El Capitán always sat alone, and always at the same table; he drank in moderation and showed no enthusiasm for doña Burgel’s aphrodisiac stew. He tapped his toe in time with the music, and when niña Eloísa was unengaged he would invite her to dance, stopping smartly before her with a discreet click of his heels and a slight bow. They never spoke, they merely looked at each other and smiled between the gallops, skips, and obliques of some old-time dance.
One December Saturday less humid than others, a tourist couple came into The Little Heidelberg. These were not the disciplined Japanese they had been seeing recently but tall Scandinavians with tanned skin and pale eyes; they took a table and watched the dancers with fascination. They were merry and noisy; they clinked their mugs of beer, laughed heartily, and chatted in loud voices. The strangers’ words reached the ears of El Capitán at his table and, from a long way away, from another time and another world, came the sound of his own language, as whole and fresh as if it had just been invented, words he had not heard for several decades but retained intact in his memory. An unfamiliar expression softened the features of this ancient mariner and he wavered several minutes between the absolute reserve in which he felt comfortable and the almost forgotten delight of losing himself in conversation. Finally he rose and walked toward the strangers. Behind the bar, don Rupert observed El Capitán as he leaned forward slightly, hands clasped behind his back, and spoke to the new arrivals. Soon the other customers, the waitresses, and the musicians realized that the man was speaking for the first time since they had known him, and they, too, fell silent in order to hear him better. He had a voice like a great-grandfather, reedy and deliberate, but he uttered every phrase with clear determination. When he had poured out the contents of his heart, the room was so silent that doña Burgel hurried from the kitchen to find out whether someone had died. Finally, after a long pause, one of the tourists emerged from his astonishment, summoned don Rupert, and asked him in rudimentary English to help translate the captain’s words. The Nordic couple followed the elderly seaman to the table where niña Eloísa sat, and don Rupert trailed along, removing his apron on the way, with the intuition that a solemn event was about to occur. El Capitán spoke a few words in his language, one of the strangers translated it into English, and don Rupert, his ears pink and his mustache trembling, repeated it in his hind-to-fore Spanish.
“Niña Eloísa, asks El Capitán will you marry him.”
The fragile old lady sat there, her eyes round with surprise and her mouth hidden behind her batiste handkerchief, while all waited, holding their breath, until she was able to find her voice.
“Don’t you think this is a little sudden?” she whispered.
Her words were repeated by the tavernkeeper and then the tourist, and the answer traveled the same route in reverse.
“El Capitán says he has waited forty years to ask you, and that he could not wait until again comes someone who speaks his language. He says please to do him the favor of answering now.”
“All right,” niña Eloísa whispered faintly, and it was not necessary to translate her answer because everyone understood.
A euphoric don Rupert threw his arms in the air and announced the engagement; El Capitán kissed the cheeks of his fiancée, the tourists shook everyone’s hand, the musicians struck up a ringing triumphal march, and the guests formed a circle around the couple. The women wiped away tears, the men offered sentimental toasts, don Rupert sat down at the bar and buried his head in his arms, shaken with emotion, while doña Burgel and her two daughters uncorked bottles of their best rum. The trio began to play The Blue Danube waltz and the dance floor emptied.
El Capitán took the hand of the gentle lady he had wordlessly loved for so many years and walked with her to the center of the room, where they began to dance with the grace of two herons in their courtship dance. El Capitán held niña Eloísa in his arms with the same loving care with which in his youth he had caught the wind in the sails of an ethereal sailing ship, gliding with her around the floor as if they were skimming the calm waves of a bay, while he told her in the language of blizzards and forests all the things his heart had held silent until that moment. Dancing, dancing, El Capitán felt as if time were flowing backward, as if they were growing younger, as if with every step they were happier and lighter on their feet. Turn after turn, the chords of the music grew more vibrant, their feet more rapid, her waist more slender, the weight of her tiny hand fainter in his, her presence less substantial. El Capitán danced on as niña Eloísa turned to lace, to froth, to mist, until she was but a shadow, then, finally, nothing but air, and he found himself whirling, whirling, with empty arms, his only companion a faint aroma of chocolate.
The tenor indicated to the musicians that they should continue playing the same waltz, because he realized that with the last note the captain would wake from his reverie and the memory of niña Eloísa would disappear forever. Deeply moved, the elderly customers of The Little Heidelberg sat motionless in their chairs until finally La Mexicana, her arrogance transformed into affection and tenderness, stood and walked quietly toward the trembling hands of El Capitán, to dance with him.
THE JUDGE’S WIFE
Nicolas Vidal had always known that a woman would cost him his life. That had been prophesied on the day he was born, and confirmed by the proprietress of the general store on the one occasion he had permitted her to read his fortune in the coffee dregs; he could never have imagined, however, that the woman would be Casilda, the wife of Judge Hidalgo. The first time he had seen her was the day she arrived in town to be married. He did not find her attractive; he preferred females who were brazen and brunette, and this translucent young girl in her traveling suit, with bashful eyes and delicate fingers useless for pleasuring a man, seemed as insubstantial to him as a handful of ashes. Knowing his fate so well, he was cautious about women, and throughout his life he fled from any sentimental attachments, hardening his heart to love and limiting himself to hasty encounters aimed at outwitting loneliness. Casilda seemed so insignificant and remote to him that he took no precautions against her and, when the moment came, he lost sight of the prediction that had always governed his decisions. From the roof of the building where he was crouched with two of his men, he observed the young señorita from the capital as she descended from her car on her wedding day. She had arrived in the company of a half dozen of her family members, all as pale and delicate as she, who had sat through the ceremony fanning themselves with a frank air of consternation and then departed, never to return.
Like all the town’s residents, Vidal was sure the bride would never survive the climate and that soon the old women would be laying her out for her funeral. In the unlikely event she did endure the heat and dust that blew through the skin and settled in the heart, she would without question succumb before the foul humor and bachelor manias of her husband. Judge Hidalgo was several times her age, and had slept alone for so many years that he did not know how to begin to please a wife. His severity and stubbornness in carrying out the law—even at the cost of justice—was feared in every corner of the province. In the exercise of his duties he ignored any rationale for humaneness, punishing with equal firmness the theft of a hen and premeditated murder. He dressed in rigorous black, so that everyone would be reminded of the dignity of his responsibilities, and despite the inescapable dust clouds of this town without dreams his high-topped shoes always gleamed with a beeswax shine. A man like that is not made to be wed, the gossips would say; their dire prophecies about the marriage, however, were not fulfilled. To the contrary, Casilda survived three pregnancies in a row, and seemed content. On Sundays, with her husband, she attended twelve o’clock mass, imperturbable beneath her Spanish mantilla, untouched by the inclemency of the never-ending summer, as colorless and silent as a shadow. No one ever heard anything more than a timid hello from her, nor witnessed gestures more bold than a nod of the head or a fleeting smile; she seemed weightless, on the verge of
dematerializing in a moment of carelessness. She gave the impression of not being there, and that was why everyone was so surprised by the influence she exerted on the Judge, who underwent striking changes.
Although Hidalgo maintained the same appearance—funereal and sour-faced—his decisions in court took a strange turn. Before a stupefied public he let off a boy who had stolen from his employer, following the logic that for three years his patrón had underpaid him, and the money he had pilfered was a form of compensation. He similarly refused to punish an adulterous wife, arguing that the husband had no moral authority to demand rectitude from her when he himself kept a concubine. Gossiping tongues had it that Judge Hidalgo turned inside out like a glove when he crossed the threshold of his front door, that he removed his sepulchral clothing, played with the children, laughed, and dandled Casilda on his knees, but those rumors were never substantiated. Whatever the case, his wife was given credit for his new benevolence, and his reputation improved. Nicolás Vidal, however, was indifferent to all of this because he was outside the law, and he was sure that there would be no mercy for him the day he was led in shackles before the Judge. He ignored the gossip about doña Casilda; the few times he had seen her from a distance confirmed the first impression of a blurred ectoplasm.
Vidal had been born thirty years earlier in a windowless room of the only bordello in town, the son of Juana la Triste and an unknown father. He had no business in this world, and his sad mother knew it; that was why she had tried to tear him from her womb by means of herbs, candle stubs, lye douches, and other brutal methods, but the tiny creature had stubbornly hung on. Years later, Juana la Triste, pondering why her son was so different from others, realized that her drastic measures to eradicate him had, instead of dispatching him, tempered him, body and soul, to the hardness of iron. As soon as he was born, the midwife had held him up to the light of the kerosene lamp to examine him and had immediately noticed that he had four nipples.
“Poor mite, a woman will cost him his life,” she had prophesied, guided by long experience in such matters.
Those words weighed on the boy like a deformity. With a woman’s love, his life might have been less miserable. To compensate for the numerous attempts to eliminate him before he was born, his mother chose for him a noble-sounding first name and a solid surname selected at random. Even that princely appellation had not been enough to exorcise the fatal omens, and before he was ten the boy’s face was scarred from knife fights, and very soon thereafter he had begun his life as a fugitive. At twenty, he was the leader of a gang of desperados. The habit of violence had developed the strength of his muscles, the street had made him merciless, and the solitude to which he had been condemned by fear of dying over love had determined the expression in his eyes. Anyone in the town could swear on seeing him that he was Juana la Triste’s son because, just like hers, his eyes were always filled with unshed tears. Anytime a misdeed was committed anywhere in the region, the guardia, to silence the protests of the citizenry, went out with dogs to hunt down Nicolás Vidal, but after a few runs through the hills, they returned empty-handed. In fact they did not want to find him, because they did not want to chance a fight. His gang solidified his bad name to the point that small towns and large haciendas paid him to stay away. With those “donations” his men could have led a sedentary life, but Nicolás Vidal kept them riding, in a whirlwind of death and devastation, to prevent the men from losing their taste for a fight or their infamous reputation from dwindling. There was no one who dared stand up to them. On one or two occasions Judge Hidalgo had asked the government to send Army troops to reinforce his deputies, but after a few futile excursions the soldiers had returned to their barracks and the renegades to their old tricks.
Only once was Nicolás Vidal close to falling into the traps of justice; he was saved by his inability to feel emotion. Frustrated by seeing Vidal run roughshod over the law, Judge Hidalgo decided to put aside scruples and set a trap for the outlaw. He realized that in the name of justice he was going to commit a heinous act, but of two evils, he chose the lesser. The only bait he had been able to think of was Juana la Triste, because Vidal had no other family, nor known lovers. The Judge collected Juana from the whorehouse where she was scrubbing floors and cleaning latrines for want of clients willing to pay for her miserable services, and threw her into a made-to-measure cage he then placed in the very center of the Plaza de Armas, with a jug of water as her only comfort.
“When her water runs out, she’ll begin to scream. Then her son will come, and I will be waiting with the soldiers,” said the Judge.
Word of this torture, outdated since the time of runaway slaves, reached the ears of Nicolás Vidal shortly before his mother drank the last drop from her pitcher. His men watched as he received the news in silence: no flicker of emotion crossed the impassive, loner’s mask of his face; he never lost a stroke in the calm rhythm of stropping his knife. He had not seen Juana la Triste for many years and had not a single happy memory of his childhood; this, however, was not a question of sentiment, it was a matter of honor. No man can tolerate such an offense, the outlaws thought, and they readied their weapons and mounts, willing to ride into the ambush and give up their lives if that was what it took. But their leader showed no signs of haste.
As the hours went by, tension heightened among the men. They exchanged glances, dripping with sweat, not daring to comment, impatient from waiting, hands on the butts of their revolvers, the manes of their horses, the coil of their lariats. Night came, and the only person in the whole camp who slept was Nicolás Vidal. At dawn the men’s opinions were divided; some had decided that Vidal was much more heartless than they had ever imagined; others believed that their leader was planning a spectacular manner of rescuing his mother. The one thing no one thought was that he might lack courage, because he had too often demonstrated that—in spades. By noon they could bear the uncertainty no longer, and they went to ask him what he was going to do.
“Nothing,” he said.
“But what about your mother?”
“We’ll see who has more balls, the Judge or me,” Nicolás Vidal replied, unperturbed.
By the third day Juana la Triste was no longer pleading or begging for water; her tongue was parched and her words died in her throat. She lay curled up like a fetus on the floor of her cage, her eyes expressionless, her lips swollen and cracked, moaning like an animal in moments of lucidity and dreaming of hell the remainder of the time. Four armed men guarded the prisoner to prevent townspeople from giving her water. Her wails spread through all the town; they filtered through closed shutters, the wind carried them through the chinks of doors, they clung to the corners of rooms, dogs caught them up and repeated them in their howling, they infected newborn babies, and grated on the nerves of any who heard them. The Judge could not prevent the parade of people through the plaza, commiserating with the old woman, nor stop the sympathy strike of the prostitutes, which coincided with the miners’ payday. On Saturdays, the streets were taken over by these roughnecks from the mines, eager to spend their savings before returning to their caverns, but this week the town offered no diversion apart from the cage and the moan of pain carried from mouth to mouth, from the river to the coast highway. The priest headed a group of parishioners who presented themselves before Judge Hidalgo to remind him of Christian charity and to entreat him to release that poor innocent woman from her martyr’s death; the magistrate shot the bolt to his office door and refused to hear them, wagering that Juana la Triste would last one more day and that her son would fall into his trap. That is when the town leaders decided to appeal to doña Casilda.
The Judge’s wife received them in the darkened parlor of their home and listened to their arguments silently, eyes lowered, as was her custom. Her husband had been away from home for three days, locked in his office, waiting for Nicolás Vidal with senseless determination. Even without going to the window, she had known everything happening outside: t
he sound of that long torment had also invaded the vast rooms of their home. Doña Casilda waited until the visitors had retired, then dressed her children in their Sunday best and with them headed in the direction of the plaza. She carried a basket of food and a jug of fresh water for Juana la Triste. The guards saw her as she turned the corner, and guessed her intentions, but they had precise orders, and they crossed rifles before her, and when she tried to walk by them—watched by an expectant crowd—they took her arms to prevent her from passing. The children began to cry.
Judge Hidalgo was in his office on the plaza. He was the only person in town who had not put wax plugs in his ears, because all his attention was focused on the ambush: he was waiting for the sound of Nicolás Vidal’s horses. For three days and nights he had withstood the sobs of the victim and the insults of the people crowded outside the building, but when he heard the voices of his children he realized he had reached the limits of his endurance. He left the Court of Justice wearing the beard that had been growing since Wednesday, totally exhausted, red-eyed from waiting, and with the weight of defeat on his shoulders. He crossed the street, stepped onto the square of the plaza, and walked toward his wife. They gazed at each other sorrowfully. It was the first time in seven years that she had confronted him, and she had chosen to do so before the whole town. Judge Hidalgo took the basket and water jug from doña Casilda’s hands, and himself opened the cage to minister to his prisoner.
The Stories of Eva Luna Page 14