The lieutenant went to spend the first part of the night with the men whom he had relieved, the ones who had been on duty atop the ice truck. There were two or three of them. He sent for the girl, and María Antonia, pressing her arms against her belly, thought that the moment had come, and that they were going to rape her when she joined them. There were no men who wouldn’t do the same. Thirty meters separated the house from the brow of the little hill where the ice truck was parked. The top cover of the machine gun mounted on the ice truck was silhouetted against the night sky. As María Antonia walked up those thirty meters, the frozen letters of the Ice Factory gradually appeared and grew clearer, blue and white on a blue background paler than the thick darkness surrounding the ice truck, as if it were a circus truck painted with some kind of glossy or glittering paint, and as if those fantastic letters, snow-crested like mountaintops, were announcing the imminent opening of a circus show with ice, seals, and penguins. The lieutenant was sitting inside the truck, on the driver’s side. His window was down, one elbow was sticking out, and he was smoking like the others. He turned his head as the girl approached the truck. The two men beside him craned forward and looked at her, too. “What do you think of this girl?” the lieutenant asked.
“She looks human, Lieutenant,” one of the other men said.
“Go up to the room. The sergeant wants to ask you to perform a service.”
The girl crossed her arms, pulled the blanket over her shoulders, and turned around. Neither the lieutenant nor his two men were the ones who were going to rape her. She was afraid to retrace the thirty meters, because her heart was pounding in her chest and she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. In church, the priests taught the children such behavior, telling them that they had to be obedient, even in time of war, even though they could escape and disappear on the mountain with the cows after setting fire to the hayloft, and then, for decades to come, the house that had sheltered Etxarri’s Bar would be nothing but a burnt patch, a few charred beams on ash-covered ground, and nobody except a very few people would know that María Antonia Etxarri had set the house on fire to save herself from being raped, but instead of doing that, remembering other reasons and other rains, María Antonia obediently mounted the stairs to the room, doing as she had been told, fearing only the barrage of blows she would get from her stepfather should peace ever come.
The door was open and the sergeant was waiting for her, wearing a rustic undershirt and long drawers. When she arrived, he looked at her and said, “I’ll have to thank the lieutenant.”
A lighted oil lamp stood on a console table, filling the room with shadows and shimmers worthy of a sacristy. The sergeant invited her inside and closed the door behind her. His face was illuminated and sad, or at least that’s the way she remembered it, giving it the features of a boy who had perhaps been promoted to corporal on the very day when he enlisted, and then promoted to sergeant because of the need for noncommissioned officers or because of some warlike deed accomplished on one of the many occasions a war of that sort would have offered, and after the passage of so many years, that closed face, which contemplated her with neither malevolence nor kindness, without even any desire except to assuage desire, had taken on in her memory the expression, between bad-tempered and foolish, of bridegrooms married against their will. He didn’t smile, nor did he bare his teeth. The lieutenant had turned the room over to him for just this situation, which promised to be awful from the moment the sergeant closed the door behind the girl, and she, who had often heard her mother and stepfather fighting in that room—and years later, the best customers would take up quarters there during the salmon-fishing season—she dropped the blanket that she was still wearing over her head like a shawl, and since she knew what she was going to be obliged to do, she hoped only that the man would not force himself upon her violently, and that the young soldiers downstairs would never find out about what was on the verge of happening in that room. She had heard men compared to dogs, and she had watched the packs when they were released during hunts. The indecisive sergeant made no move for several seconds. His profile was silhouetted against the moonlight on the balcony. He told her to lie on the bed and pulled his woolen undershirt over his head as if he were peeling off his skin. Then he sat on a chair and removed his long underpants, tugging first on one leg and then on the other, as though stripping off a long, two-fingered glove. She had never lain on her mother and stepfather’s bed nor, except when doing the cleaning, did she ever enter their bedroom. But she lay on the bed as the man had told her to do, and the man lay down beside her. He had big, cold hands. They seemed rather nervous, perhaps from shyness, perhaps from excitement. The brass balls at the foot of the bed gleamed while the bedsprings groaned, and her only hope was that the other soldiers wouldn’t hear what was going on and wouldn’t wake up in a state of lecherous agitation that nothing would be able to restrain. He threw her skirts over her face as if he were opening a trunk full of fancy clothes and undid the long drawers she used to wear in those days. Then he threw himself on top of her, and without her moving a muscle or shedding a tear or feeling either pleasure or pain, except for the alien warmth in her insides, the ungainly, naked man, covered with the sweat of war, as defenseless as a dog in the bed, raped her.
The sergeant turned over onto the mattress, lit a cigarette, and caught his breath. “Today’s my first wedding anniversary,” he said. “My wife’s in Pamplona, and the lieutenant understood that I needed a woman tonight.”
The cigarette left some shreds of tobacco on his lips, and he spat on the floor.
“Your name’s Etxarri?”
“Etxarri.”
“There are some people named Etxarri in Pamplona.”
The man didn’t speak again, and when he began to snore, she was able to leave the room. She picked up her blanket and spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, where the other soldiers were sleeping. She heard the changing of the guard and the lieutenant returning to his room. Then she fell asleep, too.
Colonel Beorlegui’s forces ran into difficulties in their advance upon Oyarzun. In the to-and-fro of the war during those days, the Etxarri house changed hands three times, and it seemed as though each force had carried off a piece of the building. A mortar shell ripped off one corner, bringing to light a wallpapered bedroom and the sad bed with the brass balls. When the bridge over the river was blown up, stones and pieces of rubble struck the roof, and an eave was detached when fire destroyed a beam. But then the war gradually moved away. No one knows when the ice truck came back, stripped of its machine gun and transformed into an ambulance, and later, during the years of shortages, stripped of everything that could serve any purpose and finally stranded in a field, where it became a refuge for a clutter of cats, with its snowy letters eaten by rust, its broken headlights like the hollow eye sockets of an animal carcass, its tires and seats gone, and its remains delivered up to the advancing nettles. No one knows with whom the sergeant spent the first anniversary of the war or the second anniversary of his marriage. María Antonia, indulgent as she was, still didn’t know whether she had been the victim of a rape or whether, in the springtime of her sixteen years, she had been a second wife for that man. “Long live God, who never dies,” the young troops of his company would fervently shout. Death surprised some like an early visitor, leaving behind as a sign of their time on earth the satiny sheen of some campaign photographs of them, young soldiers followed by their patient, immemorial mules, which seemed to carry all their exploits and all their sins, until they could carry them no more. María Antonia Etxarri’s mother did not return, and it turned out that she was in a cemetery on the other side of the border, but her stepfather came back, and Etxarri’s Bar eventually started doing a good business. María Antonia went into service, first in Vera, in the house of the rich man who had suffered a stroke in Etxarri’s while on his way to a wedding. His name was Leopoldo, Don Leopoldo, like Leopold, King of the Belgians, and he behaved like a patriarch toward her. S
ome time later, she went to Hondarribia to serve in the house on the country estate called Las Cruces, and she preferred Hondarribia, because although she had been born in the valley and raised in the valley, she had always (even more now that she was old) liked being near the sea.
Some more particulars about Etxarri’s inn:
Work on the new bridge began with the excavation of foundations on both sides of the stream and the pouring of gigantic concrete bases, placed diagonally across from one another with respect to the line of the current. Anchored in those concrete blocks, the bridge’s iron framework, with beams as thick as a man’s arm, grew upward, anticipating the construction of the only arch. This new bridge vaulted the river in a single span, altering dimensions, modifying perspectives, and soaring above the old bridge, which had been poorly reconstructed—its ancient, hewn stones were reused—shortly after the war. The highest point of the elegant curve upon which the new bridge’s concrete deck rested rose some ten or fifteen meters above the chimney and the ridgepole on the roof of the inn. Around this time, after the expropriation proceedings, the place was abandoned. What the war had been unable to do was accomplished in the peace: The roof developed holes, and moss and ferns began to grow on the tiles and in the recesses of the attic windows. Soon the sign that read HOSTAL fell off, and the big, rambling house once again became a ruin as in the days of the muleteers. The rosebush on the façade, the one with roses as fleshy as a wet nurse’s breasts, grew wild and started throwing shoots into the meadow in a kind of disorderly procreation, and these offspring produced roses that were smaller but perhaps more robust. It was as though the rosebush were emigrating from the premises and demonstrating its ability to cope with the dark rivalry of the brambles in order to reach the woods and traverse the crests of the mountains and perhaps even—who could tell?—cross over into France. The new route of the highway, a comfortable, gently winding road, opened onto an embankment cut into the mountainside about halfway up and then ran along the opposite slope like an asphalt ribbon among the thick mountain foliage, and all this so that trucks with five axles and loads above thirty tons might have a smoother ride to Pamplona. By then, María Antonia’s stepfather was dead, and it was she who received the money for the expropriation.
She was, by that time, an old woman with clever hands and a strong stomach, the housekeeper or servant or custodian or caretaker of the house where the wedding reception had been held (and later we shall have to speak of that wedding), a conceited but shrewd woman, weaker and more rheumatic than she herself might have wished, but still capable of lifting a bucket of water with only one hand, and capable as well of shouting insults over the villa’s delicate rosebushes and garden wall at anyone making a racket with a motorcycle or at the baker who hadn’t stopped to drop off her bread. The proprietress of Las Cruces had died a few years previously, and the house was kept up by sorcery or by the servant’s presence and certainly not by the distant solicitude of the late owner’s family, who lived in Madrid and couldn’t even spend their summers in the country house, because it didn’t belong to them anymore. One could recapitulate the landscape of bygone days by standing on the promontory of Hondarribia and gazing around in a circle. The young girl who had arrived there as a servant had been transformed into a wild animal, as if time had stripped her of her flowers in order to cover her with a skin like woven esparto and a cap stiffened with tar and turn her into something between a fox and a porgy, because there was as much innocence in her as there was shrewdness, and everything depended on who spoke to her and who came to see her. Her body was essential. She hated horses, an attitude that was somewhat surprising in a woman who had known three men, or perhaps was based precisely on that fact. The maintenance of the Las Cruces house was her responsibility, since an unusual last will in her favor had made the place hers. The property overlooked a magnificent landscape surrounding the broadest and most open stretch of the estuary, and from Las Cruces one could descry a watercolor horizon in the tender blue and green of the other shore, the buoys off Hendaye, the heights of Urruña, the masts and wind-whipped flags in the seaside resort of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the radio transmitter, the casino in Biarritz, and the big department stores in Bayonne, all in a single, compact picture, just as María Antonia’s misty imagination could have desired. She could see the Customs Service’s gray motor launches. On the French side, the glass-enclosed miradors sparkled in the twilight sun. One could always, while admiring the view, conjure up the landscape of a former battle. During the fall of the fort of San Marcial and the burning of Irún, there were people on that other shore who rented miradors and well-situated farmhouses so that they could follow the spectacle of the war from the safety of their side of the frontier. At the other end, one could discern a point of light that came from the Amuitz lighthouse. Also visible from the villa, among the trees of a park on the Spanish side, was a country estate that the former owner never forgot to point out to her visitors, and which had belonged to the late Eulalia de Borbón. But to return to the Etxarri inn, to the construction of the new bridge that canceled out the bend in the road where the inn stood, and to the old bridge, upon which the Etxarri inn had founded all its hopes since the time of the Romans and their successors the mule drivers—in these matters, even María Antonia’s elementary imagination found food for thought. It was the combat of gold and blood, which was resolved with the victory of gold. Not even she, with all her ambition—a woman of the woods, thrice possessed by men with equine members—could have conceived of the millions stipulated in the work contract for that bridge, or of the amounts that were thrown around in the government ministries and in the administrative offices of the Public Works, or of the modern requirements of traffic, but she knew all about the blood that had been spilled on that bridge during the war, and she moreover felt, however obscurely, that she carried in her veins the blood of the innumerable generations of Etxarris who had run the inn until it was taken over by the last Etxarri, her stepfather, who was not a true Etxarri but a false Etxarri, but who, for the results he’d obtained and on a posthumous accounting, could be considered one of the family. None of that could have any effect against the gold represented by the bridge-building contracts and the exigencies of transportation, but a portion of the budget wound up in María Antonia’s pockets anyway, and on terms she could never even have dreamed of. Her property was expropriated, and the expropriation filled those pockets of hers with gold. She was old and rich in the way peasants are, suspicious, and less than friendly to strangers. Nobody cared about the consequences of this chain of events, except for the gardener, a distant relative, or some cousin, who would never get rich. In regard to her function on the little estate in Hondarribia, to which she had come as a servant when she was a young girl and her late mistress practically a newlywed bride, nobody and nothing, not even a bulging bank account, could have persuaded her to leave service and go into retirement. The check from the Ministry, duly deposited in a bank, had amounted to something like eighteen million pesetas, and in the three or four years that had passed since, interest had accrued upon that principal, and neither María Antonia herself nor the gardener nor anyone in the vicinity who was aware of the existence of her fortune could guess what María Antonia would do with such a mass of money.
This was the state of affairs on the day when a grandson of the late owner—after asking permission from the present proprietress, his grandmother’s former servant—was coming to stay at the house in Hondarribia for a few months. One of his first acts would be to identify the deceased in a photograph taken on the afternoon of his grandmother’s wedding, a pallid sepia memento corroded by acid and set in a silver frame, barely more important than the two little porcelain dogs that were kept in the same glass cabinet, petrified like two small companion animals that might have belonged to the Señora and might in some way have been buried with her. The bride smiled in a lost paradise of tulle and lace and orange blossoms. The photograph showed neither how much weeping she was to do nor how little
she had wept until then, nor was there any visible sign of the two tears of emotion she had shed during the ceremony or of the sighs she would utter that same night, but these are things that very few portraits of women allow the viewer to discern. María Antonia Etxarri heaved her own sigh. She felt veneration for the woman who had been her Señora. The bride in the photograph was a young lady of twenty-five at the time, while she, María Antonia, thrice possessed by three stallions, was a tender girl of … how old had she been? She herself could no longer be certain. The calendar of sentiments knows no certainties, but she had kept everything in her memory. There could be no greater misfortune, no greater solitude, than memory.
The Wrong Blood Page 3