The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  Rain or shine, the doctor was the last to arise, generally around ten in the morning, at which time he would open the door for his cat. The animal would be on the wooden bench on the porch, waiting for him. The doctor made his appearance, unshaven, leaning on his cane, and wearing slippers and a robe, under which his striped pajama pants were visible. His hair formed a disheveled crest on his head, and there was something deranged in his appearance, as though he were drunk, and what he really looked like was a man who had spent the night slumped in an armchair, drinking instead of sleeping. Satan slipped between his legs and headed for the kitchen, where some canned meat and a saucer of milk were usually waiting for him. When the doctor looked outside, his eyes went first to the neighboring garden, to the placid and studious silence of the Las Cruces house, while he could feel behind him the ominous silence and disorder of the Los Sauces house. In Doctor Castro’s life, there had been not only a succession of cats. There had also been a woman. Her name was Hortensia Fiquet, and to honor her given name, the doctor had planted the big clump of hydrangeas—hortensias in Spanish—in the garden, although he might just as well have honored her family name by planting a fig tree. She was from Perpignan, and something that was nobody’s business had happened to cause them to break up after only a short time. They may have stayed together six months or a year, and if the details of their relationship were nobody’s business, the amount of time it had lasted was even less so. It must have been during the 1950s. She had been a professor of French, but no one could remember whether she had taught at the state high school in Irún or in a convent of nuns. In any case, the story of that affair had little to do with the story that now involved the doctor and young Goitia. Of Hortensia Fiquet, all that remained were the blue hydrangeas—the blue hortensias—which later turned pale or drably pink. Crippled men are often solitary men, people declared in the village. No one could be certain that the disorder in the doctor’s house, as well as in his life, was due to the absence of a woman. There are men who subvert order because they carry a deep-seated, centrifugal inertia that destroys the space as well as the feelings around them, and that may well have been the case with Doctor Castro. No one could know what the doctor owed his solitude or the grand total of the invoices solitude had submitted to his life, no one could know that, not even those who knew the significance of the clump of hydrangeas and remembered, fleetingly, the attractive, elegant ease, the Catalan or Cerdanyolan neatness of Hortensia Fiquet. Moreover, one couldn’t say that the doctor had maintained a relationship with his neighbor in Las Cruces, with Isabel, the grandmother, although men have always been suspicious of neighborly relations between a man and a woman, especially those between a man and a widow, and perhaps more caustic imaginations would have been particularly suspicious of such a relationship between a crippled man and a young widow. Insofar as anything the villagers understood was concerned, none could be so categorical as to aver that the two neighbors had shared a deeper connection, an unimagined, mystery-shrouded bond. And indeed, what did they know about all that, the merchants, the old summer vacationers, or the members of the fishermen’s guild? What did the teeming humanity of Hondarribia, decimated by war and exile, know about all that? Hondarribia was no longer a village; it was a little city, with its prosperous cooperatives and its influx of new visitors. Irún had been raised from its ruins, and everything, except for the doctor’s centrifugal and destructive activity, seemed to have been born again after the brief pact with the devil and fire. The gray mists of the estuary had veiled other memories, perhaps more romantic but not always pleasant to scrutinize. The hydrangeas remained, all that was left of the single amorous relationship the doctor was known to have had, but not sufficient grounds for declaring that the man had truly possessed the feelings attested to by the flowers. Similarly, he could have ordered the hydrangeas, the hortensias, pulled up, and forget-me-nots and daisies planted instead, without necessarily suggesting that he couldn’t forget some woman named Daisy, but this was the sort of thing that the gardeners of Hondarribia—that is, those who knew or believed they knew the doctor—could not always thoroughly understand.

  The doctor cast a glance at the neighboring garden, gazed for an instant at the melancholy clump of hydrangeas, and went back inside the house. The cat was waiting for him in the kitchen, impatient for his tinned meat and his platter of milk. He reiterated the eager, pitiful meowing uttered down the generations by all cats demanding food, not demanding affection or attention, and that was precisely what the doctor loved about cats. While Satan was eating, the doctor prepared his own breakfast. Coffee and toast. Although the day threatened rain, he went out into the garden to have his breakfast there.

  At the end of a minute, with his coffee in his hands, he felt a sudden desire for conversation. He wondered why, as the years passed, he increasingly felt the need to have a living creature at his side, some interlocutor other than the cat and the hydrangeas. No, that wasn’t it. His solitude wasn’t opting for that solution. The question the doctor asked himself as he raised his eyes to the cloudy sky that morning, examining the band of wan light that illuminated the horizon and would, perhaps, disperse the midday clouds, set the afternoon afire, and end in a biblical sunset—that question had nothing to do with the recurrent paradoxes of his solitude; instead, the doctor was wondering what were the chances of an excursion to Biarritz that very day. He settled into the big wicker chair with the cup of coffee in his hand, laid his cane on the ground beside him, and stretched out his leg. When the cat finished eating, he came outside and joined the doctor in the chair.

  Once again, Doctor Castro felt an irrepressible urge to seek human company, and such weakness of character irritated him. He had sufficient patience to hold out for another ten minutes. He distracted himself by contemplating the bar of yellowish, rather ghostly light that widened and rose between the clouds on the other side of the estuary, on the other side of the border. Then his desire for conversation became too strong. He got to his feet without picking up his cane and limped into the house, swaying like a bear. Soon he appeared at the door again, tottering on the threshold with a telephone in his hand and the cord untangling behind him. He placed the telephone next to the coffee cup on the garden table and sat down once more in the wicker chair. From there he could see the office, or the sewing room, or whatever it was, where the lawyer studied. He could have sworn that the boy could see him, too. The windowpanes reflected the leaden sky, and behind them he could make out a studious silhouette. The doctor leaned forward and seized the telephone. He put the apparatus on his knees and dialed the number for Las Cruces. There was probably a telephone in that office, or in that sewing room, or whatever it was, and the boy himself would answer. And so he did. At the end of the second ring, the boy picked up the receiver without even rising from his seat. The doctor endeavored to sound jovial.

  “Goitia? Good morning. It’s your neighbor calling. I see that you’re a diligent man, and an early riser to boot.”

  The lawyer didn’t understand who the caller was. The telephone beside him, a black Bakelite device that had been silent until that moment, had rung, he had answered it, and now he failed to recognize the doctor’s voice.

  “It’s your neighbor,” Doctor Castro repeated. “I can see you through the window. If you turn your head this way, you’ll see me in front of my house.”

  The lawyer turned his eyes toward Los Sauces with the receiver pressed to his ear. He moved a few books that were on the table and thrust his nose close to the window glass. Beyond the garden, about thirty meters away, it seemed to him that he could make out the doctor, installed on the little terrace in front of the door to his house and half submerged in the luxuriant mass formed by the hydrangeas. The doctor cheerfully raised an arm above the circle of flowers and said, “Do you see me?”

  “Yes, I see you,” Goitia mumbled, somewhat disconcerted by the sight of the doctor, whose voice was in his ear.

  “Good morning, my boy,” the doctor repeated, wi
th even greater enthusiasm.

  “Good morning.”

  Doctor Castro solemnly settled back in his chair. Visual and telephonic contact had been established. The unbearable solitude of his breakfast had been resolved. There was still some tepid coffee in his cup. With the telephone receiver in one hand and the cup in the other, he took a sip. Satan had occupied the other chair and was staring at his master with dilated eyes, admiring the telephone and human inventions.

  “Today’s the big day, my boy. We’re going to Biarritz for lunch,” the doctor said.

  “Today?”

  “Come, come, Goitia, don’t make me beg you. We agreed that I would take you to lunch today.”

  “I didn’t remember that.”

  “That’s why I’m calling to remind you.” The doctor waved his arm again, sending a grand signal to the villa of Las Cruces. Seen from the villa of Los Sauces, Goitia’s silhouette shifted behind the window. “Do you see me? I’m reminding you.”

  “Yes, I know we talked about that,” Goitia said. “But it wasn’t clear that we said today.”

  “We said today. Think what you will, but today you’re going to give your notes a rest. This won’t stop you from becoming a notary someday.”

  The doctor let a minute of silence pass. He knew that the boy needed time to reflect. It couldn’t be easy to accept an invitation to dine with an old, solitary bear like him. That was all right, though. A boy decides to shut himself up for a couple of months so he can study, so he can prepare for his upcoming competitive exams in the most eccentric corner of northeastern Spain, and an impertinent neighbor invites him to lunch. The doctor sat up a little in his chair to check on his neighbor. On the other side of the garden, behind the window of the office, or the sewing room, or whatever it was, the air was thick with hesitation. At last, the lawyer replied, remembering what the doctor had said about the Morris that was in the garage at Las Cruces. “We can’t go in the car that’s in the garage,” Goitia announced. “It’s undriveable.”

  “Undriveable?”

  “It’s up on some wooden blocks, it’s covered with dust as thick as your finger, and there’s an old blanket over the hood.”

  “The Morris is undriveable?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  The doctor burst out laughing. “Come on, my boy. You can’t think I’m going to trust an old relic to take the two of us to lunch in Biarritz.”

  “You had suggested—”

  “Put that car out of your mind. The old Etxarri woman will wind up selling it to me, and then the Morris will be a real collector’s automobile.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I’ll go and rent a car.”

  “I don’t know if that would be prudent.”

  “Prudent?” Once again, the doctor was quite surprised.

  Goitia remained silent.

  “All right. It would have been more pathetic to go to lunch in the Morris,” the doctor said, pretending not to have grasped the allusion to his disabled leg. “That’s what I had imagined—going to the hotel where your grandmother spent her honeymoon, and in the same car she made the wedding journey in. Magnificent, right? But I think it’s better not to add too much pathos.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just an old bear muttering. Anyway, if you’re referring to another kind of prudence, don’t worry, I’ll let you drive.”

  “I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to go to lunch with you,” Goitia stammered.

  “I don’t think that for a minute,” the doctor declared emphatically. “I’ll come to fetch you at twelve noon.”

  The lawyer sighed and surrendered. “All right.”

  “And now you’ve got more than an hour to study.”

  Before hanging up, the doctor sat up straight, so that his whole bulk emerged above the hydrangeas. Bracing himself on the back of the chair, he signaled to Goitia by waving his hand. Behind the window of his study, the lawyer replied with a vague gesture. The doctor smiled. “Do you see me?” he asked.

  “Yes, I see you,” Goitia repeated, with a hint of irritation.

  “You won’t regret coming to lunch with me, I can assure you of that,” the doctor said. “Now, I’m sure the old woman’s listening to you on the other side of the door. You can tell her that you and I are going out. She won’t dare acknowledge what she owes me. Much more than you can imagine.”

  The lawyer hung up the Bakelite telephone. He sat for a few moments looking at it, a contraption from another time, as black and heavy as a telephone made of stone and painted black. Then he raised his eyes to the neighboring villa again, but the doctor had already disappeared. Or he had submerged himself again behind the hydrangeas. Then Goitia stood, went to the study door, and opened it to see if the old woman actually was behind it, listening. There was no one. The hall was plunged in darkness, and all that could be heard was an indistinct, metallic sound. The old Etxarri woman was in the drawing room, cleaning dishes and polishing silver. She cared for the cutlery in the house as if it were her own, which in fact it was. The lawyer closed the door again and sat back down to his books. He felt a vague desire to be in Madrid or in some other place, but not in the place where he was.

  He couldn’t concentrate. After a while, he abandoned his books and went to talk to the old woman. He assumed that she’d been listening at the door. But why did the doctor care whether she’d been listening or not? The servant was in the drawing room with a vinegar-soaked rag, polishing a set of several dozen pieces of flatware, an entire service except for the little coffee spoons, which were in a different set. The storage chests, lined in maroon velvet, lay open on the table. Flatware for fish, for meat, for dessert. She supposed that the cutlery was all sterling silver. But it might have been silver plate. She had dissolved some aspirin in the vinegar. Vinegar with aspirin made the pieces shine. Goitia stopped in the doorway of the drawing room, unable to articulate a word. The old Etxarri woman had obviously been listening at his door, because she’d listened at many doors over the course of many years, and in all kinds of circumstances. Besides, that house, the villa of Las Cruces, was her house, just like the silver cutlery. Goitia babbled an apology: “I’m having lunch with Doctor Castro today.”

  He seemed to be asking permission, not so that the old woman would grant him her indulgence, but by way of observing forms whose neglect might arouse jealousy. What was he thinking? Had he come to this place in order to go crazy? The old woman looked at him with an old woman’s tender, watery blue eyes. She thought that the lawyer wanted to examine the cutlery, perhaps even to count the pieces. The old Etxarri woman knew how to calculate their value. If they were sterling silver, their weight would come to more than four kilos. Four kilos of silver. She knew about silver. But maybe the flatware service was not silver at all but rather the alloy called pewter, and that was a doubt that couldn’t be resolved, and so the old woman had calculated the service’s value that way, too, taking into account the loss she would suffer if the service turned out to be pewter. The service could be melted down, and she would still have the kitchen cutlery at her disposal. When she saw Goitia in the doorway of the drawing room, she placed herself between him and the flatware chests. The vinegar cloth was still in her hand. While making a piece of cutlery shine, she had indeed been listening at the door, because she was distrustful, and because she was afraid of what the boy might learn from the doctor.

  The doctor appeared at twelve sharp. He apologized to Goitia for having set their appointment for such an early hour, but the lawyer had to understand that the French ate their midday meal at twelve-thirty, or one o’clock at the latest, and the doctor could do nothing to change the customs of the French, nor could he persuade them that, since they were so close to the border, they should adopt Spanish customs. The reverse was also true, but that was another question.

  He’d rented a white car and driven it to Las Cruces himself. He accomplished this by crushing the accelerator with his cripp
led leg, making the clutch howl, and by stamping on the brake pedal, when necessary, with the same fury. He had brought along his cane, which was lying next to the gearshift. When Goitia came out of the front door, the doctor got out of the car, leaving it running, circled the vehicle, and got back in on the passenger’s side. The cane remained where it was and now lay next to his left hand. Goitia adjusted the driver’s seat and tested the various controls before backing up onto the villa’s circular driveway. Then they went down the Las Cruces road toward the village, driving along the seashore. They skirted the village on a street lined with chestnut trees and joined the highway leading to Irún and the Hendaye bridge. The doctor turned toward his companion and asked, “Have you ever been to Biarritz?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t imagine what it feels like for me to be going to Biarritz with you. Finally. Any excuse for going to Biarritz is a good one.”

  “Do you go there often?”

  “No, I don’t go often. I meant that I’d use any excuse to go there. But I rarely have an excuse as good as this one. I mean, going to Biarritz with Isabel’s grandson …”