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Updated: May 9, 2025
It was the usual trouble: neurasthenia, diabetes, all those chronic ailments of which she did not want to be cured, refusing to obey the physicians. She was thinner, but her nerves seemed calmer; she cried less; she maintained a sad silence, simply wanting to be alone and stay in a corner, staring into space. Cotoner shook his head again. Renovales' optimism was not to be wondered at.
After midnight when Cotoner went away he walked in silence through the brilliantly lighted rooms; he prowled around the chamber entered it to see Josephina in bed, sweating, shaken from time to time by a fit of coughing or in a deathlike lethargy, so thin and small that the bed-clothes hardly showed the childlike outline of her body.
Mariano's friend, who had charge of the furnishing of the house, a certain Pepe Cotoner, who hardly ever touched his brushes and who devoted all his artistic enthusiasm to his worship of Renovales, had certainly done things well.
His expression of indifference was repeated when he heard the Countess of Alberca mentioned. Cotoner described her alarm and astonishment at the master's behavior. She had sent for him to find out about Mariano, to complain, with tears in her eyes, of his absence. She had twice been to the door of his house and had not been able to get in; she complained of the servant and that mysterious work.
Her daughter would lift her out of it without any effort as if she were a feather, and she would sit in a chair, small, insignificant, unrecognizable, her face so emaciated that its only features seemed to be the deep hollows of her eyes and her nose, sharp as the edge of a knife. Cotoner could hardly keep back the tears when he saw her.
In front of the altar were two praying desks and behind them, for the more important guests, all the luxurious chairs of the studio: white armchairs of the 18th Century, embroidered with pastoral scenes, Greek settles, benches of carved oak and Venetian chairs with high backs, the bizarre confusion of an antique shop. Suddenly Cotoner started back as if he were shocked. How careless!
Short, rotund, bald-headed, with projecting ears and the ugliness of a good-natured, merry satyr, Signor Cotoner, when summer came, always found refuge in the castle of some cardinal in the Roman Campagna. During the winter he was a familiar sight in the Corso, wrapped in his greenish mackintosh, the sleeves of which waved like a bat's wings.
You idiot," muttered his friend, losing all respect for him. Good Cotoner refused to go with him after that. In vain Renovales talked to him enthusiastically every night about that girl, deeply impressed by her different impersonations.
Cotoner started to laugh, in sheer admiration of the princely simplicity with which the master gave him the commission. "Thank you, sir; I am highly honored by such a favor, but I am not going. You confounded fool. Do you suppose that girl knows who Renovales is or has ever even heard of his name?" The master expressed his astonishment with childlike simplicity. "Man alive.
Fortunately Cotoner was at the house and mamma had made him stay, so that they would not have to lunch alone. Their old friend had gone to the kitchen and prepared one of those dishes he had learned to make in the days when he was a landscape-painter. Milita observed that all landscape-painters knew something about cooking.
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