The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  “That doesn’t bother me,” the lawyer said.

  “Are you interested in the subject? Or are you not interested at all?”

  The lawyer made no reply.

  “I suppose it doesn’t interest you,” the doctor went on, in an ample, generous voice that suited the sumptuous contemplation of the ocean.

  He paused and stretched out his hand. “Look at this landscape,” he said. “Look at the estuary and the sea. Something seems to be saying that the other side of that estuary is the kingdom of the dead, even though the idea’s refuted by the vehicles crossing the international bridge in both directions. It’s all a matter of knowledgeable presentation. This is the landscape that your grandmother contemplated during the more than forty years of her widowhood. You could say it’s the same landscape I’ve been contemplating all that time myself. Does that have any importance? Does it? Maybe it doesn’t interest you, because the connection with that landscape has been lost. But if, on the contrary, it interests you, maybe there’s something that could interest you even more. Someday after we have lunch in Biarritz, I’ll take you to Vera de Bidasoa.”

  “Do you think I’ll have any time left for studying?”

  “You don’t have to stand on ceremony with me.”

  “It’s no joke,” Goitia protested. “I’d be glad to go on an excursion to Biarritz or Vera de Bidasoa or wherever you’d like to take me, but I came here because I wanted to spend a quiet time studying for my exams.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way. We’ll go out to eat together.”

  “In two or three days?” the doctor asked suspiciously.

  “In two days. I’m sure I’ll need a break by then.”

  “All right.”

  The sound of a voice made them both look up.

  “Excuse me,” the lawyer said.

  The old Etxarri woman appeared on the porch with a napkin draped over one forearm and a tray in her hands. On the tray was the afternoon snack. The servant didn’t leave the porch, and young Goitia turned back to his neighbor to take his leave. The gap that yawned between those two men, between the young lawyer and the old doctor, included something vaster than just the distance between different generations. It appeared that they lived within distinct frames of reference, as was no doubt the case. The doctor was afraid that a lunch would resolve nothing, because the transmission of memory—if one considers that it may be indispensable at some point—has a great deal to do with one’s own solitude and with the need to keep conversations going as a weapon against boredom, and simultaneously, the act of transmitting one’s memory responds to a pernicious notion that doing so guarantees some form of immortality.

  As the youth moved away, the doctor said, “We’ll talk it over again.” Then he repeated his words, lifting his cane in the direction of the fugitive: “We’ll talk it over again in two or three days.” Lowering the cane, he struck at the blades of grass next to his leaden foot. His smile grew broad and secret, as if he were hiding treasures he’d be able to reveal only with extreme caution.

  The youth walked up the sloping garden to the house, obeying the servant’s call like a schoolboy. There was a wicker table on the porch, and there the old Etxarri woman placed the tray. Goitia unfolded his napkin and sat down to eat the small repast: quince jelly and a glass of milk. It could have been his deceased grandmother’s afternoon snack. From the height of the porch, the lawn seemed to roll away, undulating in the tardy light. The old woman withdrew. Then she turned in the direction of the doctor, retreating there in the distance, moving along the garden wall, and she gazed at him for a few minutes with her hands on her hips, as if she were demanding that he give an accounting, from down there, of what he’d been talking about with the boy. Whatever it was, the boy belonged to her, she was the one who fixed him his meals and his snacks and watched over his sleep, and apparently she would have liked to watch over his thoughts as well; it was as if the old Etxarri woman, aware that she was coming to the end of her days, had no other desire than to appropriate the blood and the life of her incomprehensible and studious guest, who was in the flower of his youth. The doctor limped away from the garden wall and continued his walk under the trees. Long columns of shadow crossed the lawn, and in the backlight of the gleaming sea, above a thin cloud of mosquitoes, the sky received clouds of gold, as in the ancient iconography of a burned village or a sacked and looted city. The old Etxarri woman remembered other golden skies, too, but in her thoughts, twilights succeeded one another with the mysterious and profound unconsciousness of animals, and her sensibility, only slightly stimulated by the generous play of gold and gray in the sky, responded to other instincts. She went back into the house while the boy finished his snack on the porch. At that very moment, the doctor disappeared.

  For years now, the doctor’s territory, like his cat’s, had been confined to the two or three thousand square meters of his garden, not counting his obligatory visits to the village, and it’s possible that the cat’s territory was bigger. With a glance, he recognized the boundaries of the garden wall and the shadows. He took walks out there because exercise made his leg feel better. He stopped at the top of the small hillock and gazed at the rooftops. Then he went inside to read and smoke. The boy didn’t go out into the garden that night to take the air, or if he did go out, he went through a door on a side of the house where he couldn’t be seen. Or maybe he’d decided to go down to the village—who could imagine what free lives boys lead? The doctor went outside to keep watch and remained in wait, sitting on the wooden bench between the clump of hydrangeas and the streetlight, with his leg propped up on a stool and Satan in his lap. All his thoughts brought him back to the years of his youth, when he was recently settled in Hondarribia, and recently crippled, as if the presence of the young lawyer in the Las Cruces house had served to conjure up the tragedy whose repository the doctor considered himself to be and of which the boy himself knew nothing, because a gap of two generations, by its very extent, induced forgetting. Shadows of memory rose up in his mind, the gold and blood-red of countless sunsets accumulated in the indefatigable lushness of the garden, in the indecisive memory of shadows. The doctor sighed. The placid Satan was asleep or pretending to be asleep across his legs, and in the doctor’s forced immobility, since he didn’t want to disturb the cat, the damp night air began to make his back wet. The intermittent beam from the Amuitz lighthouse kept cutting out segments of darkness on the hills and igniting sudden, brief flashes in the treetops. Somewhere in the night, the sea was breathing with a strong undertow. Fishing boats hung burning yellow lamps over a sheet of black ink. And above everything else, as if to attach a broader significance to his sense impressions, he could hear the whistle of a locomotive in the distant railway station of Irún, and that rent in the night, that heartrending lament, made Satan jump off his lap, and the long, melancholy complaint made the doctor shiver, too. He attributed his trembling to the dew, but also to the memory that the train’s complaint had succeeded in awakening.

  Three

  THE STILLBORN FRUIT

  AS SATURN DEVOURED HIS CHILDREN, so had time devoured María Antonia Etxarri’s memories, leaving behind only a tormented and confused accumulation. She recalled her years as a young girl in the Etxarri inn with her mother and stepfather, until the war came, with its events and its consequences, or what the old Etxarri woman considered, in the burning guts of her individual experience, to have been the consequences of the war. She remembered her time as a maid in the house of the rich man of Vera, Don Leopoldo, like Leopold, King of the Belgians, when Don Leopoldo was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. And she also remembered the time after she arrived, still a young girl though not exactly a maid, in the villa of Las Cruces. Each of those periods had left a trace, sometimes insignificant and sometimes profound, in her memory. They were three large, clearly defined segments, which marked her life like broad furrows. The smell of the Etxarri inn perfumed her feelings and the warm
th of the stable awakened primitive emotions as she wielded a pitchfork with sharpened prongs to turn the hay. In the house in Vera de Bidasoa, the wheels of Don Leopoldo’s wheelchair were wooden, two big wheels with metal spokes and rubber tires and two smaller wooden wheels like the wheels of a toy wheelbarrow or the wheels of a cradle. And in the most spacious parcel of her recollection, the one that went back to those very days, her memories nourished deeper mysteries and awakened other feelings. Those days were from another era. Back then, the trees on the Las Cruces estate had yet to attain the state of growth they had reached now, except for some century-old specimens that didn’t seem to have increased in size or undergone any fluctuations in magnificence, as if their imposing dimensions were part of some ancient record in which human memory was unable to detect the imperceptible development of their circumference. It happened that way with some old memories, solider and better defined and more emphatic than recent ones, which always seemed to be in a process of elaboration. At her age, at María Antonia Etxarri’s age, the consistency of life was starting to lose its sharpest contours, but it wasn’t losing either force or heat. She got up at seven in the morning. She put on her big rope-soled sandals or her rubber clogs and started shuffling around the service area, moving like a bear. She was as punctual as the cat that belonged to the doctor on the other side of the garden wall. The cat spent the night outside. He would be looking for a way into the Los Sauces house around the time when the old Etxarri woman in the Las Cruces house stuck her head out of the kitchen door. Satan distrusted the old woman, but he wasn’t afraid of her. Three or four generations of Satans had succeeded one another, roaming back and forth between the two gardens. If the cat was close enough, the old Etxarri woman would chase him away before returning to her kitchen. Her breakfast was an enormous bowl of coffee and milk, which she had to hold with both hands. Then, with the fragrant steam in her nostrils and her eyes blurred by the turmoil of some bad dream, she would linger over breakfast for a while, adding up her accounts and cogitating.

  If doing accounts and cogitating took her no more than half an hour, her day would be simple and propitious. But it sometimes happened that her thoughts were more complicated, more sinister, more confused, and then her breakfast would take longer. In the more than three weeks that had passed since young Goitia’s arrival, his presence in the house had complicated María Antonia’s thoughts and prolonged the time she spent over her coffee and milk. But she couldn’t change her feelings, or pretend that in fifteen days her soul had been soothed, or that she had managed to block sudden accesses of tenderness toward her young guest. The boy was going to stay in the house for six weeks, or two months at the most. He’d given himself this period of time to go over the topics for his competitive examinations, which meant that María Antonia’s joys and desolations would be drawn out for at least another three weeks. Satan, the doctor’s cat, had gone back to his own garden, but Saturn, god of time, continued to devour the old woman’s entrails. And therefore, María Antonia lingered longer over breakfast.

  The songs that were sung in the Etxarri inn after the frog-fishing competitions sounded again in her ears:

  Go Mendieta,

  You’re the greatest.

  And she could also hear the strange song she’d heard a smuggler from Vera singing:

  Your glory, Mother, has died in the mountains.

  They weren’t happy memories, not insofar as they evoked the war, nor insofar as they evoked the frog-fishing competitions, and so the old woman thrust the songs out of her memory with a brusque movement of her hand, as one who hears a bothersome buzzing shoos it away. She put her nose in her steaming breakfast bowl and with a long, noisy slurp drained her milky coffee to the grounds. She had only a distant memory of her rape during the war, but that’s the wrong way of putting it. María Antonia set the empty bowl aside. Then she wiped her lips with a green-and-blue kitchen cloth.

  If it was a bright day, the old Etxarri woman would stand on the threshold of the kitchen door after breakfast and contemplate her domain, but if the day was dark or threatened to be overcast—and on the day in question, the sky had been overcast since dawn—the old woman would remain seated with her elbows on the table and carry out some prolonged interior contemplation. The curtains of rain or the distant, dull-gray clouds bursting over the open sea filled her with nostalgia, because for her, the weeping of the heavens was the ultimate poetic sensation, and nothing compared with the lyrical emotion of abandonment and dispossession that the rain promised. She wasn’t a sad woman, but she saw in the never-ending gray clouds of autumn, whose approach was heralded by the sudden storms of September, a confirmation of the life cycle, which was an experience she understood in meteorological terms—inevitable, not destructive—and the powerful northwest winds of winter received from her a certain kind of triumphant consecration. And if the day looked like a watercolor, her emotions were more distrustful, as happens in persons who think that gentle sensations, like bright colors, are not made to last. Saturn was devouring her entrails. But who could have imagined that the old Etxarri woman was capable of working out such feelings? She rose from the kitchen table and walked over to the sink, where she left her breakfast bowl. Young Goitia would be getting up at eight. His breakfast had to be ready. He would take it in the drawing room.

  The boy cared about nothing but those examinations of his. He was marking off the days on the calendar. Other than that, he cared about nothing, and so it had to be if the boy really wished to become an upstanding man, the old Etxarri woman thought, and that was why he had come, not for any other reason, not to resuscitate ghosts or make deals with the past, and not to revive Saturn’s wound in the old woman’s entrails. She didn’t like the fact that young Goitia wasted precious minutes every afternoon conversing with the doctor over the garden wall. But the boy had other things on his mind. That morning, while the old woman was fixing his breakfast, Goitia had gone to have a look around the garage. Later, sitting down to his coffee and toast, he’d asked about his grandmother’s car.

  “Was that my grandmother’s car?”

  “I suppose it was your grandmother’s car,” the cautious old woman replied, as if she really wasn’t sure whose car it might have been.

  Goitia insisted. “Was it her car?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The young man, correctly supposing that the old woman was going to keep saying “I suppose,” asked no further questions. The automobile, its tires deflated, was resting on four wooden blocks. A threadbare blanket covered its hood. Did the doctor want to go to Biarritz in that relic? Young Goitia believed that either the doctor’s memory was failing him or the old man had gone crazy. María Antonia went back to the kitchen so that the lad could have his breakfast in peace. She didn’t know whether his inquiries about the car and his grandmother sprang from good or bad motives, but in any case, it would be highly exceptional for her to feel obligated to speak about those matters or to give explanations. Once she was in the kitchen, she closed the door and burst into tears. Her eyes wept for all that they hadn’t wept for when she was a girl, but her sobs were weak, not the same now as they would have been then. Before the placid landscape visible from the kitchen window, her deep, bloodshot eyes clouded over for a few minutes. She wiped her face with the dubiously white handkerchief she carried in her apron pocket. Making sure that her eyes were dry, she returned to the drawing room to collect the breakfast tray. The boy had shut himself up in the gun room to study. Before washing the dishes, she examined the bottom of his cup for a few moments. The coffee grounds offered no great revelations, and besides, María Antonia Etxarri had grown skeptical of all predictions except those made by the television weatherman. She raised her eyes skyward once again, looking through the windowpanes with her hands still under the faucet. The following day would bring some morning downpours, followed in the afternoon by sheets of steady rain. Maybe that September day was the first day of fall. Young Goitia was her guest, but Saturn was devouring her
entrails, just as Saturn had devoured the engine of the automobile that had been sleeping for so many years in the garage.

  After breakfast, Miguel Goitia shut himself up in the little gun room to study for two and a half hours. His program was unvarying. Two and a half hours of studying and a ten-minute break, then two more hours of study until lunchtime. Behind him, in the spacious kitchen, he could hear the faucet, weeping torrentially into the sink, but soon the pipes stopped their coughing and sighing. The depths of the house resounded with the silence of a mausoleum. There were gloomy cavities in the house, spaces nobody had ever inhabited or explored, but the mystery of that resonance, had Goitia been interested in uncovering it, was limited to the well in the cellar and to the empty cistern that had been used until twenty years previously, when the house was connected to the municipal water supply and the plumbing system renovated.

  Every two days, Goitia telephoned Madrid from the village to speak with his mother or his girlfriend. The doctor imagined the conversations, or wasted time imagining conversations he probably wouldn’t understand, because he was a man who didn’t understand the telephone, much less the affectionate or sentimental conversations people had on the telephone. But he would have been surprised to hear young Goitia speaking, not like a young lawyer, but like a boyfriend, or like a son, with the inquisitive and tender inflections of a son’s or boyfriend’s voice, speaking over many kilometers of distance but with the intimate closeness of shared feelings. And the doctor might have thought that young Goitia would have used the same inflections and the same affectionate tone to speak to his grandmother Isabel. The question, however, was whether he used the same tone and inflections to address the old Etxarri woman, courteously playing the role of the guest while the old woman silently played the role of his grandmother. That was what the doctor would have imagined.