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Updated: May 2, 2025
My family being well known to Basilio, I obtained his consent to visit their lonely rancho whenever I could; and I, on my part, promised not to speak of love to Transita till her sixteenth year.
Margarita has inherited the form, not the spirit, of the child Transita. She is an exquisite statue endowed with life. Transita, with lines equally graceful and colours just as perfect, had caught the spirit of the wind and sunshine and was all freedom, motion, fire a being half human, half angelic. I saw her only to love her; nor was it a common passion she inspired in me.
I told her that if she died, Margarita would be conveyed to the French ship in the harbour, and afterwards to me, and that I knew where to place her with good-hearted, simple peasants who loved me, and would obey my wishes in all things. "She was satisfied, and I left her to make the necessary arrangements to carry out my plans. A few weeks later Transita expired, and the child was brought to me.
The situation was also wild and solitary, and they very seldom saw a strange face. Transita spent her childhood in rambling over the dunes on that lonely coast, with only wild flowers, birds, and the ocean waves for playmates.
Three years after I had found Transita, I was ordered to a distant part of the country, for I was already in the army then, and, fearing that it would not be possible for me to visit them for a long time, I persuaded Basilio to let me speak to his daughter, who was now fourteen.
Transita was in this way taken to Buenos Ayres, where she had masters to instruct her, and lived in great splendour. The novelty of this life charmed her for a time; the pleasures of a large city, and the universal admiration her beauty excited, occupied her mind and made her happy.
I then sent her to Batata's house, where, ignorant of the secret of her birth, she has been brought up as her mother wished her to be. May she never, like the unhappy Transita, fall into the power of a ravening beast in man's shape." "Amen!" I exclaimed. "But surely, if this child will be entitled to a fortune some day, it will only be right that she should have it."
We Orientals are not tearless men, and I have wept since then, but only with rage and hatred. My last tears of tenderness were shed over unhappy, dying Transita. "Briefly she told me her story. No letter from me had ever reached Basilio; it was supposed that I had fallen in battle, or that my heart had changed.
Here in a small rancho in a lonely spot called Barranca del Peregrine, and with only a few sheep and cows to subsist on, he spent the remainder of his life. His wife, though old, bore him one child, a daughter, named Transita. They taught her nothing; for in all respects they lived like peasants and had forgotten the use of books.
When she had been several months in Montevideo she heard casually that I was still alive and in the besieging army; and, anxious to impart her last wishes to a friend, had sent for me. "Could you, my friend, could any man, divine the nature of that dying request Transita wished to make?
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