Eva Luna

by Isabel Allende

  Soon Rolf Carlé began to notice a change in the girls’ behavior. They insisted he take the largest slice of the roast, piled mountains of whipped cream on his dessert, whispered behind his back, fluttered when he caught them watching him, touched him as he passed by—always in some casual way, but with such an erotic charge that not even an anchorite would have remained unmoved. Until then he had kept a prudent distance and watched them covertly, in order not to offend the norms of courtesy—or face the possibility of a rejection that would have been fatal to his self-esteem. Little by little, because he did not want to make any hasty decisions, he began to look at them more boldly. Which should he choose? They were both enchanting, with robust legs, straining breasts, aquamarine eyes, and baby-fine skin. The older sister was more amusing, but he was also attracted by the gentle flirtatiousness of the younger. Poor Rolf argued the matter with himself, undecided, until the girls tired of waiting for his initiative and launched a frontal attack. They cornered him in the strawberry patch, tripped him up, then piled on top of him and tickled him unmercifully, shattering his mania for taking himself seriously and arousing his lust. They burst the buttons of his trousers, pulled off his shoes, ripped open his shirt, and put their mischievous nymphet hands where he never imagined anyone would explore. From that day on, Rolf Carlé abandoned his reading, neglected the pups, forgot the cuckoo clocks, the letters to his mother, even his own name. He wandered around in a trance, his instincts aflame and his mind in a daze. From Monday to Thursday, when there were no guests in the house, the rhythm of the domestic chores slowed and the three young people had a few hours of liberty, which they seized to disappear into the unoccupied guest rooms. They did not want for excuses: airing the eiderdowns, cleaning the windows, spraying for cockroaches, waxing the wood furniture, changing the beds. The girls had inherited their parents’ sense of fairness and orderliness, and while one closed herself in a room with Rolf the other stood guard in the corridor to give the alarm if anyone approached. They were scrupulous in taking turns, but fortunately the youth was not aware of that humiliating detail. What did they do when they were alone? Nothing new; they played the same games cousins have played for six thousand years. Things became interesting when they decided to spend nights three in a bed, calmed by Rupert’s and Burgel’s snoring in the adjacent room. To keep an eye on the girls, the parents slept with their door open, and that also allowed the girls to keep an eye on them. Rolf Carlé was as inexperienced as his two companions, but from the first encounter he took precautions not to get them pregnant, and poured into the erotic games all the enthusiasm and inventiveness needed to make up for his amatory ignorance. His energies were endlessly fed by the formidable gifts of his cousins—open, warm, smelling of fruit, breathless with laughter, and exceedingly receptive. Furthermore, having to maintain absolute silence—terrified at the creaking bedsprings, huddled beneath the sheets, enveloped in one another’s warmth and aromas—was a spur that set their hearts aflame. They were at the perfect age for inexhaustible lovemaking. The girls were flowering with a summery vitality, the blue of their eyes deepening, their skin becoming more luminous, and their smiles happier; as for Rolf, he forgot his Latin and went around bumping into furniture and falling asleep on his feet; he was only half awake as he waited on the tourists, his legs trembling and his eyes unfocused. The boy is working too hard, Burgel. He looks pale, we must give him some vitamins, Rupert would say, never suspecting that behind his back his nephew was devouring great portions of his aunt’s famous aphrodisiac stew so that his strength would not desert him in his hour of need. Together the three cousins discovered the basic requirements of levitation, and on occasion defied gravity for brief periods. The youth resigned himself to the idea that his companions had the greater capacity for pleasure and could repeat their feats several times in the same session, so in order to keep his reputation intact and not cheat the girls, he improvised techniques to ration his energy and pleasure. Years later, he learned that the same methods had been employed in China since the time of Confucius, and concluded that there is nothing new under the sun, as his Uncle Rupert said each time he read the newspaper. Some nights the three lovers were so contented that they forgot to say good night and fell asleep in a tangle of arms and legs, the young man buried in a soft and fragrant mountain of flesh, lulled by his cousins’ dreams. They would awake at the first rooster’s crow, just in time for them to leap into their own beds, before their elders surprised them in such delicious misbehavior. For a while the sisters were planning to flip a coin for the indefatigable Rolf Carlé, but during the process of those memorable tourneys they discovered they were joined to him by playful and festive emotions totally inappropriate as a basis for a respectable marriage. They, practical young women that they were, decided it would be more convenient to marry the aromatic candlemakers, keeping their cousin in reserve as a lover and, when feasible, as father of their children, thus avoiding the risk of boredom—though not, perhaps, of bringing half-witted children into the world. Such an arrangement never entered Rolf Carlé’s mind, nurtured as he had been by romantic literature, chivalric novels, and strict and honorable teachings learned in childhood. While the girls were planning audacious combinations, he was striving to ease his guilt at loving them both by pretending that this was a temporary arrangement, the ultimate aim of which was to know one another better before selecting a partner; in his mind, a long-term contract would be an abominable perversion. He struggled with the insoluble conflict between desire—always spiritedly revived by those two opulent and generous bodies—and the severity that caused him to view monogamous marriage as the only possible course for a decent man. Don’t be foolish, Rolf. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter to us? I don’t love you for myself alone, and neither does my sister. We can go on like this until we marry—even after. Their proposal was a brutal blow to the young man’s vanity. For thirty hours he was sunk in indignation, but finally his concupiscence won out. He scraped his dignity off the floor and came back to sleep with the girls. And they, his precious cousins, one on each side, laughing in their glorious nakedness, again enveloped him in a delicious mist of cinnamon, clove, vanilla, and lemon, driving him mad and obliterating the last of his stodgy Christian virtues.

  Three years passed in this manner, more than enough to replace Rolf Carlé’s macabre nightmares with lovely dreams. It is possible that the girls would have triumphed over his scruples and he would have remained by their side for the rest of his days, humbly fulfilling the dual role of lover and surrogate father, had fate not led him down a different path. And the person charged with showing him the way was a señor Aravena, a newspaperman by profession and filmmaker by vocation.

  Aravena wrote for the country’s most important newspaper. He was Rupert and Burgel’s best client and he spent almost every weekend at their inn, where a room was always kept for him. His pen was so highly respected that not even the dictatorship had been able to still it completely, and during his years in the profession he had acquired an aureole of honesty that allowed him to publish what his colleagues would never have dared. Even the General and the Man of the Gardenia treated him with respect, abiding by a mutually beneficial formula that allowed him, within specific limitations, unmolested freedom, while the government projected an image of liberalism by exhibiting his moderately daring articles. A man with an obvious taste for the good life, he smoked enormous cigars, ate like a lion, and was a prodigious drinker, the only man able to defeat Uncle Rupert in the Sunday beer fests. He alone was allowed the luxury of pinching Rolf’s cousins’ magnificent buttocks, because he did it with grace, in no spirit of offense, merely of rendering due tribute. Come here, my adorable Valkyries, let this humble newspaperman feel your heavenly ass; and even Burgel would laugh as her daughters turned a backside and he ceremoniously lifted the embroidered felt skirts and fell into rhapsodies at the sight of those orbs encased in girlish underdrawers.

  Señor Aravena owned a movie camera and a noisy portable t
ypewriter, its keys discolored with use, and he sat before it all day Saturday and half of Sunday on the terrace of the inn, pecking out his columns with two fingers and eating sausages and drinking beer. Ah, it does me good to breathe this pure mountain air, he would say from behind a cloud of black smoke. Sometimes he arrived with a girl—never the same one—whom he introduced as his niece, and Burgel always went along with the pretense. We don’t run one of those shady hotels. Do you think I’d put up with such a thing? I allow Aravena to bring a friend because he’s such a well-known gentleman. Haven’t you seen his name in the newspaper? Aravena’s enthusiasm for the lady in question would last only one night; after that he would have had his fill of her and would pack her off with the first truckload of vegetables bound for the capital. In contrast, he would spend days talking with Rolf Carlé as they strolled around the village. He maintained a running commentary on international news, initiated Rolf into national politics, supervised his readings, taught him the basics of the camera and some rudiments of typing. You can’t stay in La Colonia forever, he said. It’s fine for a neurotic like myself to come here to fortify my body and get the poisons out of my system, but no normal young man should live in this stage set. Rolf Carlé was familiar with the works of Shakespeare, Molière, and Calderón de la Barca, but he had never been in a theater and could not see its relationship with the village; he was disinclined, however, to argue with the maestro for whom he felt such unbounded admiration.

  “I’m very pleased with you, Rolf,” his Uncle Rupert told him the day he turned twenty. “In a couple of years’ time, you can take complete charge of the clocks—it’s a profitable business.”

  “The truth is, Uncle, that I don’t want to be a clock-maker. I think that cinematography would be a better profession for me.”

  “Cinematography? And what good is that?”

  “To make films. I’m interested in documentaries. I want to know what’s going on in the world, Uncle.”

  “The less you know, the better, but if that’s what you like, then do it.”

  Burgel was almost ill when she learned that Rolf was going off to live alone in the capital, that den of peril, drugs, politics, and sickness, where all the women are bitches—pardon my French—like those women who come sailing into La Colonia with their stern wagging and their bow breasting the waves. Desperate, the cousins tried to dissuade Rolf by refusing him their favors, but in view of the fact that the punishment was as painful for them as it was for him, they changed their tactics and made love to him with such ardor that Rolf lost weight at an alarming rate. Those most affected, nonetheless, were the dogs, who when they sniffed the preparations in the air lost all appetite and slunk around with their tail between their legs, ears drooping, and an unbearable gaze of supplication in their eyes.

  Rolf Carlé withstood all emotional appeals, and two months later set off for the university, after promising his Uncle Rupert that he would spend the weekends with them, his Aunt Burgel that he would eat the biscuits, hams, and marmalades she packed in his suitcases, and the cousins that he would remain absolutely chaste in order to return with renewed energies for their frolics beneath the eiderdown.

  FIVE

  While these things were happening in Rolf Carlé’s life, I was growing up only a short distance away. It was during that time that my madrina’s misfortune began. I heard about it on the radio, and saw her picture in the scandal sheet Elvira used to buy behind the patrona’s back. That’s how I learned my madrina had given birth to a monster. Specialists informed the public that the creature belonged to Tribe III—that is, it was characterized by a fused body with two heads: genus Xiphoid, meaning it had a single vertebral column; and class Omphalosian, one umbilicus for two bodies. The great curiosity was that one head was white by race, and the other black.

  “The poor thing had two fathers, that’s for sure,” said Elvira, with a grimace of disgust. “A horror like that happens only if you sleep with two men on the same day. In all my fifty years, I’ve never done a thing like that. You won’t catch me letting the juices of two men mix in my belly. The fruit of that sin is circus freaks.”

  My madrina had been earning her living nights as a scrubwoman. She was on a tenth floor scrubbing the stains from a carpet when she felt her first pangs; she continued working, however, because she was not sure how to time the delivery, and because she was furious with herself for having succumbed to temptation, paying with a shameful pregnancy. A little past midnight she felt warm liquid trickling between her thighs, and knew she should get to a hospital, but it was too late; she did not have the strength to get to the elevator. She yelled at the top of her lungs, but there was no one in all the lonely building to come to her aid. Resigned to staining what she had just cleaned, she lay down on the floor and pushed with desperation until she expelled the fetus. She was so befuddled when she saw the strange two-headed creature she had given birth to that her first reaction was to get rid of it as quickly as possible. As soon as she could struggle to her feet, she carried the baby into the corridor and threw it down the incinerator chute, and then, still gasping for breath, went back to clean the rug all over again. The next day when the janitor went into the basement, he found the tiny body in the trash that had been discarded from the offices; there were few signs of injury, because it had fallen on shredded paper. Waitresses from the cafeteria came running in response to his cries, and in a few minutes the news had reached the street and spread like wildfire. By noon the scandal was news throughout the nation; even foreign newspapermen came to photograph the infant’s corpse, because in all the annals of medicine that combining of races was unique. For a week, no one talked of anything else; the event overshadowed even the deaths of two students who had been shot by the guardia at the gates of the university for waving red flags and singing the “Internationale.” My madrina was called an unnatural mother, a murderess, and a foe of science because she would not give the body to the Anatomical Institute for examination, but insisted on burying it in the cemetery, according to Catholic teaching.

  “First she kills it and throws it in the trash like a rotten fish, and then she wants to give it a Christian burial. God will never forgive a crime like that, little bird.”

  “But, abuela, no one has proved that my madrina killed it.”

  “And who did, then?”

  The police kept the mother in isolation for several weeks, until the coroner finally succeeded in making himself heard. He had insisted from the first, although no one paid any attention, that being thrown down the incinerator chute was not the cause of death; the infant had been stillborn. Finally the authorities freed the poor woman, who was marked for life, in any case; for months she was followed by newspaper headlines, and no one ever believed the official version. The sympathies of an unforgiving public were all for the baby, and they called my madrina “The Little Monster Murderess.” All this trauma was the final blow to her nerves. She could not get over the guilt of having given birth to a sideshow freak, and was never the same person after getting out of jail. She was obsessed with the idea that the birth was a divine punishment for some abominable sin that not even she could remember. She was ashamed to show herself in public, and sank into misery and despair. As a last resort, she went to see witch doctors; they wrapped her in a shroud, laid her on the ground inside a circle of lighted candles, and blanketed her beneath a suffocating cloud of smoke, talcum, and camphor, until there issued from the depths of her being a visceral scream that they interpreted as the expulsion of the evil spirits. Then they hung sacred necklaces around her neck to prevent the evil from re-entering her body. When I went with Elvira to visit her, I found her living in the same blue-painted shack. She had fallen away, and had lost the unabashed sauciness that had once put pepper in her walk; she had surrounded herself with pictures of Catholic saints and African gods, her only company the stuffed puma.

  When she saw that the prayers and the witchcraft and the herbalists’ bre
ws did not bring an end to her adversity, my madrina swore before the altar of the Virgin Mary never again to have carnal contact with a man, and to ensure that vow she had a midwife stitch up her vagina. The infection nearly killed her. She never knew whether she was saved by the hospital’s antibiotics, the candles lighted to Santa Rita, or the medicinal teas she so faithfully imbibed. From that moment she could not do without rum and the witch doctors’ santería. Life lost its meaning; often she did not recognize people she knew, and she roamed the city streets mumbling unintelligibly about a devil’s spawn, a creature of two bloods born from her belly. She was totally mad, and could not earn a living because, in her disturbed state and with her photograph in the police files, no one would give her work. She disappeared for long stretches at a time, and I would fear she was dead, but when I least expected her, she would reappear haggard and wretched, her eyes bloodshot. She always brought a cord with seven knots in it to measure my skull, a surefire way, someone had told her, to verify whether I was still a virgin. That’s your only treasure. As long as you’re untouched, you’re worth something, she would say; but when you lose it, you’re nobody. I did not understand why the part of my body that was so sinful and forbidden could at the same time be so valuable.