by Sergio Pitol
I imagine a diplomat who was also a novelist. I would place him in Prague, a wonderful city, as is well known. He has just spent an extended holiday in Madeira and attends a dinner at the Portuguese Embassy. The table is a vision of elegance. To his right sits an elderly doyenne, the wife of the ambassador of a Scandinavian country; on the left, the wife of an official from the Embassy of Albania. The tone of the ambassador’s wife is imperious and decisive; she speaks to be heard by those sitting around her. The writer, who has just arrived from Madeira, remarks that he has gotten the better of winter by two months. But he has just begun to talk when she commandeers the conversation to say that the best years of her youth were spent precisely in Funchal. She began her speech not with the city’s gardens, nor in the beauty of the mountains, the seascape, the mild climate, nor with the virtues and defects of its inhabitants, but with its hospitality. She declared that tourism in Madeira had always been very exclusive and as an example of refinement commented that at the Reid they served tea with cucumber and butter sandwiches on dark bread, as was de rigueur in the last century; she spoke at length of her stay on the island where she lived during the war; she said that her father had always been a prudent man, so when the conflict seemed inevitable he decided to move with his family to Portugal, first to Lisbon and later to Madeira, where they settled permanently.
“That is how he was,” she continued, “so excessively prudent that we spent five years away from home without our country ever having declared war. It was as if Madeira remained outside the world; correspondence and newspapers arrived with such delay that when news finally arrived, it was already so outdated that one could scarcely be bothered. We settled in Funchal, which goes without saying; where else on the island would we have done so?”
The guests around her ate and nodded; they were only permitted an occasional comment of amazement or agreement, at most a fleeting question that would encourage her to continue her monologue. She spoke of an outing she once took accompanied by her mother to greet countrymen who were going through difficult times. On that afternoon, she wore an absolutely delightful dress of silk chiffon by Edward Molyneux, a combination of lilac flowers on an ocher background, a pleated skirt, which required yards and yards of fabric for its construction. She met that afternoon the man who would become her future husband, making a vague gesture toward the other end of the table where the ambassador, immersed in gloomy silence, was seated. For a moment, the writer was perplexed; something in the man’s face had changed over the holidays.
“We crossed Funchal until we arrived at a mansion on the outskirts that had seen better times, on whose terrace lay in deck chairs two youths covered in bandages and in casts from head to toe, taking air; both were convalescing from an accident. They lived there with their parents, a sister, and an English nurse who attended them. They belonged to an old family from my country, yes, the best kind of people, with large sums of money deposited in banks in different countries, although to see them no one would have thought as much; it was a house with little furniture, frighteningly ugly; the garden had become overgrown and where it was not overrun by weeds there were huge holes, like volcano craters.”
The dinner guests’ attention began to wane. Upon noticing signs of retreat, the old woman raised her voice even more and cast disapproving glances at the deserters, but she was defeated; conversations in small groups or pairs had already spread. Determined, she addressed the writer exclusively, hinting that he should consider it a privilege to hear such intimacies and memories of a place she considered off-limits to strangers.
“I approached the lounge chairs where the young men were lying” she continued, “and one of them, Arthur, quickly raised his partially plastered arm with his free hand, grabbed my big porcelain brick-colored buckle and pulled me to him, moaning and gasping; the pain from the effort must have been tremendous. ‘A sudden outburst of amorous passion,’ my mother, who was very wise, commented later. It may have been, but I think the poor, ailing creature was glad to see an impeccably dressed young woman, wrapped in beautifully colored fabrics, since he was always looking at his mother and sister—the nurse does not count—who were dressed like prisoners, which, I can assure you, was almost a crime in Funchal, whose elegance rivaled that of Estoril itself. Ah, such wonderful salons, and terraces, and garden parties! My greatest amusement at soirées was guessing the designers. Who had dressed the Princess Ratibor? Schiaparelli! And General Sikorski’s niece? Grès! She was transformed into a Greek sculpture. And the very rich Mrs. Sasseson? None other than Lelong! Yes, Sir, Lucien Lelong himself! My mother and I devoted our time at those parties to detecting which was an authentic Balmain, Patou, or Lanvin, and which were copies made by the Island’s prodigious seamstresses. Those were moments of splendor. One needed the Gotha within reach to avoid taking risks; one could be ruined at every step with the central European and Balkan titles. Of Arthur’s many wounds the only truly serious one was his knee, which had been shattered in a dynamite explosion. That is why the poor fellow still walks with a limp and not because of sciatica as he would have people believe, much less the bouts of gout as the Finnish doctor has been spreading. Yes, Arthur fell in love with my buckle; he loved the color, and asked me to wear it with all of my dresses. It may seem rather immodest on my part, but the belt buckle made him walk again; he began to stand; of course, he fell almost every time, howling in pain; we yelled to him amid applause that nothing could be learned without suffering. Now look at him, he’s like a colt! Were it not for me, he might well be prostrate in his deck chair.”
At that moment someone interrupted the storyteller, and the novelist took the opportunity to meet the woman who was eating silently to his left. She smiled at him widely and repeated the same words she had said at the beginning of the dinner, which is to say she pointed to her plate and said in broken English, “Is good.” It pleased him enormously that a mere two words could make up a conversation because he was deaf in his left ear, and conversations on that side were almost always torture for him; misunderstandings often occurred, his responses seldom coincided with people’s questions; in short, it was a nightmare.
The admirer of Madeira once again demanded his attention, and he, to extricate the monologue from the exhausting world of fashion, asked if the two young men had been injured in military action. The woman looked at him sternly and haughtily, and finally answered that the Finnish doctor, not the current but the previous one, had spread a malicious rumor that Arthur and his brothers had exploded the dynamite in order to avoid their military obligation, which was both slanderous and preposterous; none of them feared recruitment for the simple reason that their country was neutral. They had transported the dynamite in a small boat in order to eliminate an islet that was obstructing the view from the house. The oldest brother died, the other was paralyzed for life, and Arthur, the youngest, barely survived. He dreamt of devoting himself to organizing and directing safaris in Central Africa. When he recovered, contrary to what everyone might expect, he devoted himself to studying, and later joined the Foreign Service.
They were now having dessert; the woman from Albania touched his arm slightly, pointed to her plate and said, “Is good,” and then, expounding for the first time that night, added, “Is very many pigs,” or something that sounded close, and began to laugh delightfully. The wife of the Nordic ambassador appeared insulted. Not wanting to lose her preeminence, she made a comment about desserts in Madeira, especially those at the Reid and the Savoy, but the writer, infected by the gratuitousness of the Albanian woman’s humor, suddenly interrupted the ambassador’s wife with a comment about Conrad, his travels and his layovers, and said that he would have liked to know what he said when talking to ladies in Southeast Asia.
“Who?”
“Joseph Conrad. I imagine he must have occasionally received invitations; that he must not have spent all his life talking to merchants and sailors, and that he also spoke to wives, daughters, the sisters of British officials, of shipping ag
ents. What do you think he talked to them about?”
The woman must have thought his deafness had caused him to become lost, and that it was necessary to assist him:
“The Portuguese women dressed with impeccable taste, some in Balenciaga, but their conversation did not always match the hauteur of their attire; they always seemed uninteresting to me, not to mention they were also incredibly stingy. They demanded prompt and impeccable work, but for payment they were a calamity. Well, all of them, not just the Portuguese, were dreadfully tightfisted,” she exclaimed with sudden bitterness. “The war was a pretext to exercise their greed. They wanted to be queens, and they almost were: princesses, countesses, wives of bankers, in exile, yes, but with their fortunes safe, all of them, without exception, were unable to appreciate the work that conferred their elegance. They were willing to waste an entire morning in order to begrudge a dressmaker the few escudos needed to survive. Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I shall not take it back: they were all dreadfully tightfisted.”
The hosts stood; the twenty-two guests followed suit, and they all moved slowly toward the salon to take coffee and liqueurs and smoke at their leisure. The writer approached, not without a certain morbid curiosity, the husband of the woman to whom he had listened throughout dinner, an elderly man who looked as if he were made of knots arranged haphazardly on bones, a face composed of arbitrarily positioned pits and protrusions, a porcelain prosthetic eye capable of disturbing even the most phlegmatic interlocutor, and a leg that lacked movement. He spoke as intensely as his wife in the presence of two functionaries from the Portuguese embassy who listened to him dispassionately about the preparations for the upcoming wild boar hunt in the Tatras, which only six or seven very skilled hunters would attend. The writer realized for the first time that he was looking at him with his prosthetic eye, which he always had covered with a black patch. The writer was surprised that the old codger, one-eyed and quasi-paralytic, was awaiting the event with such strange enthusiasm. As soon as he was able, the writer interrupted to say that he had just spent the holiday in Madeira and that he had taken advantage of the time to relax and read. He did not dare add “to write” because the porcelain gaze from the fake eye and the glimmer of confusion that emerged from the real one transformed instantly into a dark horror that bordered almost on dementia. The embassy staff took advantage of the moment to slip away and attend to another solitary guest.
The old man recovered his wits; he asked mockingly, as if he had not heard the writer’s words, if he had decided to participate in the boar hunt, if he had oiled his old rifle and counted his cartridges, but, just like his wife, he did not wait for the answer and between groans added that they would leave from Bratislava the following Friday at four thirty in the morning, and that the hunt would last two days. The writer attempted to add that he only went on pheasant hunts, more than anything else because of the accompanying accoutrements: campfires in the snow, hunting music, horns, dinner at the castle. The old man frightened him again as he stared at him with the brutal coldness of his prosthetic eye and the maniacal fury of the other, and just when he expected to be labeled decadent, or “artistic,” he was surprised to hear the old man say, his voice stifled, almost unintelligible, that he too had once been to that inferno, that he recalled with horror that abominable island, although the verb recalled was perhaps not appropriate, because he never recalled that desolate place, unless someone was foolhardy enough to mention it to him, which, as it were, rarely happened. He was very young then, naive, uncorrupted, you might say, he did not know how to defend himself, much less possess the physical capabilities to do so, when a pack of hungry she-wolves, of she-wolves that were hyenas and vultures, attacked him, beat him with belts and straps, threw him to the ground, bit him, and took advantage of him and his purity. That dark confidence ended with a groan, and then, without saying goodbye, he turned, leapt toward a group of guests most certainly to remind them that the wild boar hunt was to take place next week in Slovakia. He then turned suddenly with military precision, retraced his steps, and faced him once again, as if the conversation had never ended.
“Don’t think,” he said with an expression marked by sullenness, “that I did not notice my wife’s unusual garrulousness at the table tonight. She did not allow anyone to speak, is that not right? One can never understand women; they spend the whole day immersed in the dreariest silence, and then, when least expected, they turn into magpies. What had her so excited?”
The writer commented that it had been a very instructive conversation; that in an environment as rigid as diplomacy, where women were accustomed to talking about trivialities, it was refreshing to meet a woman who could discuss such interesting topics.
“Topics? What topics?” he asked, as if carrying out a police interrogation. “Answer immediately! To what topics are you referring?”
“Your wife reveled in imagining what Conrad said to European women, the English in particular, in the Malaysian ports. She speculated on how Conrad might describe the dress of those long-suffering colonial women.”
“What are you saying, what, about whom was she talking?” It was evident that the response had flummoxed him.
“About the great Joseph Conrad, your wife’s favorite novelist.”
The old man made a violent gesture with his hand, which could be interpreted as “go to hell!” and he withdrew, hopping like a giant cricket.
Once home, the writer recalled the woman’s monologue about her elegant youth in Madeira and her husband’s subsequent comments. It seemed as if he had heard two versions of the same highly dramatic situation without having understood much about it, not even what about it was dramatic. And that was precisely the kind of exciting element necessary to create, to begin to invent, a plot. The enigmas were many: a dynamite explosion that takes place on a boat, the absurd explanation of wanting to blow up a reef to improve the view of a house where no one was interested in aesthetics, the couple’s relationship, the buckle, the belts, the woman’s coldness during this part of the story and, at the same time, the almost crazed excitement with which she described the chiffons and silks and brocades. A few days later, he remarked to some colleagues how strange the encounter with the couple made him feel. He learned that the Finnish doctor had said once that the ambassador’s wife had been a dressmaker in her youth, a woman who could reproduce a dress from a mere photograph. He tries to invent a story; the porcelain eye torments him; he begins to imagine scenes and even begins to give them dialogue; the ambition of the dressmaker, spurred by a greedy mother, to trap the suffering boy, heir to a large fortune. He imagines the girl and her mother as third-class guests at some get-togethers, admiring the dresses from the great ateliers of Paris, as well as those they had cut and sewn with their own hands. Whenever they discovered one of theirs they would exchange looks of complicity and joy.
A writer often listens without hearing a word spoken; other voices trap him. The voice of a real person disappears or becomes mere background music. Sometimes a few words send him to one imaginary character or another. Other times—and that’s what’s so surprising!—the writer doesn’t even know that the voices he tries to incorporate into a character, or a plot, are not intended for that story, that lurking under the plot exists another one, waiting for him.
The day arrives when he sits down to work. He has failed to resolve the enigma of the dynamite; he looks for the relationship of the explosive with the craters in the garden of the house in Funchal. Surprisingly, out of the blue, a new character has emerged, a young theosophist who joins the dressmaker and her mother in their daily outings to visit the patient. Sometimes, only the two young women make the visit. Others, the theosophist goes to the injured young man behind her friend’s back. The discovery of the young theosophist girl is tantamount to discovering a gold mine. He sees her, hears her, and knows what she’s thinking. Her body is very small, her head larger than it should be, but she is far from a monster; at least not physically. There is something about her, however,
something frightening: her rigidness, the harshness of her look, her sullen appearance. A fluid contempt for the world seems to exude from each of her pores. The author sees two young women of markedly dissimilar appearance walking down the road that leads to the mansion where the injured man lies: one is blonde and tall, a bit ungainly, well dressed; the other, the theosophist, is wearing a blouse and skirt of an almost military cut. At that moment, she recommends ferociously to the dressmaker something new and wicked to do to the patient. Anyone who saw them would think they were an ostrich and wild boar crossing, without noticing—so lost were they in thought—a flower garden’s beauty.
When the novelist finally begins his story, Funchal and its surroundings, all of Madeira and its characters, disappear completely. Only his new discovery, the theosophist, survives. There she is: sitting in a restaurant in the lobby of the Hotel Zevallos; yes, facing the main square in Córdoba, Veracruz, where she moves much more naturally than on the flowering avenues of Funchal, which is not to say that she has become pleasant or polished or relaxed, nothing of the sort. The world is revealed to the writer at that moment. He has begun to translate himself. “Writing is a case of impersonation, forging an identity: writing is passing yourself off as someone else.” At that moment, he is now that someone else. By transplanting the location, the young woman maintains her physical characteristics and is still a theosophist. She has returned to her hometown after living with her mother and sister in Los Angeles, California for twenty years, where the three had feverously read Annie Besant, Krishnamurti, and, above all, Madame Blavatsky. Upon her mother’s death, she travels to Córdoba, which she left when she was six or seven, to claim an inheritance. She stays at the home of family friends, perhaps distant relatives. Everyone knows her as “Chiquitita,” a nickname from her childhood and one that fills her with a heavy rage that she dares not show. Her resources are negligible, which is why she doesn’t leave the family who has welcomed her; every day she notes in a diary her petty expenses. She has forbidden herself any kind of luxury. A lawyer friend of her mother advises her to contact one of the opposing parties, her tío Antonio, for example, who is the most amenable. The same lawyer is responsible for arranging the interview. Chiquitita follows his instructions and meets her uncle for lunch one day in the lobby of the Zevallos. He addresses her nonchalantly, as if everything between them were perfect. “What a gorgeous niece I have!” he says as he greets her, adding: “You look much better in person, caramba, I mean, what a beauty!” But the young woman at no time lowers her guard; she frowns sullenly throughout the meal. She’s the same prickly person she ever was. Watching him drink glass after glass of beer during the meal repulses her. She reprimands him somewhat severely, commenting on the incompatibility of drunkenness and legal affairs. Her uncle laughs, amused, and calls her cutie pie, kitten, and pipsqueak. At the end, over dessert, her relative agrees to talk about the matter they met to discuss. He insists that he doesn’t see the need to go to court, the case should be settled amicably, as should all things among family; that she must, however, understand that the property in dispute does not belong to her, that before leaving Córdoba her mother was compensated appropriately, that while she was alive she received a monthly payment. Just then, he’s about to add that in spite of everything the family has considered giving them a sum, the amount of which would be determined when they signed a waiver renouncing their claim, but doesn’t manage to say it because Chiquitita beats him to the punch. She berates him with a string of disconcerting adjectives and a tone so sarcastic and petulant that the brute becomes enraged and responds with a remark so vulgar that it frightens her. He can be heard shouting, so every local will know, that if anyone in Córdoba remembers her mother, it’s because of her whoring-around, that he personally would see to it that she and her sister don’t see a penny, that he would prove that they were both daughters of someone other than his brother, her mother’s husband in name only, and that therefore they had no right to any part of the inheritance. He then adds sarcastically that the best thing she can do is find a husband, or an equivalent, to scratch her belly and support her. Suddenly, the beast of a man gets up and leaves the restaurant. Stunned, Chiquitita remains at the table, not so much because of the violent way she’s been treated, or because of the references to her mother’s loose behavior, nor because she discovers that recovering the portion of the assets that belongs to her is going to be more—much more!—difficult than she imagined, not even because of the scandal involved, but because of the mere inability to pay the tab. Overcome by rage, and on the verge of tears, she asks the waiter if he’ll accept the watch that hangs around her neck for a half hour, the time needed to go where she’s staying and pick up the money to cover the bill.