CHAPTER LXXVII.
I will here recount a dream that I had in my fourteenth year. It came
to me during one of those mild and sweet nights that are ushered in by
a long and delicious twilight.
In the room where I had spent all the years of my childhood I had been
lulled to sleep by the sound of songs that the sailors and young girls
sang as they danced around the flower-twined May-pole. Until the
moment of deep sleep I had listened to those very old national airs
which the children of the people were singing in a loud, free voice,
but distance softened and mellowed and poetized the voices as they
traversed the tranquil silence; strangely enough I had been soothed by
the noisy mirth and overflowing joyousness of these beings who, during
their fleeting youth, are so much more artless than we, and more
oblivious of death.
In my dream it was twilight, not a sad one however, but on the
contrary, the air was soft and mild and overflowing with sweet odors
like that of a real May night. I was in the yard of our house, the
aspect of which was not changed in any particular, but as I walked
beside the walls all abloom with jasmine, honeysuckle and roses, I
felt restless and troubled as if I was seeking for some unnamable
something; I seemed to have a consciousness that someone, whom I
wished ardently to see, awaited my coming; I felt as if there was
about to happen to me something so strange and wonderful as to
intoxicate me by its very advance.
At a spot where grew a very old rosebush, one that had been planted by
an ancestor and for that reason guarded sacredly, although it did not
bear more than one rose in two or three years, I saw a young girl
standing motionless with a seductive and mysterious smile upon her
lips.
The twilight became a little deeper, the air more languorous.
Everywhere it became darker; but about her shone a sort of
indeterminate light, like that coming from a reflector, and her figure
outlined itself clearly against the shadows in the background.
I guessed that she was very beautiful and young; but her forehead and
her eyes were hidden from me by the veil of night; indeed, I could see
nothing very distinctly except the exquisite oval of her lower face,
and her mouth which was parted smilingly. She leaned against the old
flowerless rosebush, almost in its branches. Night came on rapidly.
The girl seemed perfectly at home in the garden; she had come I knew
not from where, for there was no door by which she could have entered;
she appeared to find it as natural to be here as I found it natural to
find her here.
I drew very close in order to get a glimpse of her eyes which puzzled
me; suddenly, in spite of the darkness that became ever thicker, I saw
them very distinctly; they also were smiling like the lips;--and they
were not just any impersonal eyes, such, for instance, as may be found
in a statue representing youth; no, on the contrary they were very
particularly somebody's eyes; more and more they impressed me as
belonging to someone already much beloved whom I, with transports of
infinite joy and tenderness had found again.
I waked from sleep with a start, and as I did so I sought to retain
the phantom being who faded away and became more and more intangible
and unreal, in proportion as my mind grew clearer through the effort
it made to remember. Could it be possible that she was not and had
never been more than a vision? Had nothingness re-engulfed and forever
effaced her? I longed to sleep again so that I might see her; the
thought that she was an illusion, nothing more than the figment of a
dream, caused me great dejection and almost overwhelmed me with
hopelessness.
And it took me a very long time to forget her; I loved her, loved her
tenderly, and the thought of her always stirred into life an emotion
that was sweet but sad; and during those moments everything
unconnected with her seemed colorless and worthless. It was love, true
love with all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its
overwhelming but sad enchantment, love that, like a perfume, endows
with a fragrance all it touches; and that corner of the garden where
she had appeared to me and the old flowerless rosebush that had
clasped her in its branches awakened in me, because of her, agonizing
but delicious memories.
