– They know each other, I said to myself, and not a little.

In fact, after halfway through the act, my neighbour, who had not taken her eyes off the scene again, fixed them on the stage. She, her head thrown back a little, and in the half-light, was looking at him too. She looked even paler to me. They stared at each other, insistently, cut off from the world in that parallel line of soul to soul that kept them immobile.

During the third, my neighbour did not turn his head for a moment. But before the end of the third, she went out into the side aisle. I looked at the box, and she too had left.

– End of idyll – I said to myself melancholically.

He never came back, and the box was empty.

(……..)

– Yes, they repeat themselves,” he shook his head for a long time. All dramatic situations can be repeated, even the most improbable, and they do repeat themselves. It is necessary to live, and you are a very young man…. And those of your Tristan too, which does not prevent there from being the most sustained outcry of passion that ever cried out from a human soul. I love that play as much as you do, and perhaps more. I do not mean, you will believe, the drama of Tristan, and with it the thirty-six situations of dogma, out of which all are repetitions. No; the scene that returns like a nightmare, the characters suffering the hallucination of a dead bliss, is something else. You were present at the prelude to one of these repetitions… Yes, I know you remember… We didn’t know each other at the time… And I was supposed to talk to you about it! But you misjudged what you saw and thought it was a happy act of mine… Happy!… listen to me! The ship leaves in a moment, and this time I’m not coming back… I tell this to you, as if I could write it to you, for two reasons: First, because you bear an uncanny resemblance to what I was then – in the good things only, fortunately. And secondly, because you, my young friend, are perfectly incapable of pretending to her, after what you are about to hear. Listen to me: I met her ten years ago, and during the six months I was her sweetheart I did everything in my power to make her mine. I loved her very much, and she loved me immensely. That’s why she gave in one day, and from that moment on my love, deprived of tension, cooled down.

Our social environment was different, and while she was intoxicated with the joy of possessing my name, I lived in a worldly sphere where it was inevitable for me to flirt with girls with a name, fortune, and sometimes very pretty.

One of them took the flirtation under garden party parasols with me to such an extreme that I became exasperated and seriously pretended to her. But if my person was interesting for such games, my fortune was not enough to promise her the necessary train, and she made it clear to me. She was right, perfectly right. Consequently, I flirted with a friend of hers, much uglier, but infinitely less adept at these tortures of the ten-centimetre tete-a-tete, the only fun of which consists in driving your flirt crazy, while remaining in control of yourself. And this time it was not me who was exasperated.

Sure, then, of the triumph, I thought then of the way to break with Agnes. I continued to see her, and though she could not deceive herself about the dampening of my passion, her love was too great not to light up her eyes with happiness every time she saw me coming. The mother left us alone; and even if she had known what was going on, she would have closed her eyes lest she should miss the vaguest chance of climbing with her daughter to a much higher sphere.

One night I went there ready to break off, with visible ill-humour, for the same reason. Agnes ran to embrace me, but stopped, abruptly pale.

– What’s wrong with you? -she said.

– Nothing,” I replied with a forced smile, stroking her forehead. She let me do it, paying no attention to my hand and looking at me insistently. At last she averted her narrowed eyes and we went into the living room.

The mother came, but feeling stormy skies, she stayed only a moment and disappeared.

To break up is a short and easy word; but to start it?

We had sat down and did not speak. Agnes bent down, took her hand away from my face and fixed her eyes on me, painful with anguished examination.

– It’s obvious! -she murmured.

– What?” I asked her coldly.

The calmness of my gaze hurt him more than my voice, and his face grew haggard:

-That you don’t love me any more! he articulated in a desperate, slow, head-swaying shake.

– This is the fiftieth time you have said the same thing,” I answered. There could be no harsher answer; but I had the beginning. Agnes looked at me for a while almost as if I were a stranger, and then, roughly pushing away my hand with the cigar, her voice broke:

– Esteban!

– What? -I turned to repeat.

This time it was enough. He slowly let go of my hand and leaned back on the sofa, keeping his livid face fixed on the lamp. But a moment later his face fell sideways under the arm twitching against the backrest.

A while more passed. The injustice of my attitude – I could see nothing but injustice in it – increased the deep disgust of myself. So when I heard, or rather felt, the tears come at last, I rose with a violent clucking of my tongue.

– I thought we were not going to have any more scenes,” I said, pacing back and forth.

He didn’t answer me, and I added:

– But let this be the last.

I felt the tears stop, and under them he answered me a moment later:

– As you wish.

But at once she fell sobbing on the sofa:

– But what have I done to you! What have I done to you!

– Nothing! -I replied. But I haven’t done anything to you either… I think we’re in the same case. I think we’re in the same case. I’m sick of these things!

My voice was surely much harsher than my words. Inés sat up, and holding herself on the arm of the sofa, repeated, frozen:

– As you wish.

It was a farewell. I was going to break it off, and they beat me to it. Self-love, the vile self-love touched alive, made me answer:

– Perfectly… I’m leaving. May you be happier… again.

He did not understand, and looked at me strangely. I had already committed the first infamy; and as in such cases, I felt the vertigo of getting even more muddy.

– Of course! -I brutally supported. Because you have had no complaint from me …. have you not?

I mean: I did you the honour of being your mistress, and you must be grateful to me.

She understood my smile more than my words, and as I went out into the corridor to fetch my hat, her whole body and soul collapsed in the hall.

Then, at that instant when I crossed the gallery, I felt intensely what I had just done. Aspiration of luxury, high marriage, everything stood out to me like a sore in my own soul. And I, who was offering myself at auction to the worldly ugly with fortune, who was putting myself up for sale, had just committed the most outrageous act with the woman who loved us too much…. A weakness on the Mount of Olives, or a vile moment in a man who is not a man, lead to the same end: the desire for sacrifice, for the highest reconquest of one’s own worth. And then the immense thirst for tenderness, to wipe away kiss after kiss the tears of the adored woman, whose first smile after the wound we have caused her is the most beautiful light that can flood a man’s heart.

And finished! It was not possible for me to take back before myself what I had just thus outraged: I was no longer worthy of her, nor did I deserve her any more. In a second I had sullied the purest love that any man has ever felt for himself, and I had just lost with Agnes the irretrievable happiness of possessing the one who loves us dearly.

Desperate, humiliated, I crossed in front of the room, and saw her, lying on the sofa, sobbing her whole soul, in his arms.

Agnes, lost already! I felt my misery deepen before her body, all love, shaken by the sobs of her dead happiness. Almost without realising it, I stopped.

– Agnes! -I said.

My voice was no longer what it had been before. And she must have noticed it well, because her soul felt, in rising sobs, the desperate call of my love – that time, yes, immense love!

– No, no… -she replied, “It’s too late!

(……)

Padilla stopped. I have seldom seen more dry and quiet bitterness than in his eyes when he finished. For my part, I could not get that lovely beauty in the box, sobbing on the sofa, out of my memory….

– Will you believe me,” resumed Padilla, “if I tell you that in my insomnia as a discontented bachelor I have had her before me like this? I left Buenos Aires at once without seeing almost anyone, least of all my flirt of great fortune…. I came back when I was eight years old, and I found out then that she had married, six months after I had left and Torné to go away, and a month ago I returned, well reassured now, and at peace.

I had not seen her again. It was for me like a first love, with all the dignifying charm that a virginal idyll has for the man who has become a man who has loved a hundred times over… If you are ever loved as I was, and outraged as I was, you will understand, all the purity there is in my memory.

Until one night I stumbled upon her. Yes, that very night at the theatre…. I understood, on seeing her husband’s opulent grocer, that she had rushed into marriage, like me into the Ucayali…. But when I saw her again, twenty metres away from me, looking at me, I felt in my soul, sleeping peacefully, the desolation of having lost her, as if not a single day of those ten years had passed. Inés! Her beauty, her gaze – unique among all women – had been mine, well mine, because they had been given to me with adoration. You too will appreciate this one day.

I did my best to forget, I broke my teeth trying to concentrate all my thoughts on the scene. But Wagner’s prodigious score, that cry of sickening passion, kindled into a living flame what I wanted to forget. In the second or third act I could take no more and turned my head away. She too was under Wagner’s suggestion, and she was looking at me, Inés, my life! For half a minute her mouth, her hands, were under my mouth and my eyes, and during that time she concentrated in her pallor the sensation of that ten years dead dicjla. And Tristan always, his howls of superhuman passion, on our dead happiness!

I got up then, crossed the seats like a sleepwalker, and advanced along the aisle, approaching her without seeing her, without her seeing me, as if for ten years I had not been miserable…. And like ten years ago, I suffered the hallucination that I was carrying my hat in my hand and was going to pass in front of her.

I passed, the door of the box was open, and I stopped in my madness. As ten years before on the sofa she, Agnes, now lying on the divan of the box, was sobbing Wagner’s passion and her undone happiness.

Agnes! …. I felt that fate had placed me at a decisive moment. Ten years!… But had they passed? No, no, my Agnes!

And as then, seeing her body all love, shaken by sobs, I called out to her:

– Agnes!

And as ten years before, the sobs redoubled, and as then she answered me under her arms:

– No, no… It is too late!

Step into the eerie, beautiful, and captivating world of Horacio Quiroga, the master of the short story in Latin American literature. Known for his gripping tales that blur the lines between man and nature, life and death, and reason and madness, Quiroga’s stories are as haunting today as when they were first written.

This new translation brings a fresh, modern voice to Quiroga’s timeless works, making them more accessible than ever to contemporary English readers. From the perilous jungles of Misiones to the psychological depths of human nature, Quiroga’s narratives pull you into a world where survival and horror are intricately intertwined.

What sets this edition apart is its complementary critical analysis, offering insights into Quiroga’s writing style, thematic preoccupations, and his influence on modern horror and psychological fiction. Explore how his tragic personal life shaped his fascination with death, isolation, and the frailty of the human mind.

Additionally, this edition features stunning AI-generated imagerybringing Quiroga’s vivid and unsettling landscapes to life in a way never before seen. These visuals, inspired by the visceral imagery of his stories, serve as an artistic interpretation of the strange and eerie atmospheres that define his work.

Whether you are new to Quiroga or a longtime fan, this collection promises to both captivate and unsettle, offering a fresh lens on the terrifying beauty of his storytelling.

Quiroga’s selected short stories, translated into English by Enzo Martinelli, are now available for purchase as ebook on Amazon, Apple Books and other selected sellers.