Dead Stars

Chapter 1

Through the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush—they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issues from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among rose pots.

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."

Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."

"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.

"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in life be he was?"

"In love? With whom?"

"Whit Esperanza of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with a good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic—flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that—"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in plaza, man wooed maid.

Was he being cheated by life? Love—he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of prefervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he vacate very much engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought was that ruined so many. Greed—the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed—mortgaging the future—forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.

"What do you think happened?" Asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament—or of affection—on the part of either or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch.

"That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning m. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth—"

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose—almost indolence—disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with and indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips—indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened a little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.

He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre da cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wicked, open porches he could glimpse through the heat m-shriveled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he didn't even know her name; but now—

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Do you agree with Don Julian's Ideas?

Do you know someone like Alfredo?
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Cliffhanger! Sorry for the cliffhanger guys:( but the next chapter will be out in 2 days! So turn on your notifications and follow me! And don't mind the description...