On learning of her prostration, I was tempted to pay her a dutiful visit, if only to prove how far my self-imposed austerity could go.
In this mood, I received a letter that declared: “I am so alone that I think less about myself now. I wonder: How is Diego faring? Has he found prosperity? Does he still cling to vague promises from well-intentioned but ineffectual friends and relatives? Might a more effective plea from my brother to His Majesty be of use to him? Diego, having you here nearby, even when I can’t see you, has always made me hesitate to offer you a favor that might take you to another country, perhaps to Spain. But I ask less from life nowadays and am resigned to having you triumph far from me. Will you have the goodness to visit me?”
•
At first I was ashamed. In a transport, I set fire to the letter and watched it burn. Any prying gaze to which this paper might discover that a woman was intervening or offering to intervene on my behalf was thus forestalled. Still less could I bear that word: prosperity. To prosper was to go beyond what was discreetly reasonable: It signified a gain sought out of mere ambition.
Then my mind took up the term effective. The brother, apparently, was in possession of this elusive quality, which was hardly to be detected among my other intercessors.
I needed a post nearer to Marta, for Marta, for my mother, for my children—to search for my past: my home. The home that gave me such pain because I’d shaped it in the image of an even more remote structure, inherited from parents and grandparents. The home that weighed on me all the more because I did not have one.
At the same time, I needed Luciana. My home was behind me, the transfer ahead but distant. I needed a more immediate future, palpable and proximate, something that would submit to me quickly and continually.
•
A Luciana who was dimmed, repentant, and sad emanated from the letter, an unimaginable Luciana, unless she were confined to a sickbed without hope of reprieve.
When I arrived, however, there she was in the parlor, needle in hand, fresh and so industrious that she begged my pardon for not having left off her work when I was announced. Her words coming very fast, she said she couldn’t put down her stitches just then, though she was finishing up.
No, I didn’t have to wait long at the door. Hat in hand, I watched her in profile. When she stood up and came toward me with a smile of celebration and welcome, her full face showed: an eyelid was drooping, the right one.
My pain over her disgrace became gentleness. Exaggerated as it may seem, I felt the respect that keeps us from passing judgment on the actions of the dead.
I had arrived haughty and strong, prepared to reject any kisses she might try to give me along with her offer of help, as if, in my estimation, the support of this brother, of whose existence I had heretofore been unaware, was of no particular value.
As things stood now, I could not hit on a proper subject of conversation. Clearly the first topic broached should be her health or lack thereof. But any allusion to the illness that had had such visible and disfiguring consequences struck me as indiscreet.
Luciana took the lead. She asked whether I’d noticed her shaky handwriting. I lied and said I hadn’t. She expressed surprise. Her inability to use both eyes, she said, caused her enormous difficulties. In order to see what she had in front of her, she was forced to turn her head to the right repeatedly, until the left eye, which now had to do everything, grew fatigued and refused to serve any longer.
One night, as she lay in bed, the faint light from the candlestick had dimly revealed a spider, fat, round, and slow, on the bedroom ceiling. Though she could not be certain. Beside her, her husband slept.
After a few hours, she awoke with a feeling of dread. She lit the candle and looked at the door: Had someone broken in? No. Then at the ceiling, for the thing that might have been a spider. No, nothing showed there in the darkness. Then at her husband, to see if the light had disturbed him.
The spider was on Piñares’s neck, clumsily making its way along his skin.
Terrified, Luciana could only cover her eyes with her hands and weep deep within, unable to move, to flee. Piñares lay so still that suddenly she was sure the spider had already bitten him and he was dead. Then a demented boldness came over her. She took the spider in her hand and threw it to the ground.
When Luciana at last had the strength to awaken Piñares, the insect was still on the floor, alive and unharmed. They killed it.
In the morning the walls of the room were examined to see if it had left offspring or a mate behind. A nest of pompilid wasps was discovered. The pompilid captures a spider for its young, a spider large enough for them to feed off through their infancy. The wasp stupefies the spider with repeated stings, then abandons it to its fate in the nest.
The stupefied spider had managed to escape from the tiny wasps before they were born.
•
I do not know whether any of this in fact took place, though Luciana told the story at such length, with such emotion, and to such effect that an understanding grew up between us.
Very quickly it was as if we were hand in hand.
We sipped sweet maté unhurriedly, lazily. As the tertulia progressed, she gave me a scolding for putting myself in the hands of ineffectual intermediaries and for resigning myself to a post she considered incommensurate with my abilities. I agreed and told her so, charmed, comforted, contented. “Very well: Let’s see what favors Doctor Don Diego de Zama can expect from a woman.”
“You shall see,” she answered with great resolve and immediately began developing plans that centered on this newly revealed brother who was, she assured me, a gentleman of the court.
This was a dream to cherish warmly. I was furnished with a rich supply of new hopes.
My consent given, she promised to dispatch a missive by the first mail.
Much later, she leaned briefly into the gallery to glance up at the sky. I thought she was checking on the elements. Would there be a storm to delay the arrival of a boat or calm weather to favor it?
But she had a different reason. “You must go, and quickly,” she urged. “Honorio will be home for dinner soon. It’s late.”
I felt the blood rush through my body.
“Your husband is in the city?” I asked in dismay, reproaching her without giving her time to answer so obvious a question. “You didn’t warn me.”
“But then . . . you thought he was at the hacienda?”
It was Luciana’s turn to be startled by my ignorance and to laugh unconcernedly and with such good-hearted ingenuousness that I was soothed.
Had she become more of a girl-child, more innocent? Had she set aside her wiles?
She even asked, “How could you believe he was at the hacienda when I didn’t say so in my note?”
•
Two days later, the drums gave notice of a boat from the Plata.
Piñares de Luenga was at the port and went aboard to converse with the captain.
During the afternoon, Luciana sent for me. I told the trained manservant who brought the message that I would go, but did not. Her tactics baffled me; this invitation demonstrated even less concern for my security than the time when she’d lied to lure me into a dark street in close proximity to a rival whose capacity for contempt exceeded my own.
The following morning I was roused from bed by one of the inn’s servants who bore this exciting billet-doux: “Are you afraid of Honorio? Don’t be. But if you don’t want to come, please send me an account of your titles so I can send them to my brother. No doubt he will need to include them in his appeal.”
I bore the account of all my titles to her in my mouth.
I was ready to clutch at anything, now that there was no longer any justification for desiring her.
Accordingly, an encounter with Honorio Piñares in his home was something I foresaw and even willed. I wished to be driven to such an encounter and, more precisely, into a fight.
Still, a recondite caution induced me to select twilig
ht as the hour of our meeting. And of course no confrontation occurred.
I said to Luciana, “What would have happened if your husband had been at home when I asked to see you and was announced?”
“Don’t be afraid,” she began to explain.
“I am not afraid,” I replied, with a certain violence.
“Well then, don’t be afraid,” she asserted, conciliatory.
When she saw I was calmer, she produced her reasoning: “He says that men are contemptible but women don’t notice that until they’re married. He believes I share his opinion and that all men are repellent to me.”
Luciana spoke as if confiding an unpleasant secret to her embroidery, her head bent low.
•
Piñares’s credo seemed to promise safety. Nevertheless, she did not want me to visit again until he had retreated to the hacienda.
He was away for a good month, a month of assiduous visits. At first I tried to keep the contact superficial, aimed only at safeguarding my opportunity for support before the King.
Our friendship was serene until the day I observed that the drooping eyelid was functioning more normally. It could now lift until the eye was almost open. I congratulated Luciana with effusive sincerity. Warm and open, as in the past, she said, “It’s thanks to you—the peace and tenderness you bring me.”
I wished that my response had been merely heartfelt. However, her confided words released certain long-suppressed impulses that lay deeper within me—and not elsewhere.
Later, as I walked home, my brain issued a summary decision to have Luciana once and for all. I pursued every line of reasoning that might shore up my previous stance of forbearance, but I was fighting against the determination of my entire body, which preceded all argument and was imperative.
The fever of it was upon me but the drive was commingled with a caution dictated by my instincts.
I sought to reawaken the loving responsiveness Luciana had once offered me. My words grew more daring, and in our conversations Luciana would venture down the paths they opened before her.
On one occasion, a line I tossed out, as if casually, hooked a significant catch.
I told her I could not understand how she could have denied herself children: She must be incapable of deep affection. This would have stung any woman, but with a teasing and humorous sally, I safely prevented a direct response, swiftly diverting the conversation toward a related subject with no direct bearing on her.
I purported to have only just learned, at this late date, of the system by which Mbaya women eliminate the risk of childbirth, by exerting pressure with their own fingers on certain parts of the body. This distracted Luciana from my previous declaration. She said she had witnessed this barbaric procedure in the countryside, though the practice was somewhat different there: The curandero delivered vicious kicks to the women’s delicate zones, a treatment as brutal as it was effective.
After telling me about this, Luciana spent a moment in reflection. Then she asked sadly whether I thought she herself had resorted to such methods or similar ones. I told her I did not.
Then, from her own lips, I learned why she had no children. And I learned why Luciana did not love her husband.
Honorio’s father was an indiano, a Spaniard who’d gone off to make his fortune in the Indies. He returned to the homeland greatly enriched, leaving behind in America the only issue of his loins, then fifteen years of age and the administrator of his hacienda and household. The tender youth suffered hardships which he endured with stoicism and overcame to win both fortune and status for himself. But the father, having abandoned him to his own devices at so tender an age, now imposed upon him the burden of marriage, and without consulting his opinion or preferences. In Spain, the tyrannical old man arranged with his own sister for her daughter, Luciana, to wed Honorio. As a result, Luciana, at the age of eleven, was promised in marriage to her cousin, Honorio, who was twenty-two at the time. Not until she was fifteen was Luciana informed of the arrangement. Preparations for the wedding began then, carried out via power of attorney. At seventeen, Luciana traveled to America to join the cousin and husband who was a stranger to her.
While describing the customs of the Mbaya Indians, Luciana had been so relaxed and animated, naming certain parts of the body with such frankness, that I had the disagreeable impression that she was forgetting herself and speaking to me as if I were a woman.
Yet this history of her marriage, painful but no cause for shame, was for her a kind of surrender, necessary and irremediable, a breach of her female modesty.
I knew at once that the intimacy she had entrusted me with could turn quickly into suspicion and rejection. And I had good reason to fear her hostility.
I do not know if it was because I was touched, or out of fear that she would abandon me anew, but I vowed to respect her, for so long as she wished to be respected.
•
The captain of the regiment, deputized to the post of Gobernador until such time as a new governor could be appointed, took on his executive role with great energy, precisely because he was well aware of the limited duration of his interim reign. He soon demonstrated that he possessed in abundance the sharp claws the position demanded.
In fact, his reign sought to manifest its effectiveness on a single issue: the payment of the stipend due the functionaries and employees of the royal administration. And that was, it must be acknowledged, the only issue that could engage and interest him. In making the demand for the rest of us he also implicitly made it on his own behalf.
The tin box, which had been restored to its mission for some while and was satisfactorily provisioned for the first time since I’d set foot in the province, was now far too small for the treasure it was called upon to house.
The shipment of silver arrived by an early boat on the morning that followed my unfortunate conversation with Luciana. Since the Teniente de Gobernador maintained that the well-being of those who administered the res publica must come before the res publica itself, he ordered that the funds be disbursed immediately. In consequence, resources that meant daily sustenance for my distant home were soon mine to dispose of. Once more the coins on my table helped bring Marta into my thoughts.
The soft, mild love that radiated from my memory of her seemed to grow more real, and suddenly and in all lucidity I felt I understood why: Her good love had stirred something that was in me or in my life here and now, a new chapter in no way related to my spouse, who remained in the past, far behind. This, I thought, was the true nature of my love for Luciana. And I feared for Marta.
I went down to lunch and drank recklessly and to excess. During the siesta, as I slept, my mind dwelled obstinately on a lascivious image of Luciana. No sooner did I wake than the wine made my head fall back onto the pillow. In the end I loved that lascivious image.
Vanquished by lethargy, I refreshed my head with water.
I was at peace. My mistress, eternal and inalterable, was Marta.
22
Now I fully discerned what it was I desired from Luciana. I understood that all the delays and impediments were brought about by the ease with which my emotions were swayed. When I grew soft, I could be distracted from my objective. Then the woman grew stronger and gloated over prolonging the pleasure she took in being pursued.
I hadn’t forgotten how fruitless my earlier bursts of energy had been. But it seemed to me that a distinction had to be made between two eras: the first, when Luciana toyed with me and resisted, and now a second one, of patient rapprochement and amorous tension which, in an instant, might veer into passion.
I trusted so entirely to some fortuitous and unforeseen possibility of being loved that when I was seized by the thought that it might happen that very afternoon, I stayed put in the tavern. I wasn’t strong enough to love with any vehemence that day.
In the tavern, the foreman of a gang of drovers was drinking. I sat there alone, listening to him.
He was mustering troops for his señor, Alfonso d
e Almeida, who was about to take possession of the hacienda in Villa Rica that once belonged to Don Honorio Piñares de Luenga.
•
Though the hour was late and I was no longer expected, I presented myself before Luciana.
I hadn’t seen her since the night before, when she had revealed her double kinship with Piñares. But this was a new era, or so I foresaw.
The lid of the right eye was closed once more. Not so tightly as to prevent the trickle of a tear to accompany a more copious flow from the left eye, which wept openly as, without words, we went to each other.
She held her hands out, only the hands, and kept her body at a distance. She needed my consolation, and consolation is felt more deeply when the blood communicates it.
In speaking to me the previous night, had she done herself such violence as to leave her in this pain? I asked and she answered no with a delicate shake of her head. In the morning, a messenger had come from her husband to tell her of a matter that was about to be formalized: the sale of his hacienda in Villa Rica. And now it was done.
“But what is so fearsome and painful about this sale?” I asked, disconcerted to see her in so inconsolable a state and forgetting how the news had worried me when I heard it in the tavern. “Are you faced with impoverishment?”
Luciana relieved me of that fear, adding, with a serene and pitying sorrow, “Pobrecito. You don’t know.”
I had not known that Honorio was beset by the same desire as his father: to return to Spain and there enjoy the goods accumulated in America. Having no son with whom to share those riches, he had gathered them up and resigned his post as Ministro de la Real Hacienda, without seeking another at court or in any other Spanish territory.
Luciana had said nothing of this earlier, out of fear that I would have no more to do with her once I learned she would soon depart forever.
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