The doctor had a few cans of asparagus in his pantry. That might seem ludicrous, if looked at from this distance, but it’s possible to imagine what a can of asparagus represented in those days, not because of its nutritional value, but because it was special, it evoked a party, a celebration, and it helped one forget the long-standing diet of potatoes and chickpeas. He had run out of cognac, but there was still some asparagus. Then he remembered his neighbor and decided to give her a can of asparagus and half a pound of the nougat the Cizur boy’s family had sent him. He had coffee—which, for some reason, was readily available in Hondarribia—and sugar was coming, because sugar beets were being boiled on the banks of the Ebro. There was no oil, and if by chance his neighbor had run out, there was nothing the doctor could do about that. If other people were running out of oil, he grumbled to himself, well, he had run out of cognac. The doctor paid her a visit, but he did not undertake this operation without taking serious precautions. He walked down from Los Sauces, aided only by his cane. After reaching the road and walking past the garden wall, he stopped at the gate of Las Cruces to catch his breath. Up to that point, nothing had gone awry. His leg was responding—that is, though it seemed to hang down dead from his hip, it nonetheless obediently executed the maneuver of dragging its foot and then stiffly thrusting it forward, after which the good leg joined it, and so on successively. After a few minutes’ rest, the doctor stepped through the gate and walked up to the porch. A knapsack with the provisions—the can of asparagus and the nougat—was slung over his shoulder. Before knocking on the door, he adjusted the knapsack and assumed the most dignified posture he could. His neighbor answered the door herself. The gardener came only occasionally to perform various chores for her, and it was still some time before María Antonia Etxarri would arrive to serve in that house. Isabel hadn’t stepped outside for months, both because of the interminable succession of squalls and because of the horror of open spaces that often accompanies great grief. It was an exceptionally calm night. Isabel had a fire going, too, and when she showed him inside, the doctor smelled the hot aroma of burning firewood, overlying the humid, wintry atmosphere of damp carpets and cold furniture. Isabel looked at him without recognizing him. Her hands were in gloves made of colored wool. In the darkness of the porch, her figure had reminded him of the silhouette he often saw passing behind the window, with the same mystery and the same intensity.
“I’m your neighbor in Los Sauces, Doctor Castro.”
“Yes, I recognize you,” she said.
Very good. The doctor had been mistaken. She recognized him. A low garden wall, thirty meters of garden, and half a lawn stood between them, and it was as though they were separated by a continent. There was electricity that night, but the little entrance hall the doctor stepped into was very dimly lit. He leaned his cane against a chair and opened his knapsack.
“I’ve come to bring you a few provisions. In times like these, neighbors have to help one another. The war involves us all.”
“What are you saying?”
The doctor hesitated, unable to repeat his words. Of course the war involved everybody, especially that very woman. She had barely avoided being obliged to receive a couple of soldiers into her home not long after losing her husband. She had escaped the outside world by remaining shut up in her house. She had managed to reach some kind of equilibrium between the winter and her solitude, and at that moment, at that stupid moment, her Los Sauces neighbor appeared at Las Cruces, reminding her that everyone was involved in the war, beginning with those who had shot her husband dead and ending with the intrusion of a neighbor who rooted around in a knapsack and extracted a can of asparagus and half a pound of nougat. The sequence of events passed through the doctor’s mind. It was pathetic. Exceedingly pathetic. Conscious of his accursed stupidity, the doctor babbled an excuse, holding out the package with the asparagus and the nougat. She extended a gloved hand and took the package. Then the doctor met her eye. “That’s some asparagus and nougat,” the doctor said.
“Thank you,” she said, uncertain whether she should open the package or do something else. Finally, she decided to put it on a console table. “Would you like to come in and sit down?”
“Sit down? Oh, no. I couldn’t sit down with this leg,” the doctor said, slapping his bad leg like a horse that had made an admirable effort and obtained good results. “If I sat down, I’d have to stay seated for two hours. I think I should go back home. I’ve done my good-neighborly duty,” he added with a smile.
“Thanks again,” she said. “If you need coffee, I have coffee.”
“Oh, I’ve got coffee, too,” the doctor exclaimed, overjoyed that the conversation was taking a good turn. “What I don’t have is oil.”
“I don’t have oil, either. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I don’t need oil,” the doctor said, correcting himself rather nervously. “I’m not exchanging asparagus and nougat for coffee and oil. It’s a gift.”
She smiled. “Very well,” she said.
“I’ve got a soldier quartered in my house, and I depend on him for my supplies,” the doctor said, gently patting his crippled leg. “I can send him to the village to get what you need. Or what he can find.”
“Thank you. I have my gardener. Really, wouldn’t you like to come in and sit down?”
The doctor pondered the question for a moment. “No. No, I won’t come in.”
She smiled again, a little disconcerted. The entrance hall resembled a chapel. Her hands were folded on her chest, enveloped in the colored gloves, which let her fingertips show. The cold was penetrating her body. The fireplace heated only the big drawing room. A memory came to the doctor’s mind, a recollection that went back only a few months but seemed to come from another century or another age. To see her like this was very different from seeing her on the day of her wedding. Her face had lost color and looked pallid in the semidarkness. She had matured, in the sense that suffering brings on maturity. Her pupils were dilated, and her eyes had increased in size. Her hair was gathered on her shoulders, and as he remembered the scene at the wedding, it was difficult to imagine the elaborate hairdo that had crowned the beauty of the bride. The doctor had probably expected a tragic vision, not sweet but not completely unsociable, of suffering. Isabel was a domestic vision, not even aloof from oil shortages and problems with provisioning, for those were not what tormented her mind. Her strength didn’t come from outside her. Then the doctor lowered his eyes and noticed her condition. Under her folded hands in their colored gloves, her stomach was swelling with the bulge that gives females their true strength. How could he have failed to notice sooner? That was where her force came from. She looked about five months pregnant. The doctor was so surprised that he couldn’t be certain. Five months pregnant, yes indeed, the doctor thought, making the calculation, at least five months, and it couldn’t be otherwise, he couldn’t suppose that her pregnancy was the result of the Annunciation. The doctor raised his eyes from his neighbor’s fascinating stomach and asked, “Five months?”
“A little more than five months.”
“You can’t stay alone in these circumstances.”
“I think I can deal with them.”
“Can you?”
“I think I can.”
“You should go inside and sit down,” the doctor said abruptly, recognizing the signs of fatigue in her. “Maybe I should go in and sit down, too. Somebody has to stay here with you.”
“I don’t need anybody,” she insisted.
“All right. You don’t need anybody. But the time will come when you shall need someone, and that time is coming soon.… May I suggest that you call me?”
She made no reply. She probably hadn’t given the subject much thought. Did she plan to give birth alone? He imagined her situation, between the winter and the darkness and the war, and with all her attention fixed on the growing bulge in her belly.
“I’ll call you if it’s necessary,” she said in a firm
voice.
“My leg prevents me from going beyond this garden wall, but as long as I’m the only doctor around who’s not treating war wounded, it’s my duty to deliver a baby or treat a toothache.”
She made a gesture of impatience.
“Especially with a first parturition,” the doctor went on. “And let me express my sympathy. I imagine that a posthumous child …” He stopped himself in time. “Forgive me.”
She gave him a withering look, raised her hands to her stomach, and clasped her bulge. “I don’t need condolences. Do you understand?”
“I imagine that bearing a posthumous child is not the best way to become a mother,” the doctor said, thinking that he had to complete his sentence.
Then he looked away from her intense eyes. He had an absurd thought: What was that solitary woman going to do with asparagus and nougat? Music came from the interior of the house. She had the radio on. They were playing patriotic pasodobles ahead of the news bulletin. The doctor wouldn’t have dared to suggest that they should spend the evening together, that evening and other evenings, and in any case she would have refused, just as the doctor had at first refused to go in and sit down. Neither of them felt cordial enough for that sort of thing. It seemed to the doctor that Isabel was wearing scarlet lipstick. No, not scarlet, but violet or indigo. It was an illusion of the semidarkness, which lent her lips that color. They were prominent and fleshy, what men would have called a young woman’s “bee-stung” lips, and they gave her pale face an allure of which she was not completely oblivious. So perhaps there was another reason not to enter that house or not to prolong his visit there. It was said that in the city there were still people hiding in cellars or creeping around in attics, fugitives from Irún or marked men and women from Hondarribia, but it was a novelistic or romantic idea to imagine that this young widow with the blue lips and the bulging stomach was harboring fugitives in her house while they waited for a launch to take them to the other side, and in fact neither the doctor nor Isabel had enough kindness or courage left to expose themselves to other people’s dangers. The doctor was supporting himself on the back of an armchair. He looked around for his cane, which he had left leaning against some piece of furniture. “In any case,” he said, “I’m sorry for the misfortune that has fallen on this house.”
“I don’t need condolences,” Isabel repeated.
“I understand, I understand. Nevertheless, you’re going to need me to assist you, and it had better be clear to you that I’m prepared to do so,” said the doctor, seizing his cane and positioning his leg for a pivot. He didn’t wish to act against this solitary female’s will. Female animals gave birth that way, and the doctor knew that he was confronting the instinct of one such female. “There’s a young soldier quartered in my house,” the doctor added, ignoring her silence. “He’s a good lad. And I’m an invalid. I’ll tell him to be alert for whatever may happen.”
She didn’t reply. The doctor turned his back on her and headed for the door. His leg responded with renewed strength. When he reached the door, she hadn’t moved from her place. With his hand on the door handle, the doctor turned around to take his leave.
“Good night.”
Before he stepped outside, she abruptly raised her chin and said, “Doctor!”
“Is there something else?”
“Thank you for …”
“The asparagus and the nougat.”
“Exactly. Thank you for the asparagus and the nougat.”
“Think nothing of it. Happy holidays,” the doctor said, without irony, almost mechanically, on the assumption that the tradition of well-wishing proper to the season was ingrained in everyone’s unconscious. He opened the door and received the cold December air in his face. Then he closed the door gently, as if he and the house had established some degree of complicity. He was wrong, or at least he wasn’t completely right, and not because of her, not because of the distrust her grief threw up around her, but because of himself, because he was irresponsible and insecure, without any more notion of how to attend a birth than what he’d learned in medical school, that is, not much, and just as he trusted his crippled leg to do its part on the way home, he also trusted that the natural process of birth required nothing but patience and tenacity. The doctor closed the door behind him and felt the astronomical peace of the night on his face. Without a doubt, it was freezing in the mountains. She, for her part, had not moved. She was still standing in the middle of the entrance hall, holding the bulge in her stomach, near the package of asparagus and nougat that the doctor had brought her. As he returned home, the doctor looked over the garden wall and saw a light in the living room at Los Sauces. That meant that the boy from Cizur had arrived. The waxing crescent moon shed a sterile light on the estuary, the same indifferent moon as in peacetime. A fine, cold fog enveloped the bare trees. Those were the days when it snowed on the mountains of Lesaka and the frontier of France was covered with white, and later the snow froze. The winter of 1936 was like that, cold and bright, as people say all winters were in the old days. The doctor set out for the villa of Los Sauces from the villa of Las Cruces with renewed determination. He’d begun to think of his ruined leg as a solid support, and he believed it could be a guarantee of longevity, like the freeboard of certain ships. With the passage of time, his prediction had looked more and more accurate, and now it was confirmed. The doctor had survived long enough to be old as well as crippled. He could still boast a little about his good shape and strong constitution to Goitia, his young lawyer neighbor.
The Wrong Blood Page 15