Eva Luna

by Isabel Allende

  “You remember me, Eva?”

  How could I have forgotten him? It had not been that long since our only evening together, and it was because of his attentions that I had quit my job at the factory and begun to earn my living by writing stories. We spent a few moments exchanging banalities—I, sitting on the edge of my seat, holding my cup in a trembling hand, and he, relaxed, observing me with an unfathomable expression. Once we had exhausted the formulas of politeness, we sat silent for a moment that I found unbearable.

  “Why did you call me here, General?” I blurted out finally, unable to stop myself.

  “To offer you a deal,” he said, then proceeded to inform me, always in the same doctrinaire tone, that he had an almost complete file of my life, dating from the press clippings at the time of Zulema’s death to proof of my recent relationship with Rolf Carlé, the polemical television newsman whom the Security Force also had under scrutiny. No, he was not threatening me—on the contrary, he was my friend, or, to put it more exactly, my ardent admirer. He had read the entire script of Bolero, in which, among many other events, he had found amazing details about the guerrilla war as well as that unfortunate escape of detainees from Santa María.

  “You owe me an explanation, Eva.”

  I had to fight to keep from pulling up my knees in the leather armchair and burying my face in my arms, but I controlled myself, staring at the design in the carpet with exaggerated attention, unable to find in the vast archives of my fantasy anything sensible I could say. General Tolomeo Rodríguez’s hand rested ever so briefly on my shoulder: I had nothing to fear, he had already told me that; furthermore, he had no intention of interfering with my work; I could continue my drama; he did not even object to that colonel in Episode 108, the one who resembled him so closely; he had laughed when he read that section—the character wasn’t at all bad, he was rather decent—yes, decent. But I must be careful when it came to the sacred honor of the armed forces; that was not something I could toy with. He had only one observation, as he had told the Director of National Television in a recent conference: the nonsense about the weapons made with a kind of play dough would have to be modified and any mention of the brothel in Agua Santa would have to be deleted. It not only made the prison guards and the officers look ridiculous, it was totally unrealistic. He was doing me a favor by ordering those changes; the series would undoubtedly be improved if I tossed in a few dead and wounded on both sides; the public would like it and it would avoid the touch of buffoonery that was so inappropriate in matters of such gravity.

  “What you propose would be more dramatic, General, but the fact is that the guerrillas escaped without violence.”

  “I see that you are better informed than I am. Let’s not get into discussions of military secrets, Eva. I hope you will not force me to take certain measures—just follow my suggestion. Let me say, in passing, that I admire your work. How do you do it? I mean, how does one write?”

  “I just do what I can. Reality is a jumble we can’t always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time. While you and I are speaking here, behind your back Christopher Columbus is inventing America, and the same Indians that welcome him in the stained-glass window are still naked in a jungle a few hours from this office, and will be there a hundred years from now. I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be.”

  “Where do you get your ideas?”

  “From things that are happening and from things that happened before I was born—from newspapers, from what people tell me.”

  “And from Rolf Carlé’s films, I imagine?”

  “You didn’t call me here to talk about Bolero, General. Tell me what you have on your mind.”

  “You’re right. I have already discussed the series with señor Aravena. I called you here because the guerrilla forces have been defeated. The President plans to end this struggle that has been so harmful for our democracy and so costly for the nation. Soon he will be announcing a plan for pacification, and will offer amnesty to those guerrillas who are willing to lay down their arms and who are prepared to obey our laws and become a part of our society. I can tell you something more. The President plans to legalize the Communist Party. I don’t agree with this measure, I must admit, but it is not my place to dispute the actions of the Executive. So that’s it. I warn you that the armed forces will never allow outside interests to sow pernicious ideas in the minds of the people. We shall defend with our lives the ideals of the Founders of the Nation. In sum, we are making a unique offer to the guerrillas, Eva. Your friends will be able to return to everyday life,” he concluded.

  “My friends?”

  “I am referring to Comandante Rogelio. I believe that the majority of his men will accept the amnesty if he does, and that’s why I wanted to explain to you that this is an honorable way out, his only opportunity—I shall not offer him a second chance. I need someone who has his confidence to arrange a meeting, and you can be that person.”

  For the first time in the interview, I looked directly into his eyes, convinced that General Tolomeo Rodríguez had taken leave of his senses if he thought I would lead my own brother into a trap. My God, the turns of fate . . . Not so very long ago Huberto Naranjo asked me to do the same thing to you, I thought.

  “I see that you don’t trust me,” he murmured, never taking his eyes from mine.

  “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

  “Please, Eva. At the very least, I deserve not to be underestimated. I know about your friendship with Comandante Rogelio.”

  “Then don’t ask me to do this.”

  “I’m asking you because it’s a fair arrangement. You can save their lives, and save me time—but I understand your hesitation. Thursday the President will announce these measures to the nation. I hope then you will believe me and be prepared to cooperate for the best interests of everyone concerned—especially the terrorists, whose only alternatives will be pacification or death.”

  “They are guerrillas, General, not terrorists.”

  “Call them what you will, that doesn’t change the fact that they are operating outside the laws of the nation, and I have the means to destroy them. Instead, I am throwing them a life preserver.”

  I agreed to think about it, reasoning that the delay would give me time to think. For an instant I remembered Mimí exploring the position of the planets in the firmament and decoding the secrets of the cards to tell Huberto Naranjo’s fortune: I’ve always said it—that one was born to be a bandit or a tycoon. I could not help smiling, because maybe astrology and the cards were wrong once again. Suddenly before my eyes flashed a fleeting glimpse of Comandante Rogelio in the Congress of the Republic, fighting from his velvet-upholstered chair the battles he now was fighting with a rifle in the mountains. General Tolomeo Rodríguez accompanied me to the door and, as he said goodbye, held my hand in his.

  “I was mistaken about you, Eva. For months I have impatiently awaited your call. But I have my pride, and I always keep my word. I said I would not force you and I haven’t done so, although I regret it now.”

  “Are you referring to Rolf Carlé?”

  “I imagine that is a passing relationship?”

  “I hope it will be forever.”

  “Nothing is forever, my dear, except death.”

  “I also try to live my life as I would like it . . . like a novel.”

  “Then there’s no hope for me?”

  “I’m afraid not. But I thank you for your gallantry, General Rodríguez.”

  And, standing on tiptoe to reach his martial height, I kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  A FINAL WORD

  Just as I had diagnosed, in certain matters Rolf Carlé is very slow to react. That man who is so quick when it comes to capturing an image on film is rather awkward when fa
ced with his own emotions. In his thirty-some years of existence, he had learned to live with solitude, and he had persisted in protecting those habits despite his Aunt Burgel’s sermons on the virtues of domestic life. Perhaps that was why he was so slow to perceive that something had changed when I had sat on a silk cushion at his feet and he had listened to me tell a story.

  After the breakout from Santa María, Rolf placed me in his aunt and uncle’s care at La Colonia and returned that same night to the capital; he could not be absent during the pandemonium that swept the country when the guerrilla radio broadcast the voices of the escapees flaunting their revolutionary slogans and ridiculing the authorities. He spent the following four days—exhausted, hungry, short of sleep—interviewing everyone related to the events, from the madam of the brothel in Agua Santa and the demoted prison warden to Comandante Rogelio himself, who appeared for twenty seconds on the television screens, with a star on his black beret and a kerchief covering the lower half of his face, before the transmission was interrupted—it was said—because of technical difficulties. On Thursday Aravena was summoned to the Presidential Palace, where he received the explicit recommendation that he control his team of reporters if he wanted to retain his post. Isn’t that Carlé fellow a foreigner? No, Excellency, he’s a citizen—check his papers. Aha! Well, at any rate, warn him not to poke into matters of national security or he might regret it. The Director called his protégé to the office and closeted himself with him for five minutes; the result was that Rolf returned to La Colonia that same day under unequivocal orders to stay out of the limelight until the complaints about him died down.

  He walked into the large frame house, still empty of weekend tourists, shouting hello, as he always did, but without pausing to allow his aunt the opportunity to feed him the first bite of pastry or the dogs to lick him from head to foot. He walked straight through, looking for me, because for several weeks a ghost in yellow petticoats had been haunting his dreams, teasing him, eluding him, inflaming him, lifting him to glory moments before dawn when at last after hours of impassioned pursuit he had managed to embrace her, plunging him into frustration when he awakened alone, sweating and calling her. The time had come to put a name to that ridiculous vexation. He found me sitting beneath a eucalyptus tree, seemingly absorbed in writing my script, but in fact watching him out of the corner of my eye. I shifted position so that the breeze fluttered the fabric of my dress and the late afternoon sun gave me an aspect of tranquility—utterly unlike the voracious female who tormented him every night in his dreams. I could feel him observing me from a distance. I suppose that finally he decided there had been enough time wasted and it was the moment to demonstrate his thoughts in clearer terms, always within the bounds of his usual courtliness. He strode forward, and kissed me exactly as it happens in romantic novels, exactly as I had been wanting him to do for a century, and exactly as I had been describing moments before in a scene between the protagonists of my Bolero. Once we were close, I was able unobtrusively to drink in the smell of the man, recognizing, at long last, the scent of the other half of my being. I understood then why from the first I thought I had known him before. Quite simply, it all came down to the elemental fact that I had found my mate, after so many weary years searching for him. It seemed that he felt the same, and may have reached the identical conclusion, although—always bearing in mind his rational temperament—perhaps with some small reservations. We stood caressing and whispering those words that only new lovers, to whom all the familiar words sound freshly coined, dare speak.

  As we kissed beneath the eucalyptus tree, the sun had set; dusk had fallen and the temperature suddenly dropped, as it always does at nightfall in those mountains. We then levitated and went inside to tell the good news of our just-declared love. Rupert went first to inform his daughters and then to the cellar to look for bottles of the best wine while Burgel, moved to the point of bursting into song in her mother tongue, began to chop and season the ingredients of her aphrodisiac stew; in the patio the dogs, who had been the first to scent the emanations of our happiness, created an unbelievable ruckus. The table was laid for a stupendous feast, with the best china, while the candlemakers, all qualms allayed, drank to the happiness of their former rival, and the two cousins, whispering and giggling, went to plump up the feather bed and place fresh flowers in the best guest room—the same room where years before the three of them had performed their first experiments in voluptuousness. When the family feast was over, Rolf and I retired to the large room they had prepared for us. Hawthorn logs were blazing in the fireplace and the high bed was covered by the lightest eiderdown in the world and enveloped in mosquito netting as white as a bridal veil. That night, and many following nights, we made love with such ardor that all the wood in the house glowed like polished gold.

  Later, for a judicious period of time, we loved each other more modestly until that love wore thin and nothing was left but shreds.

  Or maybe that isn’t how it happened. Perhaps we had the good fortune to stumble into an exceptional love, a love I did not have to invent, only clothe in all its glory so it could endure in memory—in keeping with the principle that we can construct reality in the image of our desires. I exaggerated slightly, describing, for example, our honeymoon as prodigious: I said that it changed the soul of that comic-opera town and the very order of nature; that every lane echoed with sighs, that doves nested in the cuckoo clocks, that the almond trees in the cemetery flowered for a night, and that Uncle Rupert’s bitches came in heat before season. I wrote that during those enchanted weeks time expanded, curled back on itself, turned inside out like a magician’s handkerchief, and that Rolf Carlé—his solemnity shattered to bits and his vanity somewhere in the clouds—was able to exorcise his nightmares and again sing the songs of his boyhood, and that I at last danced the belly dance I had learned in the kitchen of Riad Halabí, and amid laughter and sips of wine told many stories, including some with a happy ending.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  The Japanese Lover

  THE POLISH GIRL

  To satisfy Irina and Seth’s curiosity, Alma began by telling them, with the lucidity that preserves crucial moments for us, of the first time she saw Ichimei Fukuda. She met him in the splendid garden at the Sea Cliff mansion in the spring of 1939. In those days she was a girl with less appetite than a canary, who went around silent by day and tearful by night, hiding in the depths of the three-mirrored wardrobe in the bedroom her aunt and uncle had prepared for her. The room was a symphony in blue: the drapes were blue, and so too the curtains around the four-poster bed, the Flemish carpet, the birds on the wallpaper, and the Renoir reproductions in their gilt frames; blue also were the sky and the sea she could view from her window whenever the fog lifted. Alma Mendel was weeping for everything she had lost forever, even though her aunt and uncle insisted so vehemently that the separation from her parents and brother was only temporary that they would have convinced any girl less intuitive than her. The very last image she had of her parents was that of a man of mature years, bearded and stern looking, dressed entirely in black with a heavy overcoat and hat, standing next to a much younger woman, who was sobbing disconsolately. They were on the quay at the port of Danzig, waving good-bye to her with white handkerchiefs. They grew smaller and smaller, more and more indistinct, as the boat set out on its journey toward London with a mournful blast from its foghorn and she, clutching the railing, found it impossible to return their farewell wave. Shivering in her travel clothes, lost among the crowd of passengers gathered at the stern to watch their native land disappear in the distance, Alma tried to maintain the composure her parents had instilled in her from birth. As the ship moved off, she could sense their despair, and this reinforced her premonition that she would never see them again. With a gesture that was rare in him, her father had put his arm around her mother’s shoulders, as if to prevent her from throwing herself into the water. She meanwhile was holding down her hat with one
hand to prevent the wind from blowing it off as she frantically waved the handkerchief with her other.

  Three months earlier, Alma had been with them on this same quay to wave good-bye to her brother, Samuel, who was ten years older than her. Her mother shed many tears before accepting her husband’s decision to send him to England as a precaution just in case the rumors of war became real. He would be safe there from being recruited into the army or being tempted to volunteer. The Mendel family could never have imagined that two years later Samuel would be in the Royal Air Force fighting against Germany. When she saw her brother embark with the swagger of someone off on his first adventure, Alma had a foretaste of the threat hanging over her family. Her brother had been like a beacon to her: shedding light on her darkest moments and driving off her fears with his triumphant laugh, his friendly teasing, and the songs he sang at the piano. For his part, Samuel had been delighted with Alma from the moment he held her as a newborn baby, a pink bundle smelling of talcum powder and mewling like a kitten. This passion for his sister had done nothing but grow over the following seven years, until they were forced apart. When she learned that Samuel was leaving, Alma had her first ever tantrum. It began with crying and screaming, followed by her writhing in agony on the floor, and only ended when her mother and governess plunged her ruthlessly into a tub of icy water. Samuel’s departure left her both sad and on edge, as she suspected it was the prologue to even more drastic changes. Alma had heard her parents talk about Lillian, one of her mother’s sisters who lived in the United States and was married to Isaac Belasco—someone important, as they never failed to add whenever they mentioned his name. Before this, she had been unaware of the existence of this distant aunt and the important man, and so she was very surprised when her parents obliged her to write them postcards in her best handwriting. She also saw it as an ill omen that her governess suddenly incorporated the orange-colored blotch of California into her history and geography lessons. Her parents waited until after the end-of-year celebrations before announcing that she too would be going to study abroad for a while. Unlike her brother, however, she would remain within the family, and go to live in San Francisco with her aunt Lillian, her uncle Isaac, and her three cousins.