The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  The doctor didn’t dare propose to the youth that each of them should leave his garden by the respective garden gate, meet in the road, and take a walk together to admire the magnificence of the sea at night. Those days, the low tide was beginning shortly after dusk, exposing phosphorescent beaches and sediments of mud and sludge where the garbage and debris swept along by the river shone like precious jewels. An entire, living world of microscopic animals ran between the tiny rivulets and inside the cracks in the rocks that stuck up out of the water. The night smelled of iodine and sea bottoms, like a potent aphrodisiac. A few hours later, high tide would begin, filling the estuary with slow, thick, silver-backed waves, as if the black sea were mercury. Had they taken a nocturnal walk, the doctor would have drawn young Goitia into conversation, and they could have gazed in admiration at the astronomic marvel of the living ocean, punctual as a watch, but the old man dared not make the proposal. The reason was obvious: The doctor hauled his right leg behind him like a piece of wood. Nobody could converse and enjoy the night in the company of a lame person with a leg that seemed to weigh a hundred kilos. The doctor knew that, and he was sufficiently tactful and discreet to refrain from imposing such a situation on anyone. But he intended to invite Goitia to his house one night to have a drink with him under his porch, where the doctor would be able to stretch out his leg comfortably as he warmed the glass of cognac between his palms, and he would offer his guest a cognac, and the two of them could gaze out through the trees from there and contemplate the ocean’s exact, nocturnal, pendular movement, and then they could turn their eyes toward the upright shadow of the other house, that is, the villa of Las Cruces, and the youth would thus obtain a point of view both somewhat different and somewhat unusual for anyone who had not lived through years of misfortune, confusion, and injustice.

  That night, however, he preferred to keep up the conversation without extending any sort of invitation. Leaning on his cane and shifting his body weight to his bad leg, which served as an axis of rotation, the doctor turned toward his young neighbor by pivoting as though on a pillar. On such fall days as those, his gimpy leg made itself felt, and he was quick to find cosmological reasons (such as the concert of the moon and the tides) to explain the evident accord between his leg and the change of season. His eyebrows were shiny with dew. He was a tall man, and his rebellious leg had done nothing to diminish his stature; it was as if from earliest youth the bones of that leg had been fastened together with an iron nail and had developed in telescopic form.

  “A doctor of law,” the doctor said. “There have been no visitors to this house since your grandmother died, my boy, and it’s normal for an old neighbor like me to be surprised. And it’s normal for old lady Etxarri to be surprised, too. Is she treating you well, my boy?”

  “I needed a quiet place to study. She wasn’t opposed to my coming.”

  “Naturally not.”

  Goitia remained silent. In the area where they were standing, the wall separating the two gardens was barely four feet high, like the walls that sometimes separate two meadows. Goitia lifted the cigarette to his lips, and the glowing tip gave his eyes a discreet gleam. Once again, the doctor surreptitiously examined his features, insofar as the darkness, mitigated by that very brief illumination, would allow. It was like interrogating time and looking for dates marked in old calendars, not because of what was suggested by the youth’s features—the cheekbones illuminated when he drew on his cigarette, the pale forehead reflecting the light from the porch, the profile of the nose, as dark as a ship’s keel—not because of that, no, but because of the doctor’s own memory, which at that instant was applying itself to the youngster’s face, seeking a confirmation that genetics or the heritage implicit in his features might have deposited there. He looked at the boy on the other side of the garden wall and felt attracted by him. Tall, powerful, and manly, with a deep chest where there was room for every sort of feeling, the doctor concealed the secret and refined passion that the youth had awakened in him. And in any case, that wasn’t the reason why he was seeking the young man’s company. The doctor banished a cluster of thoughts from his mind and returned to his improvised chatter.

  “Watch what you eat. Otherwise the old woman will serve you nothing but lentils and protein, and the proteins may turn out to be worms,” the doctor went on. “To tell the truth, I suspect that she’ll treat you like a first-class guest and spy on you through the door to see if you’re studying whatever it is you study, even though she doesn’t believe it’s possible to be a doctor of anything but medicine. Two months is a whole lifetime for an old woman, and she knows she’s going to have you for two months. Has she asked you for news of your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. I knew your grandmother, and I knew your mother a little, too. I don’t find it surprising that the old woman isn’t interested in hearing about her. Autumn is the real season of delights in Hondarribia, but one must admit that it can get a little boring,” said the doctor, suddenly changing key. Then he felt obliged to give a little geography lesson, which the notarial candidate surely didn’t need. “What you see over there,” he said, pointing his cane at the darkness, “is one of the buoys in the waters off Hendaye. Those streaks of light are the trucks crossing the Behobia bridge—trailers and semitrailers with five or six axles. And that beam slicing through the trees above our heads comes from the Amuitz lighthouse. One of these days, I’ll ask you to bring out one of the cars I keep in my garage and I’ll take you to lunch in Biarritz. I can’t drive, so I need a chauffeur,” he added, giving his bad thigh a sonorous thwack and remembering that he’d already talked to Goitia about his modest automobile collection. “You might ask the old woman to let you take the Morris out, but that motorized whale must have owls nesting in its cylinders by now.”

  “I wouldn’t dare ask her that.”

  “And she’d turn you down if you did.”

  “Besides, I think I have too much studying to do.”

  “All right. I was just trying to be a good neighbor.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Goitia said, trying to cut the conversation short.

  “How could it be otherwise? Heaven knows, people would say that Isabel’s grandson, a diligent young man, comes to Las Cruces to study hard and turn himself into a notary, and then he meets his grandmother’s former neighbor, an old man, almost an invalid, who invites him to go on excursions in automobiles nearly a century old.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Goitia said, thinking about how glad he would be to get back to his books.

  “I suppose not.”

  The doctor was silent for a few minutes. He’d planned to lead the conversation in other directions. He thought about saying to this lad, “I witnessed your grandmother’s wedding. I wasn’t the kind of witness who greets the bride at the altar and then signs the marriage certificate, I wasn’t even a witness as an invited guest, but from my side of this garden wall, I was a discreet witness, as unknown to the eyes of your grandmother and her family as a callow young doctor could be, recently arrived here, with both legs still intact, someone who might prove useful in the future, or perhaps just a neighbor you say hello to without even asking him what happened to his leg or ever once inviting him over for coffee.” The doctor thought about saying all this, but between the past events those words awakened in his memory and the real, present situation on that September night fell the veil of the war, its fabric composed of other visions, something that young Goitia was possibly indifferent to and in no position to understand anyway.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” the doctor said, lifting his nostrils to the sea air and the sharp smell of freshly mown grass. “But you’re going to catch cold with no covering but that thin vest. Besides, as you said yourself, you have two or three hundred topics to go over.”

  “I’ll try to save a day so we can go to lunch together,” Goitia said, making the concession.

  “Agreed!” the doctor exclaimed, hastening to accept the offe
r.

  Goitia put out his cigarette on a stone and took his leave. Their conversation in the darkness, from one garden to the other, a dialogue between two discrete spheres and two different periods of time demarcated by the stone wall that separated them, seemed as though it were the most natural thing in the world, nothing unusual about it, arising out of the normal course of events, wherein one party was taking a break from the arid matters covered by competitive notarial exams and the other seeking to relieve the tingling in a leg which, in spite of its condition, he had to take for an occasional walk. The green lamp in the gun room was still on. In the doctor’s house, which was half hidden behind a wall of weeping willows, no lights could be seen, as if the doctor lived in the dark or economized on electricity, and, curiously enough, both explanations were plausible. As Miguel Goitia walked away, he rubbed his bare arms under his light shirt. The doctor, well protected all the way down to his knees by an English overcoat, grasped his cane tightly and, with swaying steps, headed down the path on which he was wont to make his rounds. It ran toward the lower part of his property, where the land belonging to the Las Cruces house separated from the land belonging to the house called Los Sauces, “The Willows,” and where both plots were bounded by a high wall, on the other side of which was another path. The doctor took a turn past the main entrance and then directed his steps toward his dark house. He sensed the cat’s shadow as the animal shook itself and followed him, hoping for a saucer of milk. When he reached the front hall, the doctor turned on the lights and put his cane in the umbrella stand. His habitual insomnia obliged him to pay a heavy tribute to boredom, and he spent those solemn hours sitting in his living room. From there, he could make out the window of the room where Goitia was studying. The doctor admired the boy’s dedication to becoming a civil-law notary without finding that endeavor absolutely ridiculous, and without understanding it, either, because every now and again studious generations arise, and his heart rejoiced that there continued to be physicians and notaries who would be more competent than he had been in his professional life and would not, as evening fell, need to have recourse to the cognac bottle precisely in order to compensate for not having possessed similar determination. However, the tenderest moment of the night would not be long in coming. Old lady Etxarri would rap with her knuckles on the door of the office where Goitia was studying and enter the room carrying a nickel silver tray, a napkin in a mother-of-pearl napkin ring, and a glass of milk for the notarial candidate, in much the same way as the doctor, though with rather less ceremony, offered milk to his cat. It seemed that the old woman, too, was pleased to find that the lad was a diligent young man, and the years after the Civil War had left her with an appreciation for the nutritive value of matches and milk. She laid the tray down, as she did every night, and left the gun room. Enveloped in a woolen mantilla, she stuck her nose out of the door to the garden and turned off the porch light. The Las Cruces house, thus darkened, loomed out of the black lake of the lawn, except for a single spot of light from the candidate’s obstinate lamp and the intermittent flash of the Amuitz lighthouse, which cut the chimneys out of the sky. Alone in his house, the doctor confronted the tedious masquerade of his insomnia. At this point, in old horror stories—which depicted feelings very close to his own—a scream would have been heard, and blood would have spattered the glass doors of the Las Cruces house. In any case, dates were needed. Often enough, it’s the dead who set dates. At other times, the living set them, but the dates they set are more fluid and subject to changing assessments.

  The doctor had arrived in Hondarribia as a recent graduate from medical school. He had a stethoscope, a white doctor’s coat, and a case that opened up like an accordion and contained a collection of scalpels, forceps, and cutting instruments. It also included a set of pliers, because in those days, a doctor confronted with a dental abscess had to know how to extract a molar, even though such a case was outside his area of competence. Many physicians went about on horseback and had practices that covered regions of varying size. The doctor settled in Hondarribia, without a horse and without even an automobile. He had a Guzzi motorcycle, one of those with a small engine and robust shock absorbers. It was cherry red in color, fitted with sturdy tires, and so well suspended it seemed like the offspring of a more powerful motorcycle that had coupled with a nanny goat. It was to this motorcycle that he owed the ruin of his right leg, but it would be better to say that he owed it not to his motorcycle, but to his youth, and to the rain, and to the somewhat too hastily indulged pleasure of launching himself downhill at full speed on an irregularly paved road. Back then Doctor Castro was not yet thirty years old. When he rode his motorcycle, he wore a pair of welder’s goggles, and it’s possible that those goggles, which gave him the look of an amphibious animal, contributed as much as or more than the rain or the chaotic paving to his failure to see the parapet of the bridge where he left the best of his knee and his femur. The young physician who had arrived in Hondarribia, clothed in a white coat, armed with a stethoscope and a medical case like a bellows, and ready to open an office and take charge of the fishermen’s guild’s health center, stayed there beside the bridge. From that time on, the village would have a lame doctor. However, he noticed that people in the village greeted him with less indifference and more respect, because lameness is an affliction that confers a certain prestige, and in any case, unless patients wanted to go to Irún, Doctor Castro was their only choice.

  Those were the last days of his youth, but the doctor could not know that at the time. The summer storms succeeded one another like continuous artillery fire in the high valleys, and a dark line on the sea marked the horizon at the place where the open ocean began. The first vacationers of the summer of 1936 arrived, and if the living could set dates, the doctor would choose the day when he lay on his sofa—a young, convalescing invalid, surrounded by various supports, an array of secondary stools, and a panoply of crutches, with aspirin and medicaments ready to hand, as well as a cane, which he was never to abandon in all the remaining days of his life—and witnessed, without leaving his house, a wedding banquet on the other side of his garden. His body now contained a screw, made of steel or iridium or some other precious, rustproof metal, whose function was to hold his fragmented bone together. His motorcycle had been recovered and was now stored in his garage, not unusable, but useless as far as the doctor was concerned, because he could never ride it again. Through his window, he contemplated the leisurely ballet of the wedding guests, who came to the banquet in large automobiles after the ceremony. The descending dusk broke up the music into sudden, premonitory bursts. During that period of his convalescence, the pain in the doctor’s leg was excruciating. The difference between the small house of Los Sauces and the villa of Las Cruces didn’t only represent a gaping disparity of wealth. Weddings are often sad, but even sadder is the wedding to which one has not been invited, and yet he had to remain there, watching it, and nursing a leg loaded with metal and plaster. That was the date the doctor chose, during the time of his broken leg, so the wedding must have taken place during the first week of June, approximately, right at the beginning of summer. No doubt, there were other people who would remember the date for different reasons, but that was none of the doctor’s concern. He could barely move. He got up slowly, leaning on his stools and his crutches. In the years to come, he would learn to use his dead leg as a flying buttress, or as a pillar, and to feel unburdened as it took his weight. Despite the many years that had gone by, he could still hear, through his open window, the music of the wedding and the murmur of the conversations during the banquet. In the end, when night fell and the wedding broke up, he hearkened to the sonorous vibrations of the automobile engines.

  So most of what Doctor Castro wished to determine hinged on a question of dates. Not only insofar as what concerned him, but also insofar as what concerned the lad next door, and insofar as what concerned that lad’s grandfather, given that the whole complex of events would require but a few leaves of
the calendar, and if he dug in his memory a little, he could easily go from the dancing at the wedding, when darkness fell upon the garden and bottles rolled here and there, to the confirmed threat of a military rising.

  Several weeks after the celebration of his marriage, as he waited to face a firing squad, Captain Herráiz would remember his wedding trip. The war had intervened in his life, tearing down the curtain of tulle and lace that protected his honeymoon. The first images were white. He could still smell the fragrant incense in the church, and the veil of Isabel’s white wedding dress floated over her smile. But before the reality that confronted Captain Herráiz and the knowledge that he had only a few hours to live, his memories kept taking on other shapes. He remembered the two regimental comrades who had served as his witnesses roughly shaking his hand, crinkling the stiff collar of his dress uniform, and swinging their saber tassels like dancers performing in an operetta. They sprinkled their farewells with crass bachelor jokes, and Captain Arderius made quite a caustic remark: “Gold digger.”

  Captain Herráiz didn’t respond. He was unaware that the men of his regiment referred to him in secret as “Chicken Thigh,” and had he known it, he would have taken it as an ignominy. There was something terrible in thinking of that as the nickname of a man who was going to be shot. Some said the nickname came from his habit of choosing a chicken thigh whenever paella with chicken was served; others said it was because he always carved himself a thigh when chicken was served. In any case, the nickname alluded to his refined appearance, to the elegant and somewhat affected style of his movements, and to his dandyish way of looking his best in his uniform. All of these were allusions that no one would understand today, and which even then would have escaped a civilian’s notice. In the schools for military officers, all the young men received nicknames, and Captain Herráiz had not been exempt from this custom, nor had Arderius, Captain Seven Heads, so called not because of his voluminous skull but because he proved to be alert and shrewd when it came to solving problems in general. And so things could have taken a turn for the farcical during the wedding ceremony, had the nicknames of the groom’s witnesses and of the groom himself been used instead of their real names when it came time to speak of them—Seven Heads’s intelligence might have been praised, and Chicken Thigh’s elegance—but no one would have dared to do that, and in any case, no one was interested in such gems of barracks humor. Doctor Castro didn’t know the nickname of the second witness whom Captain Herráiz had brought to the wedding, but given the impression he produced, he might as well have been called “Seven Sabers” or “Captain Pistols.” Soon the two witnesses would join the military rising, while Captain Herráiz, on the contrary, without wanting to or without thinking about it, would wind up in the famous Azpeitia column. But none of that could be foreseen. The groom’s two fellow officers played practical jokes on him. Everything was about to change, and afterward, if there had been any grotesque or funereal meaning in those nicknames, no one could have explicated it.