Fermina Marquez (1911) by Valery Larbaud Read Free Book Online

hand, leant towards him and embraced him. Marquez struggled, wanting to break free; his pride mutinied. But he had met with so much harshness, so much actual cruelty since entering the school, that this mark of affection — and coming as it did from a senior — broke down all his courage, all his unflinching resignation to suffering. He restrained himself no more, laid his head against the breast of this friend and vented in sobs the full store of his anguish.
Meanwhile, the two of them, entwined together and merged in with the crowd of pupils, had not stopped their upward progress. Leniot tried to find words appropriate to the circumstances; but he was unable.  A triumphal joy overwhelmed him. He savoured the calmness he was feeling, the perfection   with   which   he   was   playing   this   role   of the comforter. He wondered what would happen if, holding the child as he was to his heart, he were to burst out laughing all of a sudden. This was no doubt what it was like to "enjoy peaceful tranquillity in the act of crime". Yes, this had been neatly   done!   Words   would   spoil   everything.   He   felt   a superiority over everything  around  him and despised  this despair he was alleviating. "Yet what if his sister were to see us?" he mused. He was delighted by his own heartlessness! At the door of the second form's dormitory,  Leniot embraced Marquez again, gave the burning little hand a tight squeeze and murmured quite simply: "See you tomorrow Paquito." Nobody had been watching them.
Every evening before falling asleep, he was in the habit of recalling his speech and actions of the past day and to pass judgement on them. He examined them coldy and did not seek to find excuses for them. Well, then, that evening, he realized    that    he    really    had    fewer    grounds    for    self-congratulation than he had at first thought. His intervention in the disturbance at the prep room was not the heroic action he had supposed when concocting it. There was something hypocritical about it, though he would not have been able to say precisely in what particular respect it was so. Unquestionably  the Iturrias,   with  their  unswerving  notion of school honour, would not have behaved in quite this way. In short, he had exposed all his school fellows to serious punishment, in order to have a black mark which he had deserved, struck out in his own interest. Fortunately, it had all passed off without mishap. But he had certainly revealed an unattractive side of his character to the prefect of studies, for the latter's speech, if his choice of phrase were to be considered more closely, was a great deal more subtle than it first appeared. Without a doubt, the prefect of studies had in an instant discerned the shabby  
effrontery deep down in the heart of "this model pupil". "Oh damn! He has seen through me for the time being." But what did it matter to Joanny that he had merited this man's contempt, if this contempt were not translated into an opposition to his scholastic success? He only regretted that he had not pushed his hypocrisy to the point where it escaped detection. He felt that if he had to behave vilely to protect his rights to the prize for excellence, he would have done so without compunction. Discontented to find that his was not a perfectly honest character, he rushed headlong to the opposite extreme and was not displeased to see himself as the villain of a melodrama.
But the thought of Fermina Marquez intruded to alter the course of this self-examination. The thought of Ferminita is the most wonderful you can have. And then there is the desire to be Ferminita's beloved. Yet just to see her, or rather to know or to have known her, suffices to lend a poetic glow to an entire existence. Liners cross the Atlantic. Later when we have grown to manhood, we will go to South America. We will see all the women there with eyes which have beheld Fermina