Miguel Goitia’s plane had landed in Hondarribia at seven o’clock. He’d loaded the bulk of his baggage into a cab, and he himself had taken another cab, which preceded the one carrying his things and brought him to Las Cruces. Standing at the large window that overlooked the estuary and part of the broad mouth of the river and the open ocean, he could indeed see the sparkling miradors and the tuna fishing boats painted red, green, and blue in the incredible softness of the evening. The old breakwater, planted with tamarind trees, was crowded with the last summer visitors. There on the other shore, amid the gleaming windows and the delicate mist that descended from the crests of the mountains, the lighthouse on the French coast was emitting signals, and the buoys had begun to send out synchronized flashes. The sea extended out toward the setting sun, caught in a sieve that came down upon the horizon at the moment when dusk fell. Soon the first star would rise. Unless the simultaneous weariness and exaltation of travel were obstructing his understanding, the great panoramas seemed to contain a message, and he considered the possibility that the sea before him, into which the gigantic beast of the Pyrenees would someday sink, was going to make all things more meaningful than ever before. Miguel Goitia turned from the window, stepped over to the glass cabinet, and picked up the framed photograph. “Is this my grandmother?” he asked.
The robust servant, wearing a black cap set at an angle on her head like a beret—she said it was a mourning cap—replied in the affirmative. The deceased, the Señora, the bride, Grandmother Isabel—the person pictured in that photograph was all of them. For her grandson, who had seen little of her when she was alive, she was only a distant and uncertain childhood memory. He replaced the photograph between its permanent sentinels, the two little porcelain dogs, and moved away from the glass cabinet. The servant moved away in her turn, dragging one leg. White slipcovers shrouded the furniture in the drawing room, except for the table, whose covering was an old, patched tablecloth. The portraits and paintings on the walls, visible in the half-light of the room, were condemned to a mysterious opaqueness. The adjacent room was the dining room, and the one communicating with it had been the living room, after having been the smoking room, or the sewing room; in any case, the distribution and use of the rooms on the ground floor were not determined by their appearance or by the furniture they contained, for each space seemed to have been used capriciously for any function. At some point, Grandmother Isabel must have eaten in the sewing room, in winter or in summer—forgetting that gentlemen had smoked there in other lifetimes—or asked to be served in the real dining room, or even in the drawing room, in front of the big window. A door with a brass handle led to the kitchen. From there, a flight of stairs descended into the cellar. As for the other rooms and the attics, it would be better to leave consideration of them for another time. Hostess and guest mounted to the second floor. María Antonia went about opening doors and ventilating strongholds that had resisted the entrance of fresh air for quite some time. There was a leak in one of the bedrooms. The water filtered through the center of a magnificent halo, which on stormy days let fall an intermittent drop, like an astronomical signal, into a chamber pot placed exactly perpendicular to the circle. The ultimate cause of this drip was a cracked tile on the roof. On the ceiling, concentric, delicately veined patterns were forming, patterns such as those one can observe in certain agate stones, paler or more intense according to the severity of the rainy season in the year when they had taken shape. In all probability, the white china chamber pot that caught the water from the leak was an object saved from the Etxarri inn, and although the servant wouldn’t say so, it could be considered a survivor. At the turning of a corridor, Miguel Goitia confronted the stuffed head of an African buffalo with a split horn, and María Antonia neglected to explain that the rather shabby trophy came from the inn and had survived the war and all the postwar years with less damage and loss than many men. However, anyone familiar with the two locales—that is, the Etxarri inn at the crossroads and the Las Cruces villa in Hondarribia—could have told that one of the two had pervaded the other through the subtle introduction of symbols and emblems that assuredly were not limited to the buffalo head and the china chamber pot. Knowing eyes would have detected María Antonia’s influence in the house after the Señora’s death and the expropriation and destruction of the inn. Thus her universe now extended beyond the kitchen, where she spent so much of her time, and her room, which had always been the servant’s quarters. She had gradually taken over the rest of the territory, just as a certain species of phagocytic amoeba takes over the space previously occupied by a rival species. They went on to the room that the grandson was going to occupy for the anticipated duration of his stay on the estate. It was a room with a view of the sea, located on the northeastern façade of the house, just above the drawing room, where a few minutes previously he had contemplated his grandmother Isabel’s picture. A door led to a bathroom with blue, beveled tiles, white baseboards with a golden fillet, and a frieze in the same style, with garlands of flowers. The bathtub stood on four lions’ feet, like a Roman sarcophagus. The bedroom that the servant had chosen for him communicated with another bedroom, which contained a double bed. Another door, half closed, led to the room with the chamber pot. The chosen room was well-maintained and in good shape, except for the damp stain he detected near the window. Perhaps María Antonia had left in that room, too, some object from the inn, some fetish or device charged with magnetic power, but knowing eyes would have been unable to detect it at first glance. Then they would have guessed that the bed itself, with its brass balls, could have been stored for many years in the attic of Etxarri’s after the stepfather had turned the roadside bar into a cheap hotel. This was quite possibly the case, and also quite possibly not. A factory in Elizondo had produced beds of this type, and there were many in the region. Whether it was the case or not—and it probably wasn’t—every room in the house had preserved a certain nobility, which remained unaffected by the ceiling leak that dripped into the chamber pot or by the melancholy aspect of this bed. Miguel Goitia put down the small case he was carrying. He had heard the taxi with the rest of his baggage driving up, and he went down to wait for it at the entrance. The servant followed him, closing doors as she went. A loose shutter was banging against a window somewhere. The sparrows of late afternoon had settled on the telephone wires, and at the moment when the cabdriver opened the enormous mouth of the vehicle’s trunk, the birds took flight.
With eighteen million and more in her bank account, María Antonia did not feel obliged to unload anybody’s luggage, and she confined herself to observing the operation from the porch with her hand on one leaf of the double door. Goitia was traveling with two suitcases and a trunk. The trunk appeared to be filled with lead. In fact, it was full of books, but they weighed as much as General Zumalacárregui’s bronze bust. The taxi driver and the gardener got the trunk out of the automobile. Then, using a rag he kept in the glove compartment, the driver wiped his hands, like Pontius Pilate abdicating his responsibilities. Goitia and the gardener carried the trunk to the house. Then they came back for the suitcases, and Goitia paid his fare. Although it looked as though he’d be sleeping in the bedroom next to the room with the chamber pot, Goitia preferred to install his books on the ground floor, and he and the gardener lugged the trunk inside. In the meanwhile, María Antonia had removed the white slipcovers from the furniture in the drawing room and draped them over a chair like an armful of limp, useless ghosts. The dying afternoon light cast a dull pall over the drawing room. María Antonia switched on a couple of lamps and withdrew. In very few words, the gardener had made it known that the kitchen floor tiles were soiled with mud tracked in from the garden, and this information had put her in a bad mood. Goitia shrugged. The servant reemerged from the kitchen with a mop and an enormous bucket of water as Goitia was dismissing the gardener. She had changed her outfit; under the black skirt she’d had on before, she was now wearing a pair of blue trousers. She began to scrub away t
he traces of mud with obstinate, pendular movements. Then she looked up at Goitia with a spark of mingled reproach and affection in her eyes.
“Where’s the telephone?” the intruder asked.
María Antonia gestured toward the sewing room.
There was indeed a telephone, and it was to be hoped that the line had not been cut. Next to the sewing room was what probably had been the gun room, containing a desk and two empty glass cabinets. In point of fact—although Goitia could not know this—that small chamber had been the original smoking room. In any case, he decided to put his books in there, for although the servant thought he was a medical doctor, he was actually a doctor of law, a lawyer, and he intended to spend the next four months studying for the competitive examinations to become a civil-law notary.* He had no intention of dedicating himself to anatomical dissections, as he did in the servant’s turbid imagination, and therefore he needed a small chamber, a desk, and some bookshelves, not the kitchen or the cellar for dismembering cadavers, no matter what she might have fancied. But all that was to become clear in the following days, after the servant and the intruder had made mutual efforts to communicate.
Goitia turned to her with a tyrannical gesture. “Is there a clean armoire on the second floor?”
“They’re all clean,” the servant said proudly, without taking into account the invisible proliferation of microscopic fungi that imparted an odor of penicillin to those enclosed spaces.
“I’ll carry up the suitcases,” Goitia said.
María Antonia once again recalled the eighteen million and more that she had in the bank and made no offer to help. One after the other, Goitia hauled the two suitcases upstairs. They were lighter than the trunk filled with books and heavier than what he had really needed to bring with him, but then he wondered whether he shouldn’t have added a whip or some kind of weapon in case the old woman, despite having authorized his presence, should decide to attack him.
When he went back downstairs, the servant had disappeared, but as happens with certain animals, a trace of her smell had remained in the drawing room. Goitia stepped into the little sewing room, where he planned to make a couple of telephone calls. Before his eyes, framed under glass, was an embroidered cloth that figured cats playing with a basket full of yarn balls, and next to it was another framed cloth embroidered with an exceedingly elaborate uppercase letter, covered with garlands of flowers. The letter was an I, the initial of his grandmother Isabel. Outside the window, an airplane rose into the sky, between the line of country houses and the trees and half-inundated fields that hid the airport runway. The airliner was a silent artifact. The roar of its engines could be heard only several seconds later. It was gaining altitude, high enough for the sun to cast a glittering reflection onto its fuselage. It veered smoothly northeast, tilting its wings, and then traced a broad curve to the west, as if it hoped to escape in triumph with the gold of twilight and flee to the advancing night. Then it changed direction and hurtled southward. It was the plane Goitia had arrived on, flying back to Madrid.
It’s not impossible to imagine what that drawing room was like in darkness, separated from the sewing room by a door that stood ajar and allowed a square of light to fall on the chessboard of the tiled floor. A gloomy lamp with a green glass shade had been turned on in the gun room. In the sewing room, Goitia took refuge under the circle of light shed by a lamp with a parchment shade, crouching beside the nearby telephone table with the Bakelite receiver in his hand. There was something grotesque about this lawyer, this young, modern doctor of law, squatting in a sewing room adorned with kittens and embroidered letters and turning his back on the virile associations of the room with the green light. But one can imagine the drawing room in darkness, and without the shrouds that usually covered the furniture: bathed in the glow of the refulgent moon, which varnished the room’s old mahogany, awakening silver reflections, and so desolate in appearance that it seemed to live only for the beyond, represented in this case by the deceptive, watery lamplight shining through the window onto the dark garden. There was an enormous ashtray, batrachian in form, with an inscription, IX FROG-FISHING COMPETITION—GASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF MENDIETA, but no date. This object came from some celebration that had taken place in the Etxarri inn. The guests at this gathering had sung
Go Mendieta,
You’re the greatest.…
or something of the sort. Or maybe
The Gorri-Gorri’s wife,
the one who does the Charleston.*
Or there was also
The woman soft and white has
legs that thrill the sight, and an
ass beyond all praise.…
María Antonia wouldn’t have been able to remember those songs, because the men who sang them were her stepfather’s old pals, but she did have a hazy memory of a competition where the size and healthy appearance of the frogs the contestants caught counted for as much as their quantity. While the frogs were still alive, their rear legs were cut off with sheep-shearing scissors and then breaded and fried, or cooked in pil-pil sauce, or prepared in whatever innovative way a member of the Society might imagine. Back then, men were cruel with frogs and cruel to one another. This kind of fishing had little to do with salmon fishing, or rather their relation was the same as the one between that large brass ashtray and the silver ashtrays to be found here and there, small ashtrays, engraved or repoussé, taking in the moonlight as though receiving the consecrated host. The unoccupied, nocturnal drawing room existed in a certain timeless flux. The collection of small ashtrays had been one of Grandmother Isabel’s wedding presents, but old María Antonia was unable to put a date on it, just as there was no date in the inscription for the IX Frog-Fishing Competition on the bronze ashtray.
But the wedding itself, represented in the drawing room by the silver ashtrays, had taken place in May, or in June, on a day excessively hot even for the recently begun season. Because of the heat, the wedding banquet was held in the garden, where the guests could scatter among the trees, although the men, who habitually flee the sun, took refuge in the house. The couple had been married in the church in Hondarribia. A chorus of villagers, beggars, and busybodies watched the bride enter that beautiful edifice, riddled by the centuries and the salt sea air. Isabel was dressed as in the photograph; her fiancé wore the uniform of a captain of artillery. Someone in the crowd said, “Captain, you don’t look like the groom.”
The groom must not have heard this comment or simply didn’t reply. Some of those present held the view that weddings where the groom is a military man and wears his dress uniform are fine and striking spectacles; others, however, thought that the anonymous remark contained something more than a mere reflection. In any case, few people choose to be married at their summer holiday home, and the decision may have been dictated by circumstances, or it may have been due to Isabel’s desire to be married within sight of the sea. One of the bride’s witnesses was missing. At first, no one noticed his absence, and no one could know at the time that the absent witness had suffered a stroke in the latrine of Etxarri’s Bar, an ignominious place for a witness in such an elegant wedding. The big black automobiles surrounded the church, and then they drove out in a caravan to the estate. Some of those vehicles would later become authentic museum pieces, and others, beginning shortly after the war broke out, would provide transport for a general staff or other group of officers, or would serve to carry Falangists to the front with the Falangist proprietor of the car behind the steering wheel, or would get taken on a joyride by a bunch of euphoric militiamen after they had requisitioned the vehicle or shot its owner. In any case, on the day of the wedding, anyone who admired those stupendous velvet-black cars, gleaming as wedding automobiles always do, anyone who admired them there would have thought about the coming summer, about excursions to the casino in Biarritz or to eat crabs in Lesaka, and no one would have given the least thought to a war, because wars never announce their imminence in the way that posterity will imagine they did. The
groom brought along four witnesses: two members of his family and two regimental comrades. The bride had more than enough witnesses, even though the man who was her father’s associate in the paper-manufacturing business had not shown up. There are people who admire superior vehicles as treasures of mechanical science, and who consider the internal combustion engine the most attractive invention since the steam engine. The wedding caravan included a Bentley, two Panhards, and a Peugeot 601, as well as other models that may be tricks of the memory, because it’s possible that they were models from after the war or from after the world war. In any case, nothing seemed more impressive than a gathering of fine automobiles, and it was a pleasure to stand close to them, knowing that you’d never be able to get your hands on any such steering wheel, and knowing, too, that those machines were a scarce luxury, only to be seen in groups at certain funerals and certain weddings, just as canons, bishops, and cardinals gather in cathedrals for certain solemn celebrations.
A canopy was stretched between two lime trees, in a spot where those two lime trees stand no more, because the fashion for shady parks was succeeded by the fashion for expanses of lawn in the American style, which is also called the English style. The guests assembled in that spot. Food and drink were also available on three other tables—two parallel boards adjoining opposite ends of the main table—which formed a horseshoe around the cedar tree. After the ceremony, when the bride, accompanied by the sound of automobile horns and a flight of seagulls overhead, arrived from the church, she entered the garden as a young married woman, but her veil, her emotional state, and the somewhat shy attention with which she extended her hand all showed that she was still a bride, because at that age, so tender and so febrile—barely twenty-five—a woman of her class was a shy virgin, even though she might have attended many a witches’ Sabbath in her secret heart. She went into the house to take off her shoes for a few minutes and throw her veil across a bed. She briefly shut herself up in her boudoir to fix her hair and check her makeup in a dressing-table mirror. Then she went outside again to receive the guests’ congratulations.
The Wrong Blood Page 4