The Fencing Master (6 page)

"How would you respond, Don Jaime, if, during a bout, your opponent made a doublé attack in tierce?"

The fencing master thought he must have misheard. He began to ask her to repeat what she had said but stopped halfway, confused. He drew a hand across his forehead, then placed both hands on his knees and sat looking at Señora de Otero as if demanding an explanation. This was ridiculous.

"I'm sorry?"

She was watching him, amused, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes. She spoke with disconcerting firmness. "I would like your expert opinion, Don Jaime."

He sighed, shifting about on his footstool. All this was devilishly unusual. "You're really interested?"

"Of course."

Don Jaime raised one hand to his mouth and gave an embarrassed cough. "Well, I don't know how far ... I mean of course, if you find the subject ... A doublé attack in tierce, you said?" After all it was just a question, albeit a strange one coming from her. Or perhaps not so strange. "Well, I suppose that if my opponent attacked in tierce, I would parry and then respond with a half thrust. Do you understand? It's fairly elementary."

"And if he responded to your half thrust by parrying and disengaging immediately m quarte?"

He looked at the young woman, this time with amazement. She had given the correct sequence.

"In that case," he said, "I would parry in quarte, and attack immediately in quarte." This time he omitted the "do you understand?" It was obvious that Señora de Otero did understand. "That is the only possible response."

She threw her head back in unexpected gaiety, almost as if to laugh out loud, but instead she merely smiled. "Do you want to disappoint me, Don Jaime? Or are you trying to catch me out? You know perfectly well that that is far from being the only possible response. It may not even be the best one."

His discomfiture was obvious. He could never have imagined having such a conversation. Something told him that he was entering unfamiliar country, yet at the same time his professional curiosity drove him irresistibly on. He decided to lower his guard slightly—just enough to follow the game and to see where it was all leading.

"Would you care to suggest some alternative, dear lady?" he asked, just skeptically enough not to be rude. The young woman nodded, almost vehemently, and in her eyes there was a glint of excitement that gave Don Jaime much food for thought.

"I can suggest at least two," she replied with a conviction entirely lacking in conceit. "You could parry in quarte, but cut over the enemy's blade and then thrust in quarte over his arm. Does that seem correct to you?"

Don Jaime had to acknowledge that this was not only correct, it was brilliant. "But you mentioned another option," he said.

"I did." While Señora de Otero was speaking, she moved her right hand as if reproducing the movements of the foil. "Parry in quarte and respond with a flanconnade. I'm sure you'll agree that any blow is always much faster and more effective if performed in the same line as the parry. Both should form a single movement."

"The flanconnade is not an easy move," said Don Jaime, now genuinely interested. "Where did you learn it?"

"In Italy."

"Who was your teacher?"

"His name is irrelevant." The young woman smiled to soften her refusal to answer his question. "Let's just say that he was considered among the best in Europe. He taught me the nine thrusts, their various combinations and how to parry them. He was a patient man." She emphasized the adjective with a pointed look. "And he didn't consider it a dishonor to teach his art to a woman."

Don Jaime preferred to ignore the allusion. "What is the main risk involved in performing a flanconnade?" he asked, looking her in the eyes.

"Receiving a riposte in seconde."

"And how would you avoid it?"

"By making a
froissement
in reverse."

"How do you parry a flanconnade?"

"With a seconde or a low quarte. Anyone would think this was an examination, Don Jaime."

"It
is
an examination, Señora de Otero."

They sat regarding each other in silence, as weary as if they really had been fencing with foils. He took a good look at the young woman, noticing for the first time how strong her right wrist was, though without losing any of its feminine grace. The expression in her eyes and the gestures she made while describing the fencing moves were equally eloquent. Don Jaime knew, from experience, how to recognize a talented fencer. He reproached himself for having allowed his prejudices to blind him.

Of course all this was purely theoretical, and he realized that now he needed to test her skills in practice. Touché. That complicated young woman was about to achieve the impossible: to awaken in him, after thirty years in the profession, the desire to see a woman fence. To see
her
fence.

Adela de Otero was watching him gravely, awaiting his verdict. Don Jaime cleared his throat. "I have to confess that I am very surprised."

The young woman didn't reply, nor did she make any gesture. She remained impassive, as if his surprise was something she had expected from the start, but which was not the reason for her presence here.

Don Jaime had come to a decision, although in his heart of hearts he preferred not to question, for the moment, the ease with which he had surrendered.

"I'll expect you tomorrow at five. If the trial lesson proves satisfactory, we will arrange a date to teach you the two-hundred-escudo thrust. Try to come..." He indicated her clothes, experiencing a sudden awkward rush of modesty. "I mean, try to come dressed in an appropriate fashion."

He expected a cry of joy, a clapping of hands, or something of the sort, one of the usual manifestations to which the female nature seems so inclined. But he was disappointed. Señora de Otero merely gave him a long, silent look, so enigmatic that, although Don Jaime could not have said why, an absurd shiver ran through his body.

T
HE
light from the oil lamp cast flickering shadows about the room. Don Jaime reached out his hand to work the mechanism of the wick, raising it a little until the brightness grew. With his pencil he drew another two lines on the sheet of paper, forming the vertex of an angle, and joined the two ends with an arc. Seventy-five degrees, more or less. That was the margin within which one should move the foil. He noted the figure down and sighed. A half thrust in quarte without disengaging; perhaps that was the right path to take. And then what? The opponent would, logically speaking, parry in quarte. Would he, though? Well, there were plenty of ways to force it. Then he would have to riposte immediately in quarte, perhaps with a half thrust, with a false attack without disengaging. No, that was too obvious. Don Jaime put the pencil down and imitated the movement of the foil with his hand, studying his shadow on the wall. He thought glumly how absurd it was that he always ended up with familiar, classical moves that could easily be predicted and avoided by an opponent The perfect thrust was something else It had to be as swift and precise as a bolt of lightning unexpected impossible to parry But what was it?

On the shelves, the gold lettering on the spines of the books gleamed softly in the light from the oil lamp. The pendulum of the clock on the wall swung monotonously back and forth, its gentle tick-tock the only sound filling the room now that his pencil was no longer moving across the page. He lightly thumped the table a few times, sighed deeply, and looked out the open window. The Madrid rooftops were now nothing but a confusion of shadows, barely hinted at by the pale light of a sliver of moon fine as a silver thread.

He would have to abandon that opening in quarte. He picked up his pencil again—it was gnawed at one end—and drew more lines and arcs. Perhaps by opposing a counterparry of tierce, with the wrist pronated, and with his weight on his left thigh...

It was risky, for it exposed the person performing it to a thrust to the face. The solution, therefore, consisted in throwing your head back and disengaging in tierce. But when to do it? Of course, at the moment when your opponent raised his foot, a lunge in tierce or quarte over the arm. He drummed his fingers on the piece of paper, exasperated. This was all leading nowhere; the response to both moves was to be found in any treatise on fencing. What else could he do after disengaging in tierce? He drew more lines and arcs, noted down degrees, consulted notes and books open on the table. None of the options seemed appropriate; none provided the basis he needed for his thrust.

He got abruptly to his feet, pushing back his chair, and picked up the oil lamp to light him as far as the fencing gallery. He set it down on the floor next to one of the mirrors, took off his dressing gown, and picked up a foil. Sinister shadows appeared on his face, lit from below, as if on the face of a ghost. He made various moves directed at his own image. Counterparry in tierce. Disengage. Counterparry. Disengage. Three times he managed to touch his twin reflection moving simultaneously on the surface of the mirror. Counterparry. Disengage. Perhaps two false attacks one after the other, yes, but then what? He ground his teeth with rage. There must be a way!

In the distance, the post office clock struck three. The fencing master stopped, expelling the air from his lungs. It was all utterly ridiculous. Not even Lucien de Montespan had managed it.

"The perfect thrust doesn't exist," that maestro of maestros used to say when anyone asked him the question. "Or, to be exact, there are many. Any thrust that hits home is the perfect thrust, but that's all. Any thrust can be parried, given the right movement. Thus, a fight between two seasoned fencers could go on forever. What happens is that Fate, which enjoys spicing things up with a dash of the unforeseen, determines that everything must have an end, and forces one of the combatants, sooner or later, to make a mistake. It is therefore merely a matter of keeping Fate at bay long enough for the other man to make a mistake first. Anything else is pure illusion."

Don Jaime had never been convinced. He still dreamed of the masterstroke, the Astarloa stroke, his Grail. That one ambition, to discover the unpredictable, infallible move, had stirred his soul ever since his youth, in the distant days when he was at the military academy preparing to enter the army.

The army. How different his life might have been! A young officer with a free place as the orphan of a hero of the War of Independence, with his first billet in the Royal Guard in Madrid, the same regiment in which Ramón María Narváez had served. Lieutenant Astarloa had had a promising career, cut short, almost before it began, by an act of youthful folly. All because of a pale mantilla beneath which he had glimpsed two dark, shining eyes and a slender white hand gracefully fluttering a fan. All because a certain young officer fell head over heels in love and because, as usually happens in this sort of story, there was a third party, a rival insolent enough to get in the way. There was a cold, misty morning, the clash of swords, a cry, and a red stain on a sweat-soaked shirt, a stain that spread before anyone could stem the flow. There was a pale young man, staring stunned and incredulous at that scene, surrounded by the grave faces of colleagues advising him to flee, to preserve the freedom that the tragedy placed at risk. Then there was the frontier one rainy evening a train traveling northeast through green fields, beneath a leaden sky. There was a miserable boardinghouse by the Seine, in a gray, unfamiliar city that people called Paris.

A chance acquaintance, a fellow exile who had a good position there, recommended Jaime as a student-cum-apprentice to Lucien de Montespan, who was at the time the most prestigious fencing master in France. Intrigued by the young duelist's story, Monsieur de Montespan took him on after discovering in him an unusual talent for the art of fencing. Jaime's only tasks at first were those of a steward; he offered towels to the clients, maintained the weapons, and ran small errands entrusted to him by the maestro. Later, as he progressed, he was still assigned only secondary tasks but this time they were directly related to fencing. Two years later, when Montespan moved to Austria and Italy, Jaime went with him. He had just turned twenty-four and instantly fell under the spell of Vienna, Milan, Naples, and, above all, Rome, where both men spent a long period in one of the most famous
salles d'armes
in that city on the Tiber. Montespan's fame soon spread in Rome where his sober classical style following the pure lines of the old school of French fencing contrasted with the somewhat anarchic fantasy and freedom of movement of which Italian fencing masters were so enamored It was in Rome that thanks to his personal gifts Jaime grew into both a perfect society gentleman and a consummate fencer alongside his teacher to whom he was bound by ties of affection and for whom he carried out the duties of aide and secretary. Monsieur de Montespan entrusted him with the students of lesser rank or those who had to be initiated into the basic moves before the prestigious maestro took them on himself.

In Rome, Jaime fell in love for the second time, and there too he had his second duel with a bare blade. This time the two were unconnected; the love affair was passionate and without serious consequences, burning itself out at last quite naturally. As regards the duel, it took place according to the strictest rules of the social code in vogue at the time, with a Roman aristocrat who had publicly voiced his doubts about Lucien de Montespan's professional credentials. Before the old teacher could send for his seconds, young Astarloa had anticipated him, sending his own seconds to the accuser, a certain Leonardo Capoferrato. The matter was resolved in a dignified manner, with foils, in a pine forest in Lazio, and with perfect, formal classicism. Capoferrato, who had a reputation as a formidable fencer, had to acknowledge that, whatever his opinion of Monsieur de Montespan, his aide and student, Signor Astarloa, had proved himself more than capable of putting two inches of steel in Capoferrato's side, inflicting a wound to the lung which, though not fatal, was nonetheless quite serious.

Thus passed three years that Don Jaime would always remember with singular pleasure. In the winter of 1839, however, Montespan experienced the first symptoms of the illness that, a few years later, would take him to the grave, and he resolved to return to Paris. Jaime did not want to leave his mentor, and they both returned to the French capital. Once they settled there, it was his teacher who advised Jaime to set himself up on his own account, promising to sponsor his entry into the closed society of
maîtres d'armes.
After a reasonable period of time, Jaime Astarloa, at the age of just twenty-seven, satisfactorily passed the exam of the Paris Academy of Arms, the most famous of all the academies, and obtained the diploma that would allow him thenceforth to exercise his chosen profession freely. He thus became one of the youngest teachers in Europe, and although his youth aroused some suspicion among the more distinguished clients, who were inclined to choose teachers whose age seemed a guarantee of knowledge, Jaime's own efforts and Monsieur de Montespan's cordial recommendations saw that Jaime soon acquired a good number of pupils of high social standing. In his salon he hung the ancient coat of arms of the Astarloa family: a silver anvil on a field vert, with the motto
TO ME
. He was Spanish, a gentleman, and had a sonorous name and a perfect right to display a coat of arms. Besides, he wielded the foil with diabolical skill. With all these things in his favor, the success of the new fencing master was pretty much assured in the Paris of the time. He earned good money and grew in experience. At that time too, he perfected—even then searching for the masterstroke—a thrust that he had invented and whose secret he guarded jealously, until the day when, at the insistence of friends and clients he was forced to include it in the repertoire of masterstrokes that he offered to his students. This was the famous two-hundred-escudo stroke, which enjoyed notorious success among the duelists in high society, who gladly paid that sum of money when they were in need of some decisive move with which to settle accounts with experienced opponents.