“I think I could work better outdoors.”
“This house has only got that dark patio where you came in. My niece is growing some shade plants there. But that’s all.”
“It’s all right, Señora.”
“I’d like to rest during the day. But come to see me tonight.”
“Very well, Señora.”
You spend all morning working on the papers, copying out the passages you intend to keep, rewriting the ones you think are especially bad, smoking one cigarette after another and reflecting that you ought to space your work so that the job lasts as long as possible. If you can manage to save at least twelve thousand pesos, you can spend a year on nothing but your own work, which you’ve postponed and almost forgotten. Your great, inclusive work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the New World. A work that sums up all the scattered chronicles, makes them intelligible, and discovers the resemblances among all the undertakings and adventures of Spain’s Golden Age, and all the human prototypes and major accomplishments of the Renaissance. You end up by putting aside the General’s tedious pages and starting to compile the dates and summaries of your own work. Time passes and you don’t look at your watch until you hear the bell again. Then you put on your coat and go down to the dining room.
Aura is already seated. This time Señora Llorente is at the head of the table, wrapped in her shawl and nightgown and coif, hunching over her plate. But the fourth place has also been set. You note it in passing. It doesn’t bother you anymore. If the price of your future creative liberty is to put up with all the manias of this old woman, you can pay it easily. As you watch her eating her soup you try to figure out her age. There’s a time after which it’s impossible to detect the passing of the years, and Señora Consuelo crossed that frontier a long time ago. The General hasn’t mentioned her in what you’ve already read of the memoirs. But if the General was forty-two at the time of the French invasion, and died in 1901, forty years later, he must have died at the age of eighty-two. He must have married the Señora after the defeat at Queretaro and his exile. But she would only have been a girl at that time . . .
The dates escape you because now the Señora is talking in that thin, sharp voice of hers, that birdlike chirping. She’s talking to Aura and you listen to her as you eat, hearing her long list of complaints, pains, suspected illnesses, more complaints about the cost of medicines, the dampness of the house and so forth. You’d like to break in on this domestic conversation to ask about the servant who went for your things yesterday, the servant you’ve never even glimpsed and who never waits on table. You’re going to ask about him but you’re suddenly surprised to realize that up to this moment Aura hasn’t said a word and is eating with a sort of mechanical fatality, as if she were waiting for some outside impulse before picking up her knife and fork, cutting a piece of liver—yes, it’s liver again, apparently the favorite dish in this house—and carrying it to her mouth. You glance quickly from the aunt to the niece, but at that moment the Señora becomes motionless, and at the same moment Aura puts her knife on her plate and also becomes motionless, and you remember that the Señora put down her knife only a fraction of a second earlier.
There are several minutes of silence: you finish eating while they sit there rigid as statues, watching you. At last the Señora says, “I’m very tired. I ought not to eat at the table. Come, Aura, help me to my room.”
The Señora tries to hold your attention: she looks directly at you so that you’ll keep looking at her, although what she’s saying is aimed at Aura. You have to make an effort in order to evade that look, which once again is wide, clear, and yellowish, free of the veils and wrinkles that usually obscure it. Then you look at Aura, who is staring fixedly at nothing and silently moving her lips. She gets up with a motion like those you associate with dreaming, takes the arm of the bent old lady, and slowly helps her from the dining room.
Alone now, you help yourself to the coffee that has been there since the beginning of the meal, the cold coffee you sip as you wrinkle your brow and ask yourself if the Señora doesn’t have some secret power over her niece: if the girl, your beautiful Aura in her green dress, isn’t kept in this dark old house against her will. But it would be so easy for her to escape while the Señora was asleep in her shadowy room. You tell yourself that her hold over the girl must be terrible. And you consider the way out that occurs to your imagination: perhaps Aura is waiting for you to release her from the chains in which the perverse, insane old lady, for some unknown reason, has bound her. You remember Aura as she was a few moments ago, spiritless, hypnotized by her terror, incapable of speaking in front of the tyrant, moving her lips in silence as if she were silently begging you to set her free; so enslaved that she imitated every gesture of the Señora, as if she were permitted to do only what the Señora did.
You rebel against this tyranny. You walk toward the other door, the one at the foot of the staircase, the one next to the old lady’s room: that’s where Aura must live, because there’s no other room in the house. You push the door open and go in. This room is dark also, with whitewashed walls, and the only decoration is an enormous black Christ. At the left there’s a door that must lead into the widow’s bedroom. You go up to it on tiptoe, put your hands against it, then decide not to open it: you should talk with Aura alone.
And if Aura wants your help she’ll come to your room. You go up there for a while, forgetting the yellowed manuscripts and your own notebooks, thinking only about the beauty of your Aura. And the more you think about her, the more you make her yours, not only because of her beauty and your desire, but also because you want to set her free: you’ve found a moral basis for your desire, and you feel innocent and self-satisfied. When you hear the bell again you don’t go down to supper because you can’t bear another scene like the one at the middle of the day. Perhaps Aura will realize it, and come up to look for you after supper.
You force yourself to go on working on the papers. When you’re bored with them you undress slowly, get into bed, and fall asleep at once, and for the first time in years you dream, dream of only one thing, of a fleshless hand that comes toward you with a bell, screaming that you should go away, everyone should go away; and when that face with its empty eye-sockets comes close to yours, you wake up with a muffled cry, sweating, and feel those gentle hands caressing your face, those lips murmuring in a low voice, consoling you and asking you for affection. You reach out your hands to find that other body, that naked body with a key dangling from its neck, and when you recognize the key you recognize the woman who is lying over you, kissing you, kissing your whole body. You can’t see her in the black of the starless night, but you can smell the fragrance of the patio plants in her hair, can feel her smooth, eager body in your arms; you kiss her again and don’t ask her to speak.
When you free yourself, exhausted, from her embrace, you hear her first whisper: “You’re my husband.” You agree. She tells you it’s daybreak, then leaves you, saying that she’ll wait for you that night in her room. You agree again, and then fall asleep, relieved, unburdened, emptied of desire, still feeling the touch of Aura’s body, her trembling, her surrender.
It’s hard for you to wake up. There are several knocks on the door, and at last you get out of bed, groaning and still half-asleep. Aura, on the other side of the door, tells you not to open it: she says that Señora Consuelo wants to talk with you, is waiting for you in her room.
Ten minutes later you enter the widow’s sanctuary. She’s propped up against the pillows, motionless, her eyes hidden by those drooping, wrinkled, dead-white lids; you notice the puffy wrinkles under her eyes, the utter weariness of her skin.
Without opening her eyes she asks you, “Did you bring the key to the trunk?”
“Yes, I think so . . . Yes, here it is.”
“You can read the second part. It’s in the same place. It’s tied with a blue ribbon.”
You go over to the trunk, this time with a certain disgust: the rats are swarm
ing around it, peering at you with their glittering eyes from the cracks in the rotted floorboards, galloping toward the holes in the rotted walls. You open the trunk and take out the second batch of papers, then return to the foot of the bed. Señora Consuelo is petting her white rabbit. A sort of croaking laugh emerges from her buttoned-up throat, and she asks you, “Do you like animals?”
“No, not especially. Perhaps because I’ve never had any.”
“They’re good friends. Good companions. Above all when you’re old and lonely.”
“Yes, they must be.”
“They’re always themselves, Señor Montero. They don’t have any pretensions.”
“What did you say his name is?”
“The rabbit? She’s Saga. She’s very intelligent. She follows her instincts. She’s natural and free.”
“I thought it was a male rabbit.”
“Oh? Then you still can’t tell the difference.”
“Well, the important thing is that you don’t feel all alone.”
“They want us to be alone, Señor Montero, because they tell us that solitude is the only way to achieve saintliness. They forget that in solitude the temptation is even greater.”
“I don’t understand, Señora.”
“Ah, it’s better that you don’t. Get back to work now, please.”
You turn your back on her, walk to the door, leave her room. In the hallway you clench your teeth. Why don’t you have courage enough to tell her that you love the girl? Why don’t you go back and tell her, once and for all, that you’re planning to take Aura away with you when you finish the job? You approach the door again and start pushing it open, still uncertain, and through the crack you see Señora Consuelo standing up, erect, transformed, with a military tunic in her arms: a blue tunic with gold buttons, red epaulettes, bright medals with crowned eagles—a tunic the old lady bites ferociously, kisses tenderly, drapes over her shoulders as she performs a few teetering dance steps. You close the door.
“She was fifteen years old when I met her,” you read in the second part of the memoirs. “Elle avait quinze arts lorsque je l’ai connue et, si j’ose le dire, ce sont ses yeux verts qui ont fait ma perdition.” Consuelo’s green eyes, Consuelo who was only fifteen in 1867, when General Llorente married her and took her with him into exile in Paris. “Ma jeune poupée,” he wrote in a moment of inspiration, “ma jeune poupée aux yeux verts; je t’ai comblée d’amour.” He described the house they lived in, the outings, the dances, the carriages, the world of the Second Empire, but all in a dull enough way. “J’ai même supporté ta haine des chats, moi qu’aimais tellement les jolies bêtes . . .” One day he found her torturing a cat: she had it clasped between her legs, with her crinoline skirt pulled up, and he didn’t know how to attract her attention because it seemed to him that “tu faisais ca d’une façon si innocent, par pur enfantillage,” and in fact it excited him so much that if you can believe what he wrote, he made love to her that night with extraordinary passion, “parce que tu m’avais dit que torturer les chats était ta manière a toi de rendre notre amour favorable, par un sacrifice symbolique . . .” You’ve figured it up: Señora Consuelo must be 109. Her husband died fifty-nine years ago. “Tu sais si bien t’habiller, ma douce Consuelo, toujours drappé dans de velours verts, verts comme tes yeux. Je pense que tu seras toujours belle, même dans cent ans . . .” Always dressed in green. Always beautiful, even after a hundred years. “Tu es si fière de ta beauté; que ne ferais-tu pas pour rester toujours jeune?”
IV
Now you know why Aura is living in this house: to perpetuate the illusion of youth and beauty in that poor, crazed old lady. Aura, kept here like a mirror, like one more icon on that votive wall with its clustered offerings, preserved hearts, imagined saints and demons.
You put the manuscript aside and go downstairs, suspecting there’s only one place Aura could be in the morning—the place that greedy old woman has assigned to her.
Yes, you find her in the kitchen, at the moment she’s beheading a kid: the vapor that rises from the open throat, the smell of spilt blood, the animal’s glazed eyes, all give you nausea. Aura is wearing a ragged, blood-stained dress and her hair is disheveled; she looks at you without recognition and goes on with her butchering.
You leave the kitchen: this time you’ll really speak to the old lady, really throw her greed and tyranny in her face. When you push open the door she’s standing behind the veil of lights, performing a ritual with the empty air, one hand stretched out and clenched, as if holding something up, and the other clasped around an invisible object, striking again and again at the same place. Then she wipes her hands against her breast, sighs, and starts cutting the air again, as if—yes, you can see it clearly—as if she were skinning an animal . . .
You run through the hallway, the parlor, the dining room, to where Aura is slowly skinning the kid, absorbed in her work, heedless of your entrance or your words, looking at you as if you were made of air.
You climb up to your room, go in, and brace yourself against the door as if you were afraid someone would follow you: panting, sweating, victim of your horror, of your certainty. If something or someone should try to enter, you wouldn’t be able to resist, you’d move away from the door, you’d let it happen. Frantically you drag the armchair over to that latchless door, push the bed up against it, then fall onto the bed, exhausted, drained of your will-power, with your eyes closed and your arms wrapped around your pillow—the pillow that isn’t yours. Nothing is yours.
You fall into a stupor, into the depths of a dream that’s your only escape, your only means of saying No to insanity. “She’s crazy, she’s crazy,” you repeat again and again to make yourself sleepy, and you can see her again as she skins the imaginary kid with an imaginary knife. “She’s crazy, she’s crazy . . .”
in the depths of the dark abyss, in your silent dream with its mouths opening in silence, you see her coming toward you from the blackness of the abyss, you see her crawling toward you.
in silence,
moving her fleshless hand, coming toward you until her face touches yours and you see the old lady’s bloody gums, her toothless gums, and you scream and she goes away again, moving her hand, sowing the abyss with the yellow teeth she carries in her blood-stained apron:
your scream is an echo of Aura’s, she’s standing in front of you in your dream, and she’s screaming because someone’s hands have ripped her green taffeta skirt in two, and then
she turns her head toward you
with the torn folds of the skirt in her hands, turns toward you and laughs silently, with the old lady’s teeth superimposed on her own, while her legs, her naked legs, shatter into bits and fly toward the abyss . . .
There’s a knock at the door, then the sound of the bell, the supper bell. Your head aches so much that you can’t make out the hands on the clock, but you know it must be late: above your head you can see the night clouds beyond the skylight. You get up painfully, dazed and hungry. You hold the glass pitcher under the faucet, wait for the water to run, fill the pitcher, then pour it into the basin. You wash your face, brush your teeth with your worn toothbrush that’s clogged with greenish paste, dampen your hair—you don’t notice you’re doing all this in the wrong order—and comb it meticulously in front of the oval mirror on the walnut wardrobe. Then you tie your tie, put on your jacket and go down to the empty dining room, where only one place has been set—yours.
Beside your plate, under your napkin, there’s an object you start caressing with your fingers: a clumsy little rag doll, filled with a powder that trickles from its badly sewn shoulder; its face is drawn with India ink, and its body is naked, sketched with a few brush strokes. You eat the cold supper—liver, tomatoes, wine—with your right hand while holding the doll in your left.
You eat mechanically, without noticing at first your own hypnotized attitude, but later you glimpse a reason for your oppressive sleep, your nightmare, and finally identify your sleep-walking move
ments with those of Aura and the old lady. You’re suddenly disgusted by that horrible little doll, in which you begin to suspect a secret illness, a contagion. You let it fall to the floor. You wipe your lips with the napkin, look at your watch, and remember that Aura is waiting for you in her room.
You go cautiously up to Señora Consuelo’s door, but there isn’t a sound from within. You look at your watch again: it’s barely nine o’clock. You decide to feel your way down to that dark, roofed patio you haven’t been in since you came through it, without seeing anything, on the day you arrived here.
You touch the damp, mossy walls, breathe the perfumed air, and try to isolate the different elements you’re breathing, to recognize the heavy, sumptuous aromas that surround you. The flicker of your match lights up the narrow, empty patio, where various plants are growing on each side in the loose, reddish earth. You can make out the tall, leafy forms that cast their shadows on the walls in the light of the match. But it burns down, singeing your fingers, and you have to light another one to finish seeing the flowers, fruits and plants you remember reading about in old chronicles, the forgotten herbs that are growing here so fragrantly and drowsily: the long, broad, downy leaves of the henbane; the twining stems with flowers that are yellow outside, red inside; the pointed, heart-shaped leaves of the nightshade; the ash-colored down of the grape-mullein with its clustered flowers; the bushy gatheridge with its white blossoms; the belladonna. They come to life in the flare of your match, swaying gently with their shadows, while you recall the uses of these herbs that dilate the pupils, alleviate pain, reduce the pangs of childbirth, bring consolation, weaken the will, induce a voluptuous calm.
You’re all alone with the perfumes when the third match burns out. You go up to the hallway slowly, listen again at Señora Consuelo’s door, then tiptoe on to Aura’s. You push it open without knocking and go into that bare room, where a circle of light reveals the bed, the huge Mexican crucifix, and the woman who comes toward you when the door is closed. Aura is dressed in green, in a green taffeta robe from which, as she approaches, her moon-pale thighs reveal themselves. The woman, you repeat as she comes close, the woman, not the girl of yesterday: the girl of yesterday—you touch Aura’s fingers, her waist—couldn’t have been more than twenty; the woman of today—you caress her loose black hair, her pallid cheeks—seems to be forty. Between yesterday and today, something about her green eyes has turned hard; the red of her lips has strayed beyond their former outlines, as if she wanted to fix them in a happy grimace, a troubled smile; as if, like that plant in the patio, her smile combined the taste of honey and the taste of gall. You don’t have time to think of anything more.
Foundations of Fear Page 51