‘The prestige of your house will fly from mouth to mouth from the string of the Antilles to the realm of Holland,’ the grandmother was saying. ‘And it will be more important than the presidential palace, because the affairs of government will be discussed there and the fate of the nation will be decided.’
Suddenly the water in the tube stopped. Eréndira left the tent to find out what was going on and saw the Indian in charge of pouring water into the tube chopping wood by the kitchen.
‘It ran out,’ the Indian said. ‘We have to cool more water.’
Eréndira went to the stove, where there was another large pot with aromatic herbs boiling. She wrapped her hands in a cloth and saw that she could lift the pot without the help of the Indian.
‘You can go,’ she told him. ‘I’ll pour the water.’
She waited until the Indian had left the kitchen. Then she took the boiling pot off the stove, lifted it with great effort to the height of the tube, and was about to pour the deadly water into the conduit to the bathtub when the grandmother shouted from inside the tent:
‘Eréndira!’
It was as if she had seen. The granddaughter, frightened by the shout, repented at the last minute.
‘Coming, Grandmother,’ she said. ‘I’m cooling off the water.’
That night she lay thinking until quite late while her grandmother sang in her sleep, wearing the golden vest. Eréndira looked at her from her bed with intense eyes that in the shadows resembled those of a cat. Then she went to bed like a person who had drowned, her arms on her breast and her eyes open, and she called with all the strength of her inner voice:
‘Ulises!’
Ulises woke up suddenly in the house on the orange plantation. He had heard Eréndira’s voice so clearly that he was looking for her in the shadows of the room. After an instant of reflection, he made a bundle of his clothing and shoes and left the bedroom. He had crossed the porch when his father’s voice surprised him:
‘Where are you going?’
Ulises saw him blue in the moonlight.
‘Into the world,’ he answered.
‘This time I won’t stop you,’ the Dutchman said. ‘But I warn you of one thing: wherever you go your father’s curse will follow you.’
‘So be it,’ said Ulises.
Surprised and even a little proud of his son’s resolution, the Dutchman followed him through the orange grove with a look that slowly began to smile. His wife was behind him with her beautiful Indian woman’s way of standing. The Dutchman spoke when Ulises closed the gate.
‘He’ll be back,’ he said, ‘beaten down by life, sooner than you think.’
‘You’re so stupid,’ she sighed. ‘He’ll never come back.’
On that occasion Ulises didn’t have to ask anyone where Eréndira was. He crossed the desert hiding in passing trucks, stealing to eat and sleep and stealing many times for the pure pleasure of the risk until he found the tent in another seaside town which the glass buildings gave the look of an illuminated city and where resounded the nocturnal farewells of ships weighing anchor for the island of Aruba. Eréndira was asleep chained to the slat and in the same position of a drowned person on the beach from which she had called him. Ulises stood looking at her for a long time without waking her up, but he looked at her with such intensity that Eréndira awoke. Then they kissed in the darkness, caressed each other slowly, got undressed wearily, with a silent tenderness and a hidden happiness that was more than ever like love.
At the other end of the tent the sleeping grandmother gave a monumental turn and began to rant.
‘That was during the time the Greek ship arrived,’ she said. ‘It was a crew of madmen who made the women happy and didn’t pay them with money but with sponges, living sponges that later on walked about the houses moaning like patients in a hospital and making the children cry so that they could drink the tears.’
She made a subterranean movement and sat up in bed.
‘That was when he arrived, my God,’ she shouted, ‘stronger, taller, and much more of a man than Amadís.’
Ulises, who until then had not paid any attention to the raving, tried to hide when he saw the grandmother sitting up in bed. Eréndira calmed him.
‘Take it easy,’ she told him. ‘Every time she gets to that part she sits up in bed, but she doesn’t wake up.’
Ulises leaned on her shoulder.
‘I was singing with the sailors that night and I thought it was an earthquake,’ the grandmother went on. ‘They all must have thought the same thing because they ran away shouting, dying with laughter, and only he remained under the starsong canopy. I remember as if it had been yesterday that I was singing the song that everyone was singing those days. Even the parrots in the courtyard sang it.’
Flat as a mat, as one can sing only in dreams, she sang the lines of her bitterness:
Lord, oh, Lord, give me back the innocence I had
So I can feel his love all over again from the start.
Only then did Ulises become interested in the grandmother’s nostalgia.
‘There he was,’ she was saying, ‘with a macaw on his shoulder and a cannibal-killing blunderbuss, the way Guatarral arrived in the Guianas, and I felt his breath of death when he stood opposite me and said: “I’ve been around the world a thousand times and seen women of every nation, so I can tell you on good authority that you are the haughtiest and the most obliging, the most beautiful woman on earth.” ’
She lay down again and sobbed on her pillow. Ulises and Eréndira remained silent for a long time, rocked in the shadows by the sleeping old woman’s great breathing. Suddenly Eréndira, without the slightest quiver in her voice, asked:
‘Would you dare to kill her?’
Taken by surprise, Ulises didn’t know what to answer.
‘Who knows,’ he said. ‘Would you dare?’
‘I can’t,’ Eréndira said. ‘She’s my grandmother.’
Then Ulises looked once more at the enormous sleeping body as if measuring the quantity of life and decided:
‘For you I’d be capable of anything.’
Ulises bought a pound of rat poison, mixed it with whipped cream and raspberry jam, and poured that fatal cream into a piece of pastry from which he had removed the original filling. Then he put some thicker cream on top, smoothing it with a spoon until there was no trace of his sinister maneuver, and he completed the trick with seventy-two little pink candles.
The grandmother sat up on her throne waving her threatening crosier when she saw him come into the tent with the birthday cake.
‘You brazen devil!’ she shouted. ‘How dare you set foot in this place?’
Ulises hid behind his angel face.
‘I’ve come to ask your forgiveness,’ he said, ‘on this day, your birthday.’
Disarmed by his lie, which had hit its mark, the grandmother had the table set as if for a wedding feast. She sat Ulises down on her right while Eréndira served them, and after blowing out the candles with one devastating gust, she cut the cake into two equal parts. She served Ulises.
‘A man who knows how to get himself forgiven has earned half of heaven,’ she said. ‘I give you the first piece, which is the piece of happiness.’
‘I don’t like sweet things,’ he said. ‘You take it.’
The grandmother offered Eréndira a piece of cake. She took it into the kitchen and threw it in the garbage.
The grandmother ate the rest all by herself. She put whole pieces into her mouth and swallowed them without chewing, moaning with delight and looking at Ulises from the limbo of her pleasure. When there was no more on her plate she also ate what Ulises had turned down. While she was chewing the last bit, with her fingers she picked up the crumbs from the tablecloth and put them into her mouth.
She had eaten enough arsenic to exterminate a whole generation of rats. And yet she played the piano and sang until midnight, went to bed happy, and was able to have a normal sleep. The only thing new was a rocklike
scratch in her breathing.
Eréndira and Ulises kept watch over her from the other bed, and they were only waiting for her death rattle. But the voice was as alive as ever when she began to rave.
‘I went crazy, my God, I went crazy!’ she shouted. ‘I put two bars on the bedroom door so he couldn’t get in; I put the dresser and table against the door and the chairs on the table, and all he had to do was give a little knock with his ring for the defenses to fall apart, the chairs to fall off the table by themselves, the table and dresser to separate by themselves, the bars to move out of their slots by themselves.’
Eréndira and Ulises looked at her with growing surprise as the delirium became more profound and dramatic and the voice more intimate.
‘I felt I was going to die, soaked in the sweat of fear, begging inside for the door to open without opening, for him to enter without entering, for him never to go away but never to come back either so I wouldn’t have to kill him!’
She went on repeating her drama for several hours, even the most intimate details, as if she had lived it again in her dream. A little before dawn she rolled over in bed with a movement of seismic accommodation and the voice broke with the imminence of sobs.
‘I warned him and he laughed,’ she shouted. ‘I warned him again and he laughed again, until he opened his eyes in terror, saying, ‘Agh, queen! Agh, queen!’ and his voice wasn’t coming out of his mouth but through the cut the knife had made in his throat.’
Ulises, terrified at the grandmother’s fearful evocation, grabbed Eréndira’s hand.
‘Murdering old woman!’ he exclaimed.
Eréndira didn’t pay any attention to him because at that instant dawn began to break. The clocks struck five.
‘Go!’ Eréndira said. ‘She’s going to wake up now.’
‘She’s got more life in her than an elephant,’ Ulises exclaimed. ‘It can’t be!’
Eréndira cut him with a knifing look.
‘The whole trouble,’ she said, ‘is that you’re no good at all for killing anybody.’
Ulises was so affected by the crudeness of the reproach that he left the tent. Eréndira kept on looking at the sleeping grandmother with her secret hate, with the rage of her frustration, as the sun rose and the bird air awakened. Then the grandmother opened her eyes and looked at her with a placid smile.
‘God be with you, child.’
The only noticeable change was a beginning of disorder in the daily routine. It was Wednesday, but the grandmother wanted to put on a Sunday dress, decided that Eréndira would receive no customers before eleven o’clock, and asked her to paint her nails garnet and give her a pontifical coiffure.
‘I never had so much of an urge to have my picture taken,’ she exclaimed.
Eréndira began to comb her grandmother’s hair, but as she drew the comb through the tangles a clump of hair remained between the teeth. She showed it to her grandmother in alarm. The grandmother examined it, pulled on another clump with her fingers, and another bush of hair was left in her hand. She threw it on the ground, tried again and pulled out a larger lock. Then she began to pull her hair with both hands, dying with laughter, throwing the handfuls into the air with an incomprehensible jubilation until her head looked like a peeled coconut.
Eréndira had no more news of Ulises until two weeks later when she caught the call of the owl outside the tent. The grandmother had begun to play the piano and was so absorbed in her nostalgia that she was unaware of reality. She had a wig of radiant feathers on her head.
Eréndira answered the call and only then did she notice the wick that came out of the piano and went on through the underbrush and was lost in the darkness. She ran to where Ulises was, hid next to him among the bushes, and with tight hearts they both watched the little blue flame that crept along the wick, crossed the dark space, and went into the tent.
‘Cover your ears,’ Ulises said.
They both did, without any need, for there was no explosion. The tent lighted up inside with a radiant glow, burst in silence, and disappeared in a whirlwind of wet powder. When Eréndira dared enter, thinking that her grandmother was dead, she found her with her wig singed and her nightshirt in tatters, but more alive than ever, trying to put out the fire with a blanket.
Ulises slipped away under the protection of the shouts of the Indians, who didn’t know what to do, confused by the grandmother’s contradictory orders. When they finally managed to conquer the flames and get rid of the smoke, they were looking at a shipwreck.
‘It’s like the work of the evil one,’ the grandmother said. ‘Pianos don’t explode just like that.’
She made all kinds of conjectures to establish the causes of the new disaster, but Eréndira’s evasions and her impassive attitude ended up confusing her. She couldn’t find the slightest crack in her granddaughter’s behavior, nor did she consider the existence of Ulises. She was awake until dawn, threading suppositions together and calculating the loss. She slept little and poorly. On the following morning, when Eréndira took the vest with the gold bars off her grandmother, she found fire blisters on her shoulders and raw flesh on her breast. ‘I had good reason to be turning over in my sleep,’ she said as Eréndira put egg whites on the burns. ‘And besides, I had a strange dream.’ She made an effort at concentration to evoke the image until it was as clear in her memory as in the dream.
‘It was a peacock in a white hammock,’ she said.
Eréndira was surprised but she immediately assumed her everyday expression once more.
‘It’s a good sign,’ she lied. ‘Peacocks in dreams are animals with long lives.’
‘May God hear you,’ the grandmother said, ‘because we’re back where we started. We have to begin all over again.’
Eréndira didn’t change her expression. She went out of the tent with the plate of compresses and left her grandmother with her torso soaked in egg white and her skull daubed with mustard. She was putting more egg whites into the plate under the palm shelter that served as a kitchen when she saw Ulises’ eyes appear behind the stove as she had seen them the first time behind her bed. She wasn’t startled, but told him in a weary voice:
‘The only thing you’ve managed to do is increase my debt.’
Ulises’ eyes clouded over with anxiety. He was motionless, looking at Eréndira in silence, watching her crack the eggs with a fixed expression of absolute disdain, as if he didn’t exist. After a moment the eyes moved, looked over the things in the kitchen, the hanging pots, the strings of annatto, the carving knife. Ulises stood up, still not saying anything, went in under the shelter, and took down the knife.
Eréndira didn’t look at him again, but when Ulises left the shelter she told him in a very low voice:
‘Be careful, because she’s already had a warning of death. She dreamed about a peacock in a white hammock.’
The grandmother saw Ulises come in with the knife, and making a supreme effort, she stood up without the aid of her staff and raised her arms.
‘Boy!’ she shouted. ‘Have you gone mad?’
Ulises jumped on her and plunged the knife into her naked breast. The grandmother moaned, fell on him, and tried to strangle him with her powerful bear arms.
‘Son of a bitch,’ she growled. ‘I discovered too late that you have the face of a traitor angel.’
She was unable to say anything more because Ulises managed to free the knife and stab her a second time in the side. The grandmother let out a hidden moan and hugged her attacker with more strength. Ulises gave her a third stab, without pity, and a spurt of blood, released by high pressure, sprinkled his face: it was oily blood, shiny and green, just like mint honey.
Eréndira appeared at the entrance with the plate in her hand and watched the struggle with criminal impassivity.
Huge, monolithic, roaring with pain and rage, the grandmother grasped Ulises’ body. Her arms, her legs, even her hairless skull were green with blood. Her enormous bellows-breathing, upset by the first rattles of de
ath, filled the whole area. Ulises managed to free his arm with the weapon once more, opened a cut in her belly, and an explosion of blood soaked him in green from head to toe. The grandmother tried to reach the open air which she needed in order to live now and fell face down. Ulises got away from the lifeless arms and without pausing a moment gave the vast fallen body a final thrust.
Eréndira then put the plate on a table and leaned over her grandmother, scrutinizing her without touching her. When she was convinced that she was dead her face suddenly acquired all the maturity of an older person which her twenty years of misfortune had not given her. With quick and precise movements she grabbed the gold vest and left the tent.
Ulises remained sitting by the corpse, exhausted by the fight, and the more he tried to clean his face the more it was daubed with that green and living matter that seemed to be flowing from his fingers. Only when he saw Eréndira go out with the gold vest did he become aware of his state.
He shouted to her but got no answer. He dragged himself to the entrance to the tent and he saw Eréndira starting to run along the shore away from the city. Then he made a last effort to chase her, calling her with painful shouts that were no longer those of a lover but of a son, yet he was overcome by the terrible drain of having killed a woman without anybody’s help. The grandmother’s Indians caught up to him lying face down on the beach, weeping from solitude and fear.
Eréndira had not heard him. She was running into the wind, swifter than a deer, and no voice of this world could stop her. Without turning her head she ran past the saltpeter pits, the talcum craters, the torpor of the shacks, until the natural science of the sea ended and the desert began, but she still kept on running with the gold vest beyond the arid winds and the never-ending sunsets and she was never heard of again nor was the slightest trace of her misfortune ever found.
Collected Stories Page 30