The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  The ladies’ hats of those years, the so-called picture hats, were just as remarkable as the automobiles, and one might have talked about the hats as well, but they were much less interesting than mechanical science. A lady who lived in Vitoria, an emotional person, came up to pay her respects to the bride. This lady was on the arm of a gentleman, the bride’s uncle by marriage, who smiled under his mustache, exhibiting both his teeth and his good appetite.

  “I wept in church, Isabel, to see you looking so pretty.”

  “Thank you, Aunt.”

  This was the moment to present the groom, for the aunt and uncle had only seen his name on the wedding invitation and had been unable to greet him before the ceremony. “Let me introduce Julen.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You’ve chosen well,” the older gentleman said. “You’ve chosen a chicken thigh,” he added, observing the captain’s rosy complexion above the collar of his military jacket, or perhaps thinking about going over to the refreshment tables.

  “Thank you, Uncle.”

  The courtesies were brief. Other picture hats and mustaches pressed forward. The groom was Julio Herraz, or Julen Herraz, according to the degree of intimacy and familiarity his name evoked, or Captain Herraz to those who met him somewhat later, when he attached himself, with his rank and function, to the Defense Junta of Azpeitia, a few days after the war began. But that decision would have nothing to do with his loyalty or his courage, or with what others would afterward call his wrongheadedness. Be that as it may, the thirty-year-old captain, five years older than his bride, had come to get married and not to give explanations of what his future conduct would be, even if a clairvoyant capable of seeing imminent events would have dared to ask him to justify himself. He was wearing white gloves and a saber. He had uncovered his head and was carrying his uniform cap under his arm. A civilian can hardly imagine how difficult it must be to get married while wearing a saber and to refrain from dragging it on the ground, from tangling its tassels, from using it to strike chairs and benches. The captain removed his right glove to shake hands with the wedding guests. After half an hour, when the guests had taken their seats, he and his two regimental comrades went into the house, precisely so that they could leave their sabers in some convenient place. For reasons having to do both with economics and with some obscure prestige, the wedding banquet had been contracted out to the officers’ mess in the Loyola barracks. The cooks arrived with giant field kettles for boiling lobsters, the quartermaster corps sent vans filled with wines and liqueurs, and the waiters were young men performing their military service to the Republic, offering a series of trays laden with canapés and fried snacks. All these unexpectedly glamorous items issued from the kitchen of the villa itself, but it was the groom who had requested them. Some guests remarked to their companions that army recruits and orderlies made the best waiters, but at bottom many of the attendees thought that the wedding was irregular, and that neither of the parties had wished to open their wallets. An orchestra consisting of five musicians and a vocalist, likewise quartered in the barracks, enlivened the end of the meal with elegant music, followed by the Gorri-Gorri Charleston, as if they wanted to complicate their function and vulgarize the party. Later, as night fell, there was dancing on the veranda. Everyone looked on while the bride’s father opened the dancing with his daughter, acknowledging the fact that he had finally married her off, as if, right up to that moment, he could have avoided the unavoidable, and also acknowledging the fact that from that moment on, it would be the captain’s job to satisfy his daughter’s caprices, given that he, the father, had already sacrificed his opinion to her supreme caprice, namely, the idea of marrying the captain. Then, as was the custom, the father of the groom, a widower and tax inspector, invited the bride to dance, while the bride’s mother allowed the groom to lead her out for a few turns. Then the groom and bride danced together. Someone remarked, “Look here, the dove is dancing with the chicken thigh.”

  Captain Herraz danced with his shoulders stiff and his neck stretched, as if his body were attached to a hanger. He held his wife around the waist with a gesture learned at officers’ balls. Although her eyes were tired, she did her best to keep smiling as she threw her head back. She had lost an earring, but she didn’t know it. Someone had picked it up and clutched it in his fist, wondering whether earrings found in such circumstances should be restored to their rightful owner, or if they had some greater significance.

  “Gold digger,” somebody said, watching the couple dance.

  “Do you think the captain has married the young woman for her inheritance?”

  “Not just for that,” someone else added, observing the breathless bride’s heaving bosom as the dance ended, noting her smile and her half-open lips, and envying the place Chicken Thigh would occupy that very night.

  When this group passed near the newlywed couple, conversation ceased, and the guests raised their glasses and murmured something. On the other side of the wrought-iron gate was a gathering of people from Hondarribia, who had come out to see the wedding at the country estate of Las Cruces. Back then, Hondarribia was still a village where a wedding at the vacation home of some summer residents could be considered a social event. A man on horseback came down the road, and his bust, hieratic against the half-lit landscape, glided past above the line of broken glass crowning the garden wall. But nobody appeared to be paying any attention to this enigmatic vision, and with the passage of the years, when recalling a wedding celebrated so long ago, it may all seem grotesque, strange, or simply unreal—a memory of playing with figures decked out in wedding finery amid flowers and balustrades, or of wandering in a labyrinth of bushes, or of seeing the bust of a horseman above a garden wall as he rode by during the magic moments when twilight was falling—for real life had offered one of those sequences that would never be repeated except in the theaters where what were then still called talkies were shown. In the end, memory adopts images that originated in films. Garden walls were no longer crested with broken bottles, no longer bared their teeth to intruders or glinted like jewels in the capricious moonlight, and this was not because men were less cruel or had chosen to eschew the most primitive manifestations of cruelty, but because tastes had changed, or because those were more violent times, when garden walls were defended with guns; and therefore a horseman’s upper body, remembered as riding past at twilight on the other side of a garden wall topped with broken glass, could be seen again only on a movie screen.

  Candelabras had been brought out from the house to illuminate the garden. A garland of colored lightbulbs hung from both sides of the canopy spread out between the trees. The girls had shared out the flowers that decorated the tables. The younger children were asleep in wicker chairs, and the faces of the ladies, who had drunk anisette and coffee, were faded and sad. One overturned chair lay on the grass. Some gentlemen strolled through the park. Others withdrew to smoke. Many further details of the wedding could be recounted, but so many years have not passed in vain, and therefore probably no one, with the best will in Spain, could obtain more data than what might spring from the most suggestive sequences of some old-fashioned films, or from the scenes in Rubens’s painting The Garden of Love, but even in the garden of love there is room for conspiracies and slander, spoken by the rascals who appear between the balustrades of palaces in certain canvases by the Old Masters. The green lamp suffused the gun room with an aquatic glow. The shadows were projected all together, arising from a single body, like the different heads of a mythical animal.

  “Cavalry has become meaningless,” Captain Arderius remarked. He was one of the groom’s regimental comrades, and he was addressing the group of men who, like him, had retired to the smoking room to enjoy a Havana cigar. “Infantry is the army’s spinal column, but only mobile artillery can decide the outcome of a battle.”

  “You’re talking about tanks?”

  “I am,” said Arderius with a smile,
flattered to see that his laconic allusion had been understood.

  The young and glossy captain sniffed the bouquet of his cognac before bringing the glass to his lips. He was a tall, gangling fellow, and a thick, unmilitary lock of dark hair hung down above his eyes. His regimental comrade, also in attendance as a witness for the groom, nodded in wordless assent. The men around them fell silent. Only a very few of them were interested in military matters, and then only as they might have been interested in a new hunting technique. At the time, the gun room was decorated with two illustrations depicting deer harried by dogs. When her mistress was dead and she herself had become undisputed mistress of Las Cruces, María Antonia Etxarri, who didn’t like packs of hounds, removed those pictures from the wall. Afterward, one could distinguish the pale, dirty rectangle left behind by each of the frames, and inside the rectangles, lines of a more intense green than the faded color in the rest of the wallpaper. In the glass cabinet, against a background of red felt, were a hunting rifle, two Sarasqueta shotguns, made in Spain, and one Purdey, of English manufacture.

  A man with drooping eyelids, either bored or depressed by the conversation, raised his glass of cognac at the same time as the captain. Two rock crystal ashtrays lay on the desk. The Havana cigars were producing thick stumps of ash. The newlyweds had departed a moment earlier, having bid farewell only to the guests who were closest to them. They would stop in Saint-Jean-de-Luz before going on to Biarritz, where they would spend their honeymoon, and then, who could tell? Someone declared that the couple’s astounding intention was to abandon Biarritz for Paris and enjoy an authentic honeymoon in the capital of France, but that was someone who had dreamed this project after falling asleep while reading a novel. As for the rest of them, it wasn’t that they considered Parisian honeymoons the stuff of novels; it was that they could not conceive of a honeymoon spent north of Biarritz. However, the newlyweds had not really left. They had mounted to the second floor and changed their clothes, but not in the same room. The bride took off her wedding dress, separated by a partition wall from Captain Herraz, who hung his uniform on a hanger. An orderly carried the suitcases out the back door, and then the couple stepped out. Several automobiles had already left. The deliberate revolutions of their engines, as slow and powerful as ships’ engines, could still be heard. Another automobile’s horn began to honk merrily.

  “There go the lovebirds,” said a man standing next to the window, cigar in hand. Then he turned to his companions. “Come on, Captain. Let’s hear some more about the coffeepots on tracks.”

  “The tanks?”

  “That’s it, the tanks.”

  “Say what you want,” said the man with the drooping eyelids, “but the real shock force is and will always be the Spanish Legion.”

  There were a few moments of silence. The Havana tobacco made tongues drowsy and thoughts slow. It’s possible that some belated memories slipped back, with deferred nostalgia, to their own honeymoons. Then conversation began again.

  “Where do the lovebirds plan to nest?”

  “In the Loyola barracks,” Arderius said. “Although Chicken Thigh has put in for a transfer to Madrid.”

  The man with the drooping eyelids closed them. He saw himself traveling on the road to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where he would spend his wedding night, and used the liveliest colors to paint his image of what a wedding night could be. Only once in his life had he possessed a virgin, and she, unfortunately, was now his wife. The placid, sturdy cognac had ignited a vague spark of lechery in him. The desire to be in the groom’s place opened a twisting road in his imagination. He finally recovered and peered darkly through one half-closed eye. “It’s not a superstition. The best way to ensure that your wife will eventually make a cuckold of you is to take her on a honeymoon trip to Paris.”

  The others burst into laughter. In the smoke-filled gun room, tobacco and cognac were increasingly dulling everyone’s wits. The guests were saying their good-byes, and there was a perceptible bustle of waiters clearing away dishes. The members of the orchestra were storing their instruments in their cases, while a couple of women called through the bushes for a lost child. The Havana cigars were consumed, and those solid gentlemen, as slow and ungainly as sacks of cement, began to set themselves in motion. The gun room would never again be so densely populated as it was during those moments, nor the house, either, nor the garden. The groups of automobiles and curiosity-seekers gradually dispersed. Before long, the last person left the garden. Captain Arderius and his comrade in arms, after giving the matter some thought, went to a whorehouse in Irún. Later, as was the custom in their regiment, they exchanged whores, so that each of them might try the one whom the other had chosen. It’s not rare for a wedding to end in a brothel. Could Miguel Goitia have heard the comments made about his grandmother on her wedding day, about how beautiful she looked—which was just as she did in the photograph with the silver frame—he would perhaps have been flattered, but he would have been less pleased to hear the derogatory remarks made about his grandfather, Captain Herraz. Or Herráiz, because no one in Hondarribia could remember exactly, and the name wasn’t even spelled correctly on the rolls of the unit the captain joined in Azpeitia a few weeks after his return from his honeymoon and a few days after the military rising was proclaimed in his barracks. War transforms not only people’s lives, but even their names and surnames. No one who wasn’t curious or crazy would have bothered to verify the spelling of the captain’s name after so many years. Similarly, had no one told him about it, Goitia would never have found out the significance of the empty gun room, so someone would have to tell him about it. The pictures of the hunted deer were gone, as were the shotguns in the cabinets, lined with red felt, where he was shelving his books. The smoke from half a dozen Havana cigars had dispersed at the same time as the memories. A collector of cigar bands kept the bands from the cigars the men had smoked at the wedding. On those bands, the initials of the bride and groom were intertwined: J and I.

  The cellar of the Las Cruces house contained more objects salvaged from the Etxarri inn than the total scattered through the rest of the house. The inn’s white china crockery was packed away in wooden ham crates. There were thick drinking glasses and various sets of cutlery. There was, in fact, enough tableware to set up a restaurant, but the Las Cruces promontory, even counting the residents in the neighboring houses and the summer vacationers as potential customers, could not match the advantages of a good crossroads location, and it was for this reason, and not only because of her age, that María Antonia Etxarri had rejected the idea of opening a dining establishment. But sometimes, as the shadows fell and she dwelt upon the schemes and projects that filled her head, she would fantasize about having her own successful business, like the prosperous enterprise that her stepfather had made of Etxarri’s in the years following the Civil War, after she had already gone into service. Had that business been hers, she thought, her life would have resolved itself into an entirely different shape. It sometimes happens that well-to-do ladies bequeath their houses to their maids. Now she had the Señora’s house and more than eighteen million in the bank, but everything had happened too late, when she was no longer strong and her time was short. These were nocturnal thoughts. Upon the Señora’s death, the Las Cruces house belonged to her. There had been documents and a will, and if she was now allowing the Señora’s grandson into the house, she was doing so for reasons that were of no concern to anyone, least of all to the grandson, who was there by an unspoken right of usufruct, whether to prepare for examinations or to write a book or to dissect cadavers or to save goods and chattels by means of the law made little difference to her. The grandson had barely known his grandmother. Old María Antonia had no reason to talk about the reasons why. As with many other things in life, it was enough to admit that it had been so.

  She went down to the gun room, where Goitia was arranging his books, and gave him a key. Then she asked him if he wanted her to prepare something for dinner.

  “
I’ll dine in the village,” Goitia said, and the old woman, much relieved, withdrew.

  She had an apron on over her skirt. She’d taken off the blue pants she wore under it when she had to wash the floors or clean the house. The mane of her hair was bound at her nape with a black ribbon, and when she turned around to remove the slipcovers, which had been left on one of the chairs, it was possible to admire the thick, wavy locks that hung down the length of her spine, as if she were a girl suddenly grown old, seen from behind. She had a peasant’s broad hips. Age had drawn her shoulders together, but they must have once been broad, too. Nonetheless, in the earthy grace of her movements as she bent forward, and in the way she spread her arms to gather up the linen pile from the chair, as she might have gathered up a sheaf of hay, there was something fresh and adolescent, like a figure captured in perspective by the eye of a painter and transformed into a couple of vigorous charcoal lines so that posterity could see in the old woman the graceful girl she had been. It was an instant. Then María Antonia turned around, embracing an armful of slipcovers. Swaying, her head thrown back, she passed in front of Goitia on her way to the wardrobe where they were stored. Goitia stepped aside with a book in his hand. And then she smiled, as if she found this boy less unusual, on the whole, than she had feared. Few could know, however, that María Antonia’s smile was equivalent to the face other people make when they detect a bad odor.

  Impeded by her load, she passed Goitia and then turned around in the narrow corridor so that she could use her buttocks to push open the door to the service area. When she did so, Goitia could see her hands, fingers interlocked, clutching her white, bulky load. “Would you like me to help you?” he asked, still holding a volume of the Civil Code.