The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  He had left his golden wedding ring, his wristwatch, his field glasses, and the folded sheet of untrimmed paper, the unenveloped letter that began with the words My Dear Love, with a request that they might be delivered to the person indicated. The whole lot, with the exception of the field glasses, arrived at its destination. The war exhibited such caprices, saving certain small objects with the tactile delicacy of a blind giant and devouring property and people like the same giant in a fury. Half a city could be destroyed, bridges could explode and viaducts collapse, and a piece of paper, a gold wedding ring, and a watch could be saved. When dawn came, the walls around the Piarist Fathers’ school stood like tall shadows. The impact of a shell had opened a gaping hole in the façade. Captain Herráiz couldn’t raise his eyes to the poetic and serene brightness of the day. He crossed the schoolyard with rapid steps. The basketball goals were still standing. A watering hose was connected to a bronze faucet. The bell that ended recess at the school hung unmoving in a corner, above the wastepaper baskets. Some ammunition cases covered with a tarpaulin were stacked next to two vans. But he saw none of this nor even intuited it, because his thoughts were elsewhere. He was executed next to a union member, a metal worker from Mondragón, a man as tenacious and faithful as a forest warden, who had been among the captain’s troops. Three privates and two civilian volunteers constituted the firing squad, which was under the command of an officer from the Estella garrison, like the two members of the court-martial. The captain could have requested for himself the honor of giving the order to fire and could have assumed that the said honor would be granted to him, and he could also assume that the members of the firing squad would present arms to his corpse after the volley, to his corpse alone, that is, and not to the mortal remains of the unionist from Mondragón, in accordance with some section of the military regulations. But the captain didn’t believe that it would be a heroic privilege to give the squad the order to fire at him, nor did he think that the honor paid to his corpse could be, in the circumstances, any sort of consolation. He would have liked to suppose that he was the only one of the three regimental comrades—the others being Arderius, the intelligent and caustic Captain Seven Heads, and the enraged Captain Pistols, his two marriage witnesses, who were both, no doubt, celebrating their victory somewhere along the front—well, he would have liked to suppose that he was the only one of the three who didn’t deserve to die a few weeks after returning from his honeymoon. That was how the doctor had always imagined the captain’s feelings, and in fact, he was right.

  The doctor shook his arm in the shadows and tried to follow the labored flight of a nocturnal butterfly with his eyes. He’d gone out into his garden to smoke a cigarette. The streetlight at the entrance to the property was on, and all around it a frantic cloud of bugs and moths were risking their lives. The doctor sat down on a wooden bench. The clump of hydrangea shrubs displayed its pale, monstrous flowers, as large as a child’s head. In daylight, their color was a washed-out blue, but in the darkness they seemed to accompany the doctor with a livid, phosphorescent glow. It was probably past midnight. The doctor wasn’t sleepy, and in any case, it had been many years since he’d had a set time for going to bed.

  “Satan,” he murmured.

  He’d served his cat a saucer of milk in the kitchen, but now the animal had come out into the garden, and the doctor could feel him gratefully rubbing himself against his leg, the good one. As is usually the case with cats, the doctor’s had three names. He was known as Satan, but in moments of great tenderness, the doctor called him Pichi. The cat’s third name was known only to the animal himself. Satan was docile and young, and his fur was black, very black, although it seemed to have silken stripes in the light from the street. Satan lifted his tail in an arabesque and rubbed his body against the doctor’s healthy leg again. Then he moved away and sat with his face to the night at the edge of the light circle, on the border between the still-warm flagstones and the shadow of the grass, next to the immobile congregation of hydrangeas. The doctor’s dead leg, as stiff as a piece of wood, was propped up on a low stool, and in this position, in which the great bulk of his heavy body rested in shadow and cast a shadow even bigger than his body, the doctor remained for a long time, until the lights in the neighboring Las Cruces house were turned off. His long, corpulent silhouette had a Caesarian profile. Intermittently, he lifted a cigarette to his lips. Bored by his nocturnal contemplation of the garden, the cautious, prudent, and jet-black Satan withdrew from the illuminated edge of the flagstones and jumped up on the stool. He walked briefly along the doctor’s rigid leg as though it were a roof beam before finally settling in his lap. The doctor stroked the cat’s black fur and sighed.

  Satan. Maybe it wasn’t the devil who had plotted Captain Herráiz’s destiny. There were surely grounds for the doctor to consider that the bad luck that had descended upon him so cruelly, destroying his leg in a motorcycle accident, was the same bad luck that had descended upon the country in general and upon the captain in particular, although the doctor would have been embarrassed to place his accident with his Guzzi on the same plane as the outbreak of the Civil War. However, the dates did coincide, give or take a few weeks. That September, while smoke from the burning city of Irún clouded the sky above the estuary, spread a thin veil, the color of tobacco and cinders, over the ocean, and altered the delicate gray cloudscape, fugitives were streaming across the international bridge or setting out in boats to cross over to the other side of the water. Former combatants, those who had not fallen back to the line of the Deva, those who were all that remained of the ephemeral army formed by the Defense Juntas of Guipúzcoa, fled by tens, by hundreds. Before jumping onto rafts, armed men buried their rifles and ammunition cases in the sand of the shore. Ashes rained down on the beach for some time after the artillery in the San Marcial fort fell silent. As the first detachments from the Navarrese columns were occupying the frontier, the doctor, a young man in the prime of his life, was taking his first steps in the garden at Los Sauces with a leg that seemed to weigh 150 kilos, and the young widow in the Las Cruces house was caressing the taut skin of her belly with an attitude of expectancy, like the young wives in medieval paintings who feel the fruit of the Annunciation growing inside them. Maybe she hadn’t yet unpacked the suitcases and the trunk from her wedding trip or placed her honeymoon souvenir on shelves, and maybe the news that she was a widow had not yet reached her. There were gunshots and executions on the Hondarribia beach, before the very eyes of the fugitives who had reached the other shore. Far from there, in the yard of the Piarist Fathers’ school in Alsasua where Captain Herráiz had departed this life, the various administrative sections of the rear guard’s quartermaster corps settled in to wait for winter to pass and spring to come, when the final offensive against the city of Bilbao could begin. As the doctor recalled, it was later learned that the captain had been buried in the cemetery of Alsasua, in the corner known as “the Reds’ cemetery,” where his body remained for some time, until it was reclaimed, if that was the way to put it, or recovered, and then transferred without too many bureaucratic setbacks to the modest mausoleum of the Herráiz family in San Sebastián. As often happens in such cases, Isabel was never completely convinced that the recovered body was Julen’s. The young widow’s fantasies nourished a melancholy, delicately irrational doubt, which allowed her to interpret death in terms of nonexistent possibilities of escape from it. And the blood spilled in front of a firing squad was now beating in her womb. Her imagination remained like this, filled with memories and expectations, and that was the bitter cup and the sweet sugar of her days. She thought that her wedding had been a sumptuous celebration in the garden of love, and she compared it in her memory with a painting by Rubens that she had seen in an illustrated book. She thought that her honeymoon had been a period of romantic rapture, like that of the lady, seduced by an officer of dragoons, whom Isabel had discovered in the same book, in a mediocre reproduction of a picture by a famous French painter. And fi
nally, she thought that the body buried in Donostia wasn’t Julen’s, despite the fact that a discreet military department had sent her his papers, a letter, and a few personal objects, including a golden wedding ring and a wristwatch. In her mind, his tomb was a stranger’s tomb to which she would never bring flowers, and she never did. Julen was probably a fugitive somewhere on the other side of the border, on the other side of the estuary spreading out before her eyes like the river Styx, and with such a thought one can live a whole lifetime, even though the years take what is simultaneously cruel and hopeful in the beginning of solitude and absence and make it lose its gleam and its intensity of feeling, shuffling and recomposing images that sanctify life’s portion of unacceptable grief.

  During those months, the fruit conceived in Isabel’s womb was thriving. The woman would lower her eyes and caress the mystery she harbored inside her as if it were the fruit of the Annunciation. At other times, nurturing the fantasy that her husband was alive and a fugitive, she would remember the book of Sacred History from her schooldays and imagine the illustration of the Flight into Egypt. The seed thriving in her womb had been deposited there by the loyal, somewhat affected, somewhat unthinking Captain Chicken Thigh, he who returned from his wedding trip to go to war. But—and this was what concerned the doctor just then—what did the lad next door know about all that? And did he care? How much of that story would be news to young Goitia, shut up over there in his late grandmother’s house, thoroughly dedicated to preparing himself for the solid, peaceful, and upright destiny of a civil-law notary? But there was a mystery, and the youthful notarial candidate could not possibly suspect it. Those first months of the war contained an enigma that concerned young Goitia’s very blood, affected his red corpuscles and perhaps his fortune, and perhaps even the way he envisioned his life, such an enigma as could reduce to rubble the common sense and good judgment that had led him to prepare for his famous notarial examinations in his deceased grandmother’s tranquil house; but the words that could help the youth decipher the mystery would not come from the doctor’s lips, and if those words were uttered, it wouldn’t be to unleash a new tragedy, but to resolve the game, as one adds pieces to a social jigsaw puzzle. Should the doctor talk, the mystery would become as clear and miraculous as a liturgical investiture. And if he opened his lips, it would have to be with a view toward constructing the scientific version of the facts, for such a version can best help a man to understand his own situation and to recognize his own blood in a way compatible with real circumstances, whether sordid or sublime; if the doctor opened his lips, it would have to be with a view toward ascertaining historical truth. A good while had passed since young Goitia had turned out the light in his study on the other side of the garden and gone to bed, leaving to his dreams or his nightmares the great volume and number of topics he had yet to work up. A good while had passed since the old Etxarri woman had finished bustling around her kitchen, and now her lights were out, too, so that the Las Cruces house was an architecture of shadows. Old and corpulent, the doctor initiated the obligatory movements in the process of getting to his feet. Visiting the basements and cellars where memories are stored could be a horrific experience, and the doctor knew a great deal about that sort of thing. His disability had kept him at a sensible distance from the war, but the price paid for this exemption, the heavy, crippled limb he dragged about with him, was no compensation for the passionate furor of youth, no matter how dangerous. He expelled Satan from his lap, moved the stool aside, and amid a mechanical creaking of joints placed the foot of his dead leg on the ground. Then he seized his cane and stood up with the uncertain delicacy of giants. Satan meowed at his side. The doctor tried to make him enter the house, but the cat ambled away, lifting his elegant tail, exhibiting the little pink button of his backside, and stealthily disappearing into the night. The melancholy giant, feeling rather weary and thinking that perhaps he would indeed be able to fall asleep, closed the door of his house and went to bed.

  Seen from the Los Sauces side, the Las Cruces house had been asleep for a good while. But seen from the Las Cruces side, it was conceivable that the old Etxarri woman had the same difficulties as the doctor in finding any sort of repose with her head on a pillow. Before going to sleep, she would drain a glass of dark cinchona wine, as thick as syrup, from one of the bottles she’d saved from the Etxarri inn and kept for herself. And it was also conceivable that the old woman listened to the sound of the woodworms in the wood and the unlocatable creaking of the parquet floors and awaited the intermittent suicide of a drop of water in the bathroom sink, as if those were all clues that might awaken her memory, for she was the memory of that house in its rawest state, as much as or more than Doctor Castro was, as much as or more than the deceased grandmother had been; she was, so to speak, the deep mirror, somewhat clouded by cinchona, of the doctor’s keen memory. Between them, the doctor and the old woman could awaken the inexistent memory of young Goitia, assuming that young Goitia had any interest in the stories the old woman and the doctor could tell him.

  Some days later, the doctor and the lawyer, having run into each other on various occasions in the village, had an encounter in the garden. Doctor Castro reiterated his invitation to have lunch in Biarritz. “I’ll drive the car,” he proclaimed, his dead foot anchored in the grass. “I’ll drive any one of those jalopies I’ve got in the garage, or I’ll drive the Morris Oxford if the old woman will let us borrow it.”

  “She won’t let us borrow it.”

  “The old witch.”

  Young Goitia made no reply. Seen from Las Cruces, his gigantic, lame neighbor occupied the entire garden with his urgent presence. As is often the case with older people, there was something obsessive about him. He insisted on arranging the excursion to Biarritz as if his status depended on it. Maybe the doctor’s solitude bored him. Or maybe he was crazy. The young lawyer stared at the ground while the doctor braced his bad leg. With such a leg, it would be impossible to work an accelerator. Maybe his car was equipped with a manual accelerator. None of that was important. With a yearning gleam in his eye, as if he longed to get behind the wheel of a large automobile, the doctor insisted: “I’ll do the driving.”

  “That’s not the problem,” Goitia said. “The problem is that I have a lot of studying to do.”

  “The hell with studying,” the doctor said. “There are more important things in life than notarial topics.”

  “Not for a future notary.”

  “Right, not for a future notary. But I’m a good neighbor, and I have certain neighborly duties. One of those duties is to invite you to lunch.”

  Goitia smiled. It was the middle of the afternoon. What old-style summer vacationers used to think of as the lunch hour had been reduced to a fifteen-minute, time-wasting break in the notarial candidate’s well-organized study plan. The doctor raised his big blue eyes. He was sure he knew the routine: The lad would take a fifteen-minute turn around the garden to breathe some oxygen and clear his head, while the old Etxarri woman, faithful to the customs of the past, would fix him an afternoon refreshment of coffee with milk and cookies, or a sandwich of quince jelly or puréed chestnuts, or some other traditional snack. Obviously, the old woman knew that study is exhausting and that the boy needed to recover his strength and keep fit until the dinner hour. The doctor paused and considered the lawyer’s flesh. The youth’s visit was not yet ten days old, and already the doctor, with his fine, clinical eye, could estimate that his new neighbor had put on a couple of kilos. If his strict study plan didn’t produce a civil-law notary, at least it would produce a lawyer somewhat fatter than the slight, pale, recently graduated lad who had arrived in Hondarribia almost ten days ago. The doctor smiled brightly. If there was one quality of the old Etxarri woman that you could count on, it would be her ability to fatten up a future notary, adjusting her budget accordingly and spending the necessary amount of time in front of the stove.

  “So we’ll go tomorrow, all right?”

  “No, not
tomorrow. In two or three days.”

  “All right,” the doctor said.

  Pivoting on his axis, he turned away from the garden wall and cast a glance at the sea, which was visible between the trees. The estuary was a gray sheet, hardly altered by the capricious, fan-shaped designs the currents made on its surface, which rippled with striations that looked immobile from a distance. The tide was at its highest point. It was a moment of fullness. The ocean seemed to overflow onto the shore in a melancholy satiety, as if it concealed a ruminant animal with waves for a snout and a longing to graze on the unreachable meadows. On the opposite shore, the coastline was fading into tones of gray shot with gold in the light of what promised to be a splendid sunset. Four black points remained unmoving in the middle of the estuary. They were fishing boats, waiting for the tide to recede so that they could fish for baby squid. The doctor turned to his neighbor again. “All right, we’ll go in two or three days,” he repeated. “You won’t be sorry for letting me have a little of your time. I’ll take you to lunch in the hotel where your grandmother and grandfather spent their honeymoon. I suppose you’d prefer me to call them your grandmother and grandfather, rather than Isabel and Julen.”