The World and His Wife

Beneath the lace mantillas and wrought-iron balconies of an unnamed Andalusian town, a patriarchal Eden fractures when rumor—more viper than viper—slides across polished marble and into the marriage bed of Don Julian, silver-haired grandee whose title is older than the dust motes dancing in his ancestral chapel. His Teodora, a tremulous bloom of seventeen summers, has become the sun around which two men orbit: her husband, custodian of honor, and Ernesto, the orphan-poet whose verses smell of ink still wet on the page. Into this hothouse of candlelit propriety bursts the sulfurous breath of society: whispers that the girl’s cradle rocking now echoes with a younger heartbeat. Don Alvarez—scimitar grin, velvet malignity—fans the ember until duelling gloves slap flesh and steel hisses from scabbards. Julian, sensing the mismatch between callow dreamer and seasoned killer, substitutes his own ageing sinews for Ernesto’s, crossing blades at dawn amid dew-beaded topiary. One man crumples, scarlet blooming on linen like a late camellia; the other staggers home, chest siphoning crimson through brocade, to perish beneath a ceiling where cherubs smirk. On the threshold of death he clings to a last chimera of betrayal; Teodora’s tears, Ernesto’s oaths, even Severo’s fraternal venom, all congeal into a final, tragic misreading. He dies cursing, thereby exiling the very innocents he sought to shield, sending them out—bereft of dowry, name, or roof—into a world whose hunger for scandal will now sup on fresh prey.