Twilight spreads its intolerable violet hues while Alipio, standing by the balcony railing, becomes almost indistinguishable from the last autumn leaves on the almond tree. He has been motionless for a while, looking without seeing the people going to and fro on the sidewalk. Precisely at the moment the sun disappears, Alipio, with a quick jump, goes into his room and lies down, covering himself up completely. It’s seven o’clock and Alipio, wide-eyed, stares at the ceiling. It’s eight, and Alipio, who is perspiring profusely, still has not decided whether to open the window. It’s nine, and Alipio thinks it must be almost dawn. It’s midnight. The sky is bright with all its characteristic standards. The stars of the first magnitude speed by like the sails of a gigantic windmill. Ursa Major moves in the northern sky and touches David’s chariot; the Centaur’s tail joins the Southern Cross; the shy Pleiades, all tremulous, advances toward Hercules. At that moment, Capella enters in conjunction with the Charioteer, and the Seven Sisters twinkle next to Orion, which is expanding. Stars in the zodiacal constellations invade the sky and fuse with the cluster of the Pleiades. The variable stars, insignificant comets, and gleams from galaxies that no longer exist dazzle the earth. The sweet constellation of the Unicorn appears for a moment, its white stars barely discernible in the distance. Castor and Pollux, the inseparable ones, are very close. Alpha approaches Canis Minor. Andromeda’s great nebula shines bright, transparent and resonant on this beautiful November evening. Alipio’s tears surge warmly, run along the sides of his nose, wetting his pillow.
Billions of solitary suns rush about the boundless heavens.
1968
Halley’s Comet
For Miguel Ordoqui
You can never tell
what will become of you.
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
The House of Bernarda Alba
VERY LATE ONE NIGHT in the summer of 1891 (that’s right, 1891), when Pepe El Romano runs away with Adela’s virginity, though leaving her behind, everything seems to have come to a most tragic end for Bernarda Alba’s five daughters: Adela, Pepe’s lover, hangs from a noose fastened to the ceiling of her maiden room; Angustias keeps intact her forty years of chastity; and the rest of the sisters, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio, are also condemned to spinsterhood or the convent.
But things did not really turn out that way. And if García Lorca left their story unfinished and unclear, we forgive him. Being wilder than his own characters—and with good reason—he followed Pepe El Romano, “that giant, or centaur perhaps, who huffs like a lion.” A few weeks later, though (but that is another story), poor Federico perished at the hands of that splendid trickster, who, after swindling him out of everything he had and, alas, without even satisfying him first (cruelest of men), slit his throat.
And it happened that while Bernarda Alba was making the arrangements for her daughter’s funeral with implacable austerity, the other four sisters, aided by their maid, La Poncia, took Adela down, and by their slapping, shouting, and recriminations brought her back to life or simply out of her fainting spell.
Bernarda Alba’s voice was already demanding that the five women open the door when together they decided that a life on the run was a thousand times preferable to living under the fearsome old woman’s iron hand. With La Poncia’s help, the five sisters jumped out the window and over the garden wall and the corral fence, and when they were already out in the open (and, it must be said, under a splendidly Lorcan moon), the feeling of freedom they enjoyed for the first time made their reciprocal resentments momentarily vanish. The five sisters embraced one another, crying joyously, and swore they were going to leave not only their home and the town but Andalusia and all of Spain as well. After a short stretch La Poncia caught up with them. In spite of her anger, and with a joy that had less to do with the sisters’ happiness than with Bernarda Alba’s fall from power, she handed them all the house jewels, her own savings, and even the dowry reserved for Angustias’s marriage. They pleaded with her to accompany them. She insisted, however, that her place was not on the other side of the ocean but next to the room of Bernarda Alba, whose raging screams “would lull her better”—those were her words—“than the very sound of the ocean.”
And they left.
While Federico was expiring, unsatisfied, they were crossing infinite fields of sunflowers, sometimes singing the verses of the dying poet. They left Córdoba and Seville, went through the Sierra Morena, and as soon as they reached Cádiz, bought tickets to Havana, where they arrived a month later, still euphoric and feeling rejuvenated.
They rented a house on Obispo Street near the ocean and, overconfident perhaps, expected future lovers to appear. But with the exception of Adela, the sisters seemed to have no luck with men. Angustias stayed day and night on display behind the wrought-iron window without any success. Magdalena, lanky and thirtyish, would take walks around El Prado Boulevard, but she managed only to have a Dragon Corps lieutenant trample her with his horse and then insult her for obstructing traffic. Amelia, with her stooping back, was only an object of derision and of an occasional stone hurled at her by some young black hoodlum from the Manglar district. Even worse, several youths from the Spanish Volunteer Corp, accusing her of witchcraft and of having offended the king’s soldiers, attempted one evening to throw her into the moat at La Fuerza Castle. And Martirio, maybe in hopes that some of Adela’s charms would rub off on her, followed her sister’s every move, and Adela’s belly grew and grew, just like the number of her lovers.
Even though her sisters knew about Adela’s very successful amorous adventures in Havana, and resented them, scandal and public condemnation did not erupt until the baby was born. Twenty-five redoubtable men (including six blacks, one Chinese, and four mulattoes) claimed paternity, arguing that the baby boy must have been born premature. The four sisters, who saw Pepe El Romano’s image clearly in the face of the newborn, could not bear Adela’s disgrace—or rather, Adela’s triumph. They declared her wicked and abandoned her. At the same time, they deemed such a dissolute mother unworthy to raise a child and took the baby away from her, though not until they had had him christened José de Alba in the cathedral. Adela wept deeply, but there were twenty-five beaux to console her.
Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio wanted to move to some remote town near the sea. After many inquiries, they finally chose Cárdenas.
This town (now called a city) was minuscule, provincial, and totally boring: very different from old Obispo Street, which had always been full of singing vendors, carriages, smells, women, horses, and men. All of this had made them despair and had forced them to go out often wearing their best clothes, their finest jewelry, and the best cologne. But in Cárdenas nothing of the sort was ever needed. One could not even hear the women talking in the neighborhood, and as for the men, they were always far away, fishing or working the land.
“Being born a woman is the worst curse of all,” said Angustias out loud once they were fully installed in their new home.
And right then the four sisters silently promised to renounce every vestige of femininity.
And they succeeded.
Dark curtains covered their windows. They dressed in black and, according to the fashion of their old homeland, covered their heads with gray bonnets that they would not take off even on the hottest days of summer, which in this land seems never-ending. Having abandoned all aspirations for their bodies, they gave in to the stupor of the sweltering heat and to tropical excesses, losing in the process what little was left of their figures. All of them became devoted, with bovine fervor, to raising their nephew.
Naturally, Adela’s name was never mentioned in that household, not even by mistake. José (or Pepe, his nickname) was for them, and for all he knew, the nephew they had brought from Spain after the death of his mother in childbirth. The story was no less credible than any other, and because of its pathos, everyone, including the sisters, ended up believing it.
In time they also forgot not only Adela’s story—e
ighteen years had gone by since their arrival on the island—but Adela herself. As for the rest of their former lives, little by little the new calamities they had to face together created new memories for them, or new nightmares: Cuba’s War of Independence, which discriminated against them; the big food shortage of 1897; and the birth of the republic, which, instead of marking the end of the hostilities, seemed to bring about incessant rebellions. As if all this weren’t enough, some insolent rabble—human trash, they called them—had installed themselves everywhere. The sisters got to be known as the “Spanish nuns,” and for some reason this trash wished they would participate in its noisy and grotesque pandemonium.
So the Alba sisters walled themselves up even more in their chastity, as well as in their approaching old age, devoting their lives to the care of their nephew, who had turned into a shy, handsome youth with curly hair (like his father’s). He did not leave the house except to sell in the streets the waxed-paper flowers or the knits his aunts had concocted.
Although the four sisters were the object of envy for some, the irreproachable, monastic life they led earned them a sort of distant admiration all over Cárdenas. The “Spanish nuns” became the most respected women in town, to the point that someone who wished to praise a woman for her morals usually said that she was “almost as chaste as one of the Alba sisters.” The parish priest (they always went to church with their nephew) mentioned them as “paragons of Christian perseverance and morality.” Their good fame reached its peak when the priest praised them in his Easter Sunday sermon. It is true that Angustias sometimes assisted the old priest and, accompanied by her three sisters, dusted the altar and swept and washed the church floor with such discipline that it seemed the spirit of Bernarda Alba was supervising her. But it must be recognized that they did these chores not out of obligation or hypocrisy, but out of true devotion.
The four sisters interrupted their monotonous lives only for their Sunday outings to the shore. Dressed in black to their ankles, in their best finery, including black parasols, they would visit the rather desolate Cárdenas seashore. There in the sand, between the water and the rock formations, they would stay sometimes for over an hour like strange, gigantic crows mesmerized by the ceaseless churning of the ocean. Before dusk they would start for home, enveloped in the violet light that seems unique to the region. They looked as if they were returning from a fiesta. José would wait for them sitting on the porch with the proceeds from the day’s sales, which were more substantial because it was Sunday. As they walked into the house, they would glance with a certain discreet pride at the small plaque that they had placed by their door some years before: VILLA ALBA, FLOWERS AND HANDMADE KNITS.
There was every indication that those women’s lives, increasingly more devout and silent by the day, produced an almost unhealthful piety, so that their every move was dictated by church bells.
It is also essential to take account of their nephew’s behavior. Solitary, shy, conservatively attired (that is, asphyxiating in those black suits), he had no social contact with the outside world other than what was strictly necessary for selling the merchandise that provided the family income. He was eighteen years old, and nobody had yet seen him with a girlfriend, or with any friend. He did not seem to need any more love than the distant, maternal love offered by his aunts. And this shared love was also enough to fulfill the lives of the four women. Certainly none of them still thought of—the words are La Poncia’s—what it was “to feel a lizard between her breasts.” Much less of having once felt—the words are Martirio’s—“a sudden sort of blaze inside.”
It is true that you can never tell what will become of you, but in Cárdenas everything pointed to a peaceful end for the Alba sisters, or at least one very far removed from exaltation or scandal.
Something quite unexpected and unique would have to happen to extricate those lives from the ecstasy of their own renunciation. That is precisely what happened. An extraordinary event occurred during that spring of 1910. Halley’s comet visited the earth.
We are not going to enumerate the hair-raising catastrophes that the press claimed would take place on the planet with the arrival of the comet. It is all well documented in the libraries. Suffice it to say that the most popular writer of the moment (today justly forgotten), Señor García Markos, obviously also considered himself an astronomer and had authored such books as Astrology for the Ladies and What the Señoritas Should Know about the Stars, not to mention Love in the Times of the Red Vomit. He also published a series of articles that within weeks had spread all over the world, and in them he proposed with a fair amount of scientific verbosity that as the comet’s tail entered the earth’s atmosphere, this would become contaminated (and “rarefied”) by a deadly gas that would bring to an end life as we know it because, and we quote, “the combining of atmospheric oxygen with the hydrogen in the comet’s tail will inevitably cause immediate asphyxiation.” This preposterous bit of information (preposterous now, forty years after its publication) was taken very seriously, perhaps for its being so uniquely dramatic. On the other hand, as a hypothesis it was not easy to disprove: the comet, according to García Markos, was getting closer to the earth each time around. And who was to know? That very year could be the end. This pseudoscientific writer also insisted that the end of the world would bring plagues of centaurs, griffins, igneous fish, outlandish viscous birds, phosphorescent whales, and other “monsters from outer space,” which, as a result of the collision, would fall on this planet accompanied by an aerolite shower. And all of that was also taken at face value by most people. Let us remember that those times (like any other) were backward and there was little to distinguish stupidity from innocence, and lack of restraint from imaginativeness.
The Cárdenas parish priest welcomed with fanatic fervor the apocalyptic predictions of Señor García Markos and all his followers. In an inspired and fatalistic sermon, the priest openly foretold the end of the world: a classic finale, just as the Bible had announced, with the earth enveloped in flames. Naturally, this end was being brought about by the continuous chain of excesses and impious acts committed throughout history by the human race, which had made the divine wrath overflow at last. The end was not only imminent but well deserved. This, however, did not prevent many of the citizens of Cárdenas (or surely, of other locations) from devoting themselves to the construction of underground shelters in which to peremptorily seek protection until the ominous comet had moved out of our orbit. But it is also true that some of the people in Cárdenas, instead of taking precautions against the disaster, brought it on themselves in advance by committing suicide. The municipality has preserved desperate letters from mothers who, rather than wait to face the universal conflagration, chose to go ahead of it, together with all their progeny.
The priest, of course, condemned the suicides as well as the construction of shelters to escape the end. Both, he declared in another sermon, were acts of sheer arrogance, pagan and even illegal, since their intention was to elude divine justice.
On their way home from this sermon, Angustias, Martirio, Magdalena, and Amelia met their nephew in the garden, where he had just built a refuge big enough for fifty persons.
“Close that hole right away,” said Angustias slowly but implacably.
Mona and Other Tales (Vintage International Original) Page 11