The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  The old woman’s reply was laconic and seemed fierce: “Stand aside. I can do it by myself.”

  Accustomed as she was to living in silence, sometimes stones issued from her mouth when she spoke, and perhaps that was why she spoke little, or spoke earthily, like a quarryman. She mitigated the effect of her words with another indecipherable smile and then disappeared into the linen room, where Goitia would later store his trunk after emptying it of his books. Soon she came out again, her posture upright, her hands free. She hesitated in the hallway, as if she’d forgotten something, unsure whether or not to go back to the drawing room. Then she could be heard in the kitchen. She wouldn’t have liked to be obliged to prepare dinner for anyone or to carry anyone’s suitcases, and she preferred to dine alone. She had her habits. As she ate, María Antonia thought about that bronze ashtray, the one inscribed for the IX Frog-Fishing Competition. She could remember very well the dinners in Etxarri’s on the days of the competition, when she would come up to the inn from Hondarribia to help serve. It was said that the best frogs came from Zugarramurdi Pond, frogs as big as toads. The best snails were the ones that lived in the wall of the cemetery in Vera de Bidasoa. And the best crayfish could be found in the clear streams of Lesaka. Every village had its pennant, which bore the image of a batrachian, a crayfish, or a snail.

  Goitia finished shelving his books and hauled his trunk into the living room. Then he went up to the second floor, to the room the old woman had assigned him, with the intention of unpacking his suitcases. When he turned on the landing, he came up against the buffalo head, which guarded the corridor. He thought he had run into a monster and was barely able to suppress a shout. There was a serene, unmoving gleam in the animal’s big glass eyes. The split horn gave it the aspect of a dismasted ship. Goitia stepped past it, lowering his head as a precaution, and entered his room. The first lights of night spilled through the open window, drawing a phosphorescent square on the geometrical pattern of the floor. Goitia turned on the light and closed the window. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, unable to make up his mind to unpack. Finally, he decided to go out to dinner and picked up the jacket he’d worn on the plane.

  From the outside, he could see that half the façade was covered with climbing plants that had not yet begun to lose their leaves. Under those plants, unknown to Goitia, there was a heraldic shield, probably invented by a great-grandfather who had made his fortune in the paper or wood business, or by canning anchovies, the same ancestor who had built the house and ordered the carving of the coat of arms, which showed an oak, a wolf, and—some said—a can opener, taking for a can opener what was actually a spear transfixing the wolf’s body, but little memory of that shield remained since the climbing plants had covered it up. Through the black glass windows of the drawing room, he could make out a lamp that was throwing a pool of yellow light onto the lawn. One of the corners on the top floor was built up into a tower, or a dovecote, and surmounted by the silhouette of a sailboat, cut out of sheet metal, which served as a weather vane. That night, the boat was sailing over a placid sea of clouds and oscillating a little in the west wind. Another light in the depths of the house disclosed the hidden life of the old woman in her kitchen, sitting before a plate of fried fish and a bowl of turnip soup. Just as he didn’t see the heraldic shield, Goita was also unaware of that humble dinner, where the risen Christ himself could have broken bread with old Antonia and blessed her as he blessed the disciples at Emmaus. The porch light, a sixty-watt bulb enclosed in a bronze cage, indicated that the house was inhabited, and to some neighbors, it signified more than that. It meant that there was a guest at Las Cruces, because only on rare occasions had they seen the light still burning at such an hour. Goitia crossed the garden and opened the entrance gate. It closed behind him with the melodious whine of oxidized iron, and when he looked back at the house, it appeared in the midst of a symphonic perspective: tower, lights, foliage. He identified his room by its window, which he had reopened before going out, intending to air out the space and anticipating the pleasure of sleeping that night with the smell of the sea in his nostrils.

  Retracing the road by which he’d arrived in the taxi, he descended the slope in the direction of the village. When he reached a dark crossroads, he grew disoriented, turned back, and took another blacktop road, which ran between rows of streetlights and a series of one-family dwellings and then past taller buildings, apartment houses inhabited by summer vacationers. Some apartments were in darkness, while others had lights and tables on the balconies, under the broad eaves of the roofs. He could hear anonymous voices, fragments of conversations, and the sound of bottles being uncorked. The trees formed a vault above his head. Between their trunks, he could see the estuary, spread out like a black sheet, and the rosary of lights on the other shore. The orange tint of the sky indicated the spot where the road intersected with the freeway. The landscape, at once black and luminous, seemed strangely charged with emotion, and Goitia came to a momentary stop, deeply affected. His surroundings might just as easily have seemed sinister. The inky estuary, made slightly iridescent by the reflections from the low clouds, was receiving the undulations of high tide, slow and powerful, as if a monster were sleeping under the water. Goitia felt the fascination of the early-falling autumn darkness. He stood still for an instant, facing the great void of the sea and of the night. Then he continued on his way down to the beach. The outdoor cafés were deserted. Finally, he reached the village. Comforted by the smell of wine, beer, and sawdust emanating from a tavern—it was as if, after a period of time suspended in the cosmic void, he had come upon humans—he entered and sat down to order his dinner.

  It was around eleven o’clock when he started back home. He went up the road with his hands in his pockets and his jacket collar turned up. The night was thicker than before, and the landscape, because of the wine he’d drunk, or because of his digestion, had taken on a velvety texture. The wrought-iron entrance gate again sang its sorrowful, rusty melody. It needed a good oiling. Before going into the house, Goitia took a walk through the garden. He passed under the porch, went around the garage, and returned along the side of the garden wall that adjoined the neighboring property. He stopped to smoke a cigarette, and then he heard someone greet him.

  “Good evening.”

  The wall was sufficiently low for him to make out a silhouette of middle height, slightly less dark than the dark garden that surrounded it. The shadowy shape was illuminated, somewhat, by the light from a streetlamp. Goitia threw his match into the wet grass and returned the greeting.

  “Good evening.”

  “My name is Félix Castro. I’m your neighbor,” the amiable voice said to the nonplussed Goitia. “Lovely night, isn’t it?”

  Goitia agreed. The stranger stepped closer to the wall. With unexpected familiarity, he asked, “You’re a doctor, right?”

  “A doctor?”

  “Old Antonia told me you were a doctor.”

  “I’m a doctor of law.”

  “Ah! That’s not the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The anonymous face was hidden again by a half-moon of shadow. Misinformed by the old woman, the doctor had been expecting to meet a young colleague. He’d seen the young man arrive in the late afternoon and watched him and the gardener shift the trunk and the suitcases. He’d thought that introducing himself would be the proper thing to do, but now he wasn’t sure that he’d chosen the right moment or employed the degree of diffidence, the hesitant mildness, advisable to a gentleman when presenting himself to someone he didn’t know. Goitia remained silent. That way, his neighbor would have to see that his intrusion was inopportune, because the young man wanted to smoke his cigarette and enjoy the night in solitude, just as the other feared. The doctor remained silent in his turn, even though he was burning to ask Goitia at least a few of the things he would not have dared to mention without the protection of the night. And among all those things, the most trivial, the one which, more than any
other, awakened in him an almost childish curiosity, was his desire to know Goitia’s opinion of the automobile that had been shut up in the garage of the villa for the past fifteen or twenty years, a Morris Oxford, immobilized, mounted on some wooden blocks, a vehicle with a body like the vault in the Church of the Good Shepherd, four cylinders of nearly a liter each, and a chassis like a railway carriage, and he also wanted to ask Goitia what it was like for a youth to find himself in a big, rundown house where the only thing that wasn’t missing was wine—the neighbor knew this because old Antonia had told him—and where there was surely no lack of ghosts, either, even though they were the ghosts of the guests who had attended that wedding long ago, the occasion for such a large gathering of automobiles, among which the Morris Oxford had not seemed out of place. Automobiles fascinate people in the same way that horses do, and the honorable, affable man who had appeared on the other side of the garden wall was fascinated by automobiles. He himself owned a fine, relatively recent model—if one could consider 1966, the year of his Renault Frégate, recent—but he was also fond of “crates,” as vintage automobile enthusiasts affectionately called their old relics, and he had managed to salvage from a garage in Vera de Bidasoa a Citroën 11 Légère that had belonged to Don Leopoldo, the rich man from Vera, the King of the Belgians. It was a marvelous automobile, ahead of its time, with front-wheel drive and hydraulic brakes, practically undriven since its owner had suffered a stroke while on his way to the wedding of the new neighbor’s grandmother, and Doctor Castro could have talked at length on that subject, too. He would have liked it had old Antonia’s young guest been a physician like himself, and not so that they could talk about medicine, a science the doctor practiced only by intuition, but so that a generic closeness might have been established between them as members of the same profession. He would also have liked it had young Goitia been interested in vintage automobiles, but that’s an interest a boy acquires in childhood, when he can hardly even dream yet of putting his hands on a steering wheel, and then, in his mature years, his fascination brings him a certain comfort, for those same old cars, those Panhards, those Citroëns, those Morrises, end up representing what he so ardently desired and could never possess.

  All that involved more than the doctor could have expressed, even in a long and descriptive speech. In the meanwhile, old María Antonia had finished her dinner and was sitting with her knees together and her shoulders hunched in front of the television set that she kept in the kitchen, under the calendar. On several occasions, her neighbor, Doctor Castro, had offered to purchase the Morris Oxford, which she had inherited with the house, but the old woman was still holding out. There was always the possibility that in some less sanctified but more practical future phase of her life in that same house, in Hondarribia, she might acquire a driver’s license. She stretched and yawned in her chair, bored by the all but incomprehensible television program, and she could have gone out onto the porch, from where she could have seen the young intruder who had arrived that afternoon chatting in the dark with the doctor. And she wouldn’t have liked that, because her ancestral distrust made her suspicious of men’s conversations. At the moment, the doctor was asking the grandson if he was planning a long stay, and if the old woman was prepared to accept it. The boy replied in the affirmative, or avoided replying by declaring that he didn’t know, and then the doctor perceived, in spite of the darkness, that the grandson wasn’t exactly a boy but rather a young man, with the face and features of an adult and a slightly severe look, despite his youth, as befitted a doctor of law. Old María Antonia would have been interested in what they were saying about her. Because it is written in the book of Job: Now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be. If the grandson and the doctor were talking about her, that lesson could be of some use to them, as well as to anyone else who might be seeking witnesses to his sojourn on Earth. But the old woman didn’t go out onto the porch, because she had fallen asleep in the kitchen chair, in front of the television, as if she had taken a drug, and she woke up only when she heard Miguel Goitia’s footsteps as he went up the stairs to his room.

  * Translator’s note: Not to be confused with the American notary public, a civil-law notary in Spain (and in many other countries of Europe and Latin America) is a lawyer who specializes in certain areas of private law, including property transactions, successions, and estates. In addition to a law degree, a notario must have broad expertise across many kinds of private law; hence the arduous examinations.

  * Translator’s note: Gorri means “red” in Basque.

  Two

  THE HONEYMOON

  DATES. Naturally, Doctor Castro knew it was going to be necessary to give dates, not only for his young neighbor’s information, if it so happened that the newcomer was interested in dates, but also to put his own thoughts in order, because after half a century’s worth of calendars have gone by, dates establish terms and margins that are easy to understand. His new neighbor, the youth who was studying for the rigorous, competitive examinations to become a civil-law notary (and not dedicating his time to dissecting cadavers, as the servant had imagined), rarely showed his face. In four days, the doctor had twice seen him going down to the village for dinner, once encountered him in the village itself, where they swapped greetings, and once exchanged a few words with him over the garden wall, on an evening when they had both gone outside to contemplate the fall of dusk. Not much contact, but all the same, it was enough. Sometimes the lad strolled through the garden with a book, which could have been a volume of poetry, or it could just as easily have been one of those compact handbooks that summarize the tricks of the notarial trade. The doctor did not have a great deal to say on these specialized matters. As for poetry, if Miguel Goitia really was walking about with a volume of poems under his arm, Doctor Castro would not have very much to say on that subject, either, except to offer two verses from his beloved Góngora, or to recite a stanza from the Epístola moral a Fabio, which brought him back to his high school days: Ya, dulce amigo, huyo y me retiro—“I flee away, sweet friend, I take my leave”—and it was most unlikely that the youth, if he was indeed reading poetry, was reading that kind of poetry. No, it would be modern poetry or it wouldn’t be poetry at all, at which point the doctor returned to his first hypothesis, namely that the compact but hefty volume Miguel Goitia carried around under his arm contained notarial prose.

  He had seen him studying by the light of the green lamp in the former gun room, where the youngster had set up his office. Once or twice, he stepped out onto the porch, arched his back, stretched, ran a hand through his hair to clear his head, lit a cigarette, and remained for a few minutes in the imposing shadow of the house before walking out into the garden, in his slippers, wearing canvas pants and a knit shirt and vest, rather light clothing for an autumn night. In the rear part of the house, the light from the kitchen indicated that the servant was still up and about, preparing the next day’s meal or recording the previous day’s expenses. The two of them had arrived at a kind of financial agreement, according to which the boy paid for his food a week in advance. This fixed price did not include dinners; for those, Goitia walked down to the village. The old woman, therefore, had only to compare the tally of the grocer’s and baker’s bills with what she received from her guest each week in order to determine whether she was making any money from him or, figuring in the electricity he used, just breaking even. Old María Antonia had a good head for figures. She’d always been adept and accurate in her accounting. As far as the idea of considering her guest as something other than a guest was concerned, such a notion never crossed her mind, whatever the boy’s connection might have been with the Las Cruces estate. And the doctor, who inferred other blood connections, deeper or more enigmatic, couldn’t help admiring the old woman’s stubbornness, as one admires an iron mask or the remains of an indecipherable writing system that refuses to provide testimony to a previous existence.

  The second time he spo
ke to Goitia across the garden wall, Doctor Castro learned several things. First: The competitive notarial exams were scheduled for December, and so the boy planned to stay in Hondarribia for a couple of months to study without any possibility of distraction. This information had not much bearing upon what the doctor had in mind, but it was worth noting. Second: The boy had hardly known his grandmother Isabel, and this was only the second time that he had ever set foot in Hondarribia. The revelation did not seem to surprise the doctor. He examined Goitia’s face, behind which was hidden the blood of other names. By the glow of the youngster’s cigarette in the darkness, Doctor Castro could make out the young man’s features as they stood near the hedge, where they had stopped to chat. The boy’s father didn’t count for very much. He’d died in an automobile accident years before (questioned by the doctor, Goitia explained that his father had been driving a powerful blue car but didn’t reveal the make or model). In the eyes of the doctor, what counted were the youth’s maternal bloodlines, and that was the lineage he was seeking in Goitia’s features, and if he’d dared to go a little further, the doctor would have inquired into what had kept the boy’s mother away from Hondarribia for so many years and into the reasons why she had never come to visit his grandmother, why she had not shown up after his grandmother’s death, and why she had never returned to the country house after marrying that Goitia fellow, who had taken her away to live in Madrid. That was the basic question, the one the doctor was chiefly interested in, with all the rancor, real or imagined, but in any case un-assuaged, that could be inferred from it. In the third place, or as the third piece of information, the doctor was able to ascertain that during what appeared to be the young man’s breaks, he strolled about with a syllabus of material for the competitive exams under his arm, and not with a book of poetry, as the doctor had conjectured with deliberate naïveté; but that insight was as little relevant as the first, although it did introduce a kind of banal, prosaic, solid accompaniment to the true importance and mystery of the second bit of information.