After they crossed the border, the doctor brought out a flask of cognac from the vest pocket of his jacket and took a swallow. His lips were wet as he screwed the nickel-plated cap back onto the flask and returned it to his pocket. Then he turned toward Goitia again. Out of the corner of his eye, Goitia could see the doctor’s smiling face, and he could smell the cognac on his breath.
“Do you speak to your mother often?”
“I’ve talked to her on the telephone several times since I’ve been here.”
“A good son.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Simple curiosity. It’s been many years since I last saw your mother. She wouldn’t recognize me.”
“She asked me to give you her regards.”
“She remembers me?”
“So it seems.”
“Ah, little Verónica. Her husband kidnapped her and took her away to Madrid.”
“My father’s from Bilbao.”
“It amounts to the same thing. If your mother ever comes this way, I’ll invite her to lunch in Biarritz, too. But I don’t think she’ll come here. She doesn’t get along with the old Etxarri woman, and it’s her house. That’s what your grandmother Isabel wanted.”
“I’ll tell her that we talked about her.”
“Very good. The delightful Verónica. Many a time, she jumped onto my lap. And sometimes, when she was afraid, she’d hold on to my bad leg as if it were a telephone pole. I taught her a Basque song: Pipa artuta aita naiz.… And now she has a son who’s going to be a civil-law notary. Has the old Etxarri woman told you that little Verónica used to jump onto my lap and cling to my bad leg like a pole?”
“She hasn’t spoken to me about my mother.”
“I’m not surprised. That woman comes to us from the glacial era. Even though I’m older than she is, she’s got half the feelings I have, and she looks twice my age.”
Goitia didn’t reply. They had driven past the farmhouses on the outskirts of Hendaye, and the doctor told him to follow the coastal road. On their right were the new highway and the ongoing construction of the freeway. Over the sea, the sky had opened up to reveal a strange flowering of high cumuli and rain clouds. At that moment, rain was streaming down on the line of the horizon. The sky above the Bay of Biscay was like a living being of changeable character, with attributes lighter and more delicate than the turbulent, choppy presence of the sea. The road went past country estates and farmhouses. Big commercial centers were gradually gaining territory at the expense of cornfields. Before they reached Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the doctor suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea to stop there and drink an aperitif, but the lawyer preferred to go on directly to Biarritz. Then the doctor took the cognac flask out of his pocket again. He felt the need for an appetizer to accompany his drink—peanuts, olives—but then again, cognac could hardly be considered an aperitif.
The doctor slapped the pocket where he kept his flask and said, “It’s the only thing that soothes my leg. You see that cloudburst out there?” he added, pointing at the cloud that was emptying itself of its water. “My leg detects it. I’ve got a twenty-five-kilogram barometer attached to my hip.”
The lawyer turned his eyes to the sea, where the cloud continued to pour down rain. A second, more distant formation of clouds was lowering over the horizon. The sea was iridescent with the pearly tints of diesel fuel. Goitia lowered his window slightly and the storm’s strong, oxygenated odor came through the chink. The interior of the vehicle smelled of new plastic. There was also a light whiff of cognac in the air. Goitia handled the car smoothly. He’d decided to enjoy the excursion, and every now and then when he reached for the gearshift, his hand closed around the doctor’s cane, and the mistake elated him. He was trying to change gears with a cane, an old cripple’s cane. The doctor remained silent for some minutes. The road ran on past summer villas, many of them already closed because the season had come to an end. There were some tiny gardens, cut back with the meticulousness of a hairdresser, others more lavish, and still others transformed into parking lots or supermarket lots, where only a single decorative tree, a row of tamarinds, or a gigantic monkey puzzle tree indicated the former presence of a garden. The doctor pointed out a bar, vaguely intending that Goitia should stop. The lawyer’s eyes kept searching out the sea between the succession of country houses and villas. The doctor interrupted his thoughts.
“What did your mother say when you told her you were going to come here?”
“To Biarritz?”
“To the old Etxarri woman’s house.”
“She didn’t say anything. Should she have said something?”
The doctor heaved an aromatic sigh. “No, there was nothing she should have said. That’s just it. The thing is, she didn’t say anything.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“What’s there to understand?”
Goitia struck the steering wheel. His good mood had evaporated. What were these riddles? He stopped at a red light while a file of children with short pants and multicolored backpacks walked across the zebra-striped crossing zone. The doctor’s cognac odor wafted to the young man’s nostrils again, further irritating him. He said, “I’m here so I can have lunch with you and take a break from my studies, not so you can break my head with questions. All right?”
“All right, my boy, all right. I only wanted to know what your mother thought about your stay here.”
“What does what my mother thinks have to do with anything?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Well, then?”
“Then nothing. I’ll phrase the question differently. Didn’t it surprise your mother to learn that you were coming precisely here to study for those damned examinations?”
“No, it didn’t surprise her. Why should it surprise her?”
“Frankly, it’s been years since anyone expected your mother to come here, or you, either.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The old Etxarri woman doesn’t seem to be sorry.”
“No, she doesn’t. Is all this going somewhere?”
The doctor unscrewed, as before, the cup-shaped, nickel-plated cap of his flask. Goitia opened his side window. The doctor made no reply to his question. In an access of impatience, Goitia struck the steering wheel again, this time with both hands. “Besides, I didn’t know I was going to lunch with someone who’s constantly reaching into his pocket and pulling out a flask of cognac, as if it were some kind of tonic,” he continued ironically.
“It is. In a certain way, it is. Your grandmother gave me this flask. It was the flask your grandfather used when he was on campaign.”
“I don’t think my grandfather drank when he was on campaign.”
The doctor thought this a valid conjecture and dropped the subject. The line of schoolchildren had finished crossing the intersection, and Goitia reached for the gearshift. The cane had rolled toward him, and he roughly pushed it aside. The doctor put it between his legs. The boy was getting irritated, all right, and he was getting irritated, too, and that wasn’t advisable, because they were supposed to be having a good day and a good lunch together, and maybe they might take a walk afterward and the doctor could exercise his leg a little on the seaside promenade, rainstorms permitting, or maybe they could go to a café and talk and return home in the evening with the feeling of having spent a good day in each other’s company, the young lawyer in the old doctor’s company, or vice versa, the solid, solitary doctor in the company of an irritable lawyer with no time to waste, or at least resigned to wasting only that one day. As they entered Biarritz, the doctor indicated the sign BIARRITZ—BEACHES, which the lawyer would have followed in any case. It had rained a short time before, and the tires hissed on the wet asphalt. Tiny droplets of rainwater still hung on the elegant, feathery foliage of the tamarind trees. The road ran along the beach. The sand was a dense, uniform color, as if the tide had just receded. The terraces of some cafés and restaurants had been cleared, but others
had remained exposed, and their pedestal tables shone wetly. The doctor pointed out the Grand Hôtel. The lawyer made no comment. The doctor concluded that he was going to have to apologize.
“I’m sorry I upset you.”
“It’s not important.”
“I’m a curious old man,” the doctor said, striking the floor of the car with his cane’s rubber tip. “And that sometimes leads me to commit impertinences. Park wherever you want. I’ve invited you to lunch, and I promise not to bother you with any more damned questions. What’s wrong with me? Why do I have this stupid rage for asking questions? It’s over. I promise you, it’s over.”
“That’s not it.”
“Damn it, your mother’s opinion interests me. Your mother should have come with you to Hondarribia, damn it, and then she would have joined us for lunch. Between the two of us, we could have told you some things.”
“Why? Is there something I should know?”
“That’s a stupid question. You’ve asked the last of the day’s stupid questions, and I’m not going to answer you.”
They continued in silence. Goitia parked in front of an ice-cream parlor. The doctor recognized the establishment. In recent years, it had changed names three times, always Italian names. Now it was called Fregoli. Who was Fregoli? An opera composer? A tenor? The storm had brightened up the colors of the awning. The doctor had a thought for Hortensia Fiquet, the educated, refined woman with whom he had shared a little less than a year of his life and his feelings and who without any doubt would have known who Fregoli was. A nougat-maker? The doctor savored the sweet sensation of being in France. Goitia locked the car and joined him on the sidewalk. The doctor checked the time and made certain Goitia was on his left side so that he himself could walk without obstruction. The hotel restaurant was on a terrace with a balustrade, just above the beach promenade. The threat of another storm made them request a table inside. Deep wall-to-wall carpets muffled their steps. It was around one o’clock when the doctor elegantly shook open his napkin, the lawyer meticulously unfolded his, and they settled in for lunch.
“I, too, was a man in love,” the doctor said in the course of the meal, and then he went on to recount to the lawyer the story bruited about by the old gardeners of Hondarribia, that is, the one about the clump of hydrangeas—of hortensias—and the woman of that name to whom those flowers were dedicated, and about the doctor’s ephemeral romantic relationship with her. But had the doctor continued to expatiate upon his emotional life, amid the knives and the forks and the succession of dishes, his young companion would have thought, “This man is an idiot,” and that was obviously not the doctor’s goal, if indeed he had one other than the goal of acting like a proper host in that hotel restaurant. He prided himself on controlling his thoughts. With age, his desire to explore memory and acquire the discipline of knowledge had taken on dramatic aspects, like a theater production whose director reveals only the seductive and advantageously lit sequence of events going on downstage and leaves the shadowy nightmares of the backstage area for themes never to be expressed. Isabel had spent her honeymoon in that same hotel and eaten lunch, with everyday banality, in that same dining room. The carpets and upholstery had surely been changed since then, and the waiters weren’t the same, because otherwise they would have looked as mummified and crippled as the doctor himself. There had been no change in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, the ones called “spiders,” with tear-shaped crystals and bronze arms and hundreds of pieces of many-faceted glass, which was at that moment mingling the rainy grayness reflected from outside with the brilliant sparkle of the wall lights. The arrangement of tables and chairs was different. Back in those days, great hotels had become the cathedrals of the haut monde, performing the function that cathedrals had provided in centuries gone by, centers of pilgrimage and enjoyment and boredom where visitors were served by canons or maîtres d’hôtel. And if a new cloudburst pelted the windows of the dining room with rainwater, Doctor Castro’s thoughts would become even sadder, although they were already sad and guilty about what concerned him. He would have liked to tell the story as though he’d found it written down in pencil, in some impulsive, passionate, immediate form, like the outpourings in war diaries and in letters from prison, and—why not?—in diaries written by women, subject to every sort of distress and disinclined to take the trouble, in times of shortages, to find pen and ink, which, however, Captain Herráiz had not lacked when he wrote his two letters, the first from San Sebastián, and the second when he was on his way to the front. And had those letters never been received, perhaps a school notebook would have turned up, written in pencil, with a record of the distress suffered by the addressee in wartime, but the letters arrived, the first because it had been deposited in a box in the main post office and because of the absurdly good postal service, which continued even in the darkest moments of the rebellion, and the second because it was delivered after the captain’s execution with his belongings, that is, a watch, a souvenir of Loyola, a hip flask, and some other knickknacks of the kind that the executed always seem to have about them, but not including his field glasses, which had been confiscated as military equipment. The doctor had to place himself on the near side of suffering, at the moment when a recently married woman receives two letters and a handful of trivial objects with the news that her young love is dead, and she lays both hands on her stomach as if to support the treasure she carries inside her, and she refuses to believe and weeps, but afterward, those letters and that handful of objects are put aside, like evidence too painful to be borne. Another woman, firmer or more serene in her grief, would have seized a pencil and recorded all that in a notebook, like a prayer, or like an act of revenge against fate. As he entertained these thoughts, black clouds gathered over the doctor’s brow, because Isabel’s love had been a tragic love, not a faded love, and that was a horrible privilege, not like his love affair with the queen of the hydrangeas or the figs, the sweet, late-blooming Hortensia Fiquet.
Some say that the honeymoon and the loss of virginity mark a couple’s relationship forever, but neither Isabel nor the captain had much time to verify that assertion or to determine the significance of the drops of blood dribbled onto a hotel bed sheet. She had been a virgin, of course; all brides were virgins back then. In the following weeks, we can assume that she, too, like her husband, recalled her honeymoon, and therefore we must believe that her memories were made even more vivid when she read the aforesaid letters. Her happiness had been brief. Little or nothing in writing remained of those weeks, or of those days, or rather of those moments when the captain’s living eyes glazed over, permanently crystallized by death into an inert, mineral gleam, like a trace of eternity that she had been unable to contemplate, that she would not have recognized, and that even then, with the evidence of his death in her hand, she still denied. And even so, the memory and the intensity of the young husband’s love belonged to a register deeper and more mysterious than death itself, deposited in Isabel’s memory of her love for him. The letters that Isabel had received from the captain were there. Nobody had destroyed them. In some part of the house, in some folder, in some desk’s secret drawer, those letters lay sleeping, as they had slept for so many years. The doctor would have given a great deal to hold those letters in his hand and to be able to add them to his store of knowledge. Not out of some unseemly curiosity, but out of the immense respect that all human feelings related to death elicited from him and which, he thought, would somehow have been reflected in a posthumous reading of those letters. He would have liked to interpret the young widow’s melancholy without having recourse to the kindly smile of the psychiatrist when faced with slight or inoffensive forms of madness. Given the opportunity to read them, he would have expected that mail between two lovers would grant him, like something out of a novel, the privilege of gaining access to their lives shortly before one of them learned that he was going to die. Isabel no doubt read the letters every night, and they made her feel once more like the belo
ved woman she had been, the one to whom the letters had been addressed, or rather, she felt she was that other, beloved woman, the one she had been and would never be again.… Dear Isabel … My Dear Love … Her favorite of the two letters was the second, more tender and more tragic, perhaps because the captain had sensed that his death was near when he wrote it. And when she read it, she murmured a song of her childhood that the letter suggested to her, as if somehow, when she held before her eyes the love those words contained, she became a child again.… The blue afternoon on the path … Perhaps it was the memory of a romantic walk the two of them had taken. Perhaps it was what the psychiatrist, in his kindly way, would call a regression. Perhaps it was the refuge of childhood for a soul in pain. But even though grief deranges the reason and makes one return to childhood years and songs, she was strong in herself, and she knew how to separate nostalgia for lost innocence from the present, brutal introduction to sorrow.
It’s possible that she received messages from her family in Bilbao over the radio—that wasn’t so rare in those days. Separated families sent messages to their loved ones across the battle lines. On the banks of the Deva, the country had turned into another country, and the land into another land. Isabel may have received news, but probably the indifference to which her terrible melancholy had reduced her was stronger than the desire to find out what had happened to her family, to those of her blood who had remained on the other side of the front. The last immediate memory she had of her previous life evoked the unreal and now almost grotesque whirl of the dancing at her wedding. The house had acquired inhuman proportions. It was inhabited only by those ghosts. On some nights, the doctor would hear the sound of music. By then, he’d already laid aside his crutches, and every evening he’d go out into the garden to take his invalid leg for a walk. So it was: From then on, his indispensable companion would be his repaired leg. Cane in hand, silent under the stars of that first autumn of the war, the doctor would hear music in the night, music coming from the villa of Las Cruces, and it wasn’t the music of the phantom orchestra that played in Isabel’s memory, accompanying the incessant carousel of the dancing at her wedding, but real music, though seeming unreal in the night and in the midst of war. It was the music that Isabel was playing on a gramophone, and it was produced from one of those Bakelite discs that spun and crackled as if the gramophone were a little mill, and what it was grinding was sand. At that time, she was not yet visibly pregnant. Her pregnancy was known only to herself. Captain Herráiz’s seed was pulsing in Isabel’s belly, and no one knew it. And the most important thing was not to know it, so that she might bow with greater fascination before the terrible void the captain’s death had created around her and preserve the ignorance of her state, so that no hope, no future life, would come to change the sumptuous contemplation of her solitude. One night, the doctor saw her step out onto the porch. She was carrying the two letters in her hand. In the dimly illuminated house behind her, the gramophone was spinning out a waltz or a melody from the wedding music in Lohengrin, accompanied by the inevitable sand-grinding. Still unsure of himself with his cane, the doctor halted. For some days, the Amuitz lighthouse had stopped sending out signals, because it had been blown up. The moon was sailing across the heavens. It was the September moon, the moon of vigorous tides, and one could hear the muffled sound of the sea pounding the breakwater below. The shadowy outlines of the cliffs grew larger. Scattered lights could be seen on the other side of the water, and far away, up the French coast, a twinkling: the Biarritz lighthouse, intact but weak, like a glint of peace among dark shadows. The lighthouse was so far away that its beam could not be made out. Maybe she took those signals for a call, or for a repeated but indecipherable message, summarized in two brief twinkles and a pause, and then a somewhat more prolonged twinkle, followed again by two brief twinkles and a pause, as if insisting on the message might conduce to its interpretation. She knew that the light came from Biarritz. She stood there, hypnotized by the distant twinkling, until the record was over and the gramophone needle was running around in an empty groove. Then she turned toward the house as if something had interrupted her fantasy or her dream, as if that waltz or wedding march were meant to be unending, and perhaps she was irritated, like children interrupted in their daydreaming. The doctor, fearing that she might discover him, retreated. The gramophone needle kept scratching in the stupid Bakelite groove. She stopped. She seemed to hesitate. Abruptly, she threw down the two accursed letters she’d been holding, hesitated again for a few seconds, and then stooped to pick them up, and in that violent gesture the doctor recognized that she wasn’t deranged; the only delirium she was suffering from was that of her grief. And he deduced more than that, because the rebellion against fate that her demeanor implied was a sign of strength. It always happens like this, when a person is able to dominate the melancholy that forms the border of madness and gather up the reins of suffering again. And thus, after throwing them on the ground, she gathered up those letters. Then she entered her house. Almost at the same moment, the noise coming from the gramophone ceased, and a few seconds later, the lights went out. Then the doctor emerged from the shadows. There was nothing sordid in his spying on that scene. There was nothing obscene or murky in his curiosity; on the contrary, the doctor felt protective and affectionate toward the woman, even though misogyny and his physical state prevented him from showing his feelings, and there was a certain grandeur in satisfying his curiosity, because someday that curiosity could be illustrative, could enable him to delve into the roots of the story. Many situations need to have been witnessed by someone. Many things are comprehensible because someone felt the blade of curiosity like a knife and slipped it into the story at the right moment. Perhaps pride hindered Isabel from asking for help, or from asking for company. The doctor hadn’t considered that question. Autumn, sad and miserable, was stripping the trees. The northwestern winds combed white tufts into the waves. On certain days, one could make out the silhouette of a destroyer on the horizon, probably the Velasco, part of the friendly fleet or the enemy fleet, according to which radio stations the doctor was able to tune in. The front lines of the war had moved away, but in his neighbor’s house, the intimate, irreconcilable tremors that the war had caused were still being felt like a secret cataclysm, perhaps more pathetic because it was more private. The doctor was a witness to those events, and maybe it was his mission—his only mission—someday to find an explanation for them.
The Wrong Blood Page 13