On the day when the doctor took young Goitia to lunch in Biarritz, María Antonia Etxarri seized the opportunity to make an inventory of all the table linen in the house. She knew that there were four sets of embroidered table linen in Las Cruces, along with another three sets of ordinary table linen for everyday use. Nonetheless, they had to be verified, much as the doctor verified the state of his health by patting his leg. She opened the drawer in the chest of drawers where the embroidered table linen was kept and counted the folded tablecloths without taking them out of the drawer, as one might run a hand over the spines of some notebooks. Then she knelt down to count the napkins, spreading them out on the carpet on the floor, twelve napkins per tablecloth, except for a set of reduced size, embroidered with saffron-colored thread, of which there were only six. The three sets of table linen for everyday use were in a different chest of drawers, located near the kitchen, and she didn’t bother to count those. She usually carried out this operation every few weeks, just as she regularly examined all the flatware in the house in an attempt to resolve the mystery of whether it was sterling silver or pewter or silver plate. She liked to be alone when she took out the cutlery and the table linen. Since the guest had been in the house, she’d been able to do it only once. And that was already weeks ago. So in order to do it again, she took advantage of young Goitia’s absence when he was having lunch with the doctor.
María Antonia Etxarri had lunch early, in her kitchen, at around one o’clock. She had stopped doing any serious cooking, and she’d come to like canned food. She liked cans of already cooked dishes, the ones she’d been used to preparing herself. She found the canned versions neither better nor worse, perhaps because she’d begun to forget her own dishes, her own stews. Canned stews tasted more acidic to her. But she also thought that the fault might be hers for getting old, and that the acid taste was in her gums and on her palate. Moreover, canned stews had turned out to be much more economical. She would never have to take out any portion of the eighteen million she had in the bank or pawn the pewter or silver flatware. And so it was that on that day, after having inventoried the table linen, she opened a can, heated its contents, and sat down in the kitchen to eat. There was an oilcloth with blue and white squares covering the kitchen table, and there had been other oilcloths, but no tablecloth had ever covered that table.
Occasionally, she cooked bacalao, salt cod, because she hadn’t learned whether it was available in cans, and also because the people at the bacalao shop knew her, and they always gave her the piece on the bottom of the pile, the piece that was the tastiest, because it had absorbed the tasty juices from all the other pieces of bacalao. She felt great respect for codfish. She believed the fish that Jesus distributed to the crowd in the miracle of the loaves and fishes was cod. That was why she had heard people at the carnival in Lesaka refer to the fish as Santo Bacalao, Holy Cod. Once in the last three weeks, she had cooked bacalao for young Goitia, but the lawyer hadn’t seemed to notice that it was bacalao from the bottom of the pile, the tastiest piece. María Antonia Etxarri thought that she had an acidic palate because she was old, but she also thought that young Goitia had no palate at all. While he was having lunch in Biarritz, she heated a can of broad beans with red chistorra sausage, like all canned foods rather acidic to her taste, but that was her taste now. Later she’d go back to counting the table linen, and maybe she’d count the bed linen, too. The sky had cleared up after the midday storm. A faint light came through the kitchen window and revived the oilcloth’s satiny sheen. The house was an empty space filled with voices and weeping from the past. There was music on the radio. It was a group performing the hit song of the moment: Quita tus sucias manos del volante de mi camión. As a person who had no driver’s license, María Antonia was interested in anything that had to do with driver’s licenses, so she paid the song some discreet attention. Then her thoughts swerved off in other directions. Thrusting her spoon into the steaming plate of beans, María Antonia Etxarri considered that getting old was worth it, if only because it meant she could enjoy a plate of beans like these.
The doctor and the lawyer finished their lunch at around three-thirty. By inadvertent coincidence, the lawyer, like the old Etxarri woman, had eaten a dish of broad beans, but his were very tender and served with foie gras. This choice was not the best the restaurant had to offer. By dessert, he was repeating the foie gras. The sky had cleared over Biarritz, too. In the middle of lunch, the doctor got up and went to the lavatory. Left alone, the lawyer had a look around. The stuccowork on the ceiling appeared to have been executed by some branch of the pastry-making profession. Except to attend fancy weddings, no one but old people frequented such hotels anymore. Nevertheless, in other times, those had been the fashionable salons, inexplicably subject to the caprices of fashion, as any fashionable bar today is subject to current fashion, and in those days, it was the decorated-pastry look of the Second Empire or the rigid art nouveau furniture, doubtless introduced during the last renovation. There was a porcelain figure, a Chinese mandarin the size of a watermelon, on a draped stand. Whenever a waiter passed nearby, the vibrations of the floorboards caused the mandarin’s movable head to nod in greeting. But the lawyer’s eyes were drawn to the elegant, beveled-glass doors. They gave access to other reception rooms and to a sumptuously furnished and no doubt suffocating interior, and if the company that owned the hotel hadn’t reacted to one of its periodic crises by selling off the furniture, the sofas his grandmother had sat on would be back there, along with the little tables at which the newlyweds of half Europe had played cards during the interludes allowed them by their passion. The lawyer smiled. Someone at a table near him had ordered a soufflé flambé for dessert. The blue flame of the rum made him think of a crematory oven. At that moment, the doctor returned, making his way among the tables. Goitia wondered how many of the old folks who were staying in the hotel now had spent their honeymoon in those rooms, and how many might come there to celebrate their antique love with a flaming soufflé. The doctor sat down and shook out his napkin with an aristocratic gesture. The lawyer turned his gaze to the big windows. Except for the line of the horizon, where the color was more intense, the sky was a pale blue, streaked with unmoving bands of white clouds. The storm clouds had shifted eastward, and it was raining in the mountains. In the intervening time since Goitia and the doctor had arrived, the restaurant had almost emptied out. Two or three people remained at a few tables. The tablecloths were littered with bread crumbs.
The doctor had eaten he no longer knew what, because the conversation had diverted his attention to other times and other circumstances, nor did he know whether or not that had been his true objective, as he was repeatedly torn between what he could talk about and what he couldn’t say. And although it seemed like stretching the truth to call a conversation what had in fact been a monologue, and not even a moral lesson or a history lesson or a disquisition on genealogy, nevertheless, when all was said and done, it seemed to him that he had eaten well. With a sad gesture, he fanned bread crumbs off the tablecloth. A waiter observed his movement and arrived at the table with a silver-plated device consisting of a comb, a brush, and a kind of small hopper for collecting crumbs from the table. This activity jolted the doctor out of his faraway thoughts, and he asked for the bill. He ordered no cognac, even though he was thirsty for cognac. He intended to wait, and when they were in the car again, he’d drink the rest of the supply in his flask. He paid in francs and left a fifty-franc note as a tip. He didn’t know whether that was a stingy tip or a generous tip. He didn’t care.
“I had several good reasons for asking you to have lunch with me here, over and above all the things I told you,” the doctor said, taking it for granted that the after-lunch lingering, which at least in his opinion had gone on too long, was over.
“What reasons?” asked Goitia.
“Listen to me. If I had been married, I would have liked to spend my honeymoon in this hotel, too.”
He leaned on the edge of
the table and stood up, inadvertently letting his napkin fall to the floor. The table shook. Goitia rose and moved his chair aside to help the doctor. The waiter brought them the doctor’s cane and their raincoats. Music came from inside the hotel. A wedding was being celebrated in one of the reception rooms. When the waiters entering and leaving the dining room opened the doors, the vaporous melody of an orchestra could be heard, only to be muted again when the doors closed. At the end of the night, wedding receptions like this generally wound up in a nearby casino, the doctor said. Had he had such a wedding, he thought—but this thought remained unspoken—he would have liked the celebration to end with the guests losing a fortune at the casino gambling tables. But that was another matter. And damned if he knew whether a cripple even ought to get married. Or whether it was a defective character or unusually powerful feelings that caused a crippled man to remain a bachelor, bound to his leg the way Ulysses was bound to the mast of his ship, unresponsive to all siren calls that didn’t come from a brothel. But that was indeed another matter, and the doctor suspected that it had nothing to do with the real matter at hand. The awareness of how alone he was and of how careless it had been for him to seek out company sufficed to put him in a bad mood. They left the hotel arm in arm. The lawyer went ahead of the doctor in the lobby to stop the revolving door from crashing into him and then returned to take his arm. The doctor tried to free himself, pushing the young man away so that he could rely solely on his cane.
“I know a marvelous place to commit suicide around here,” said the doctor, whose digestion had made his mouth sour.
“Far?”
“No, not very far.”
They reached the place where they had left the car, and the doctor pointed out the road that led to a lookout tower. The powerful incoming tide struck with great force. A few shirtless teenagers were risking themselves on the little bridge so they could get doused by the spray of pulverized water that rose to a great height every time a wave broke. It seemed they were risking their lives, and perhaps they really were, for a game, for a dare, jubilant and drenched by the golden mist that suddenly covered them. Out beyond the breaking waves, the sea rippled with white patches like fleeces of wool, the sheep-scattered sea, tended by the winds, carrying in its bosom the uncontainable force of the tempest that could break out in a few hours, or on the other hand, maybe the wind would die down at dusk and they would be granted the dark sea of night, thick and placid as a muscular animal, brimming over at high tide as if the exhibition of its power had filled the basin formed by the land and the continents. A line of incandescent light marked the horizon. Goitia and the doctor stayed in the car and looked at the breaking waves for a long time. The doctor finished off the contents of his cognac flask. Great quantities of water leaped over the parapet and covered half the road. The spectacle repeated itself monotonously, the muffled explosion of the waves following the tall spew of white foam. The windshield misted up. The wine-dark sea disappeared from sight, and all that could be heard was the shower of pelting water when the trajectory of a wave reached the car. The young people who had been playing on the bridge seemed to have been snatched away by the tide. They suddenly appeared on the other side of the road, playing with a ball. The doctor wiped off the clouded windshield. “I think we should go back,” he said.
Goitia started the car, and they drove to the coastal highway on the same road by which they had come. The bands of clouds that had streaked the sky were spreading and merging. The surly ocean stretched out before the doctor’s eyes, like the saturnine fields of time. When they reached Hondarribia, the doctor asked the lawyer to drop him off at Los Sauces. The automobile rental company would come to fetch the car, but Goitia offered to return it himself and walk back to Las Cruces. The doctor watched him drive away and patted his pockets, looking for his house keys. It was not unpleasant to find himself alone again. He appreciated the silence. He appreciated the presence of the cat. He appreciated the experience that life had given him in that house, guilty or not, distressing or indifferent over the long course of the years, but which at least allowed him the company of his ghosts. He was thirsty. He thought it must be around six in the evening. After changing his clothes, he sat in an armchair in front of the window and poured himself a glass of cognac. Then the sky began to darken, and although it wasn’t yet the season for lighting a fire, the doctor shifted the armchair around and turned his eyes toward the hearth.
The fire of the winter of 1936 was burning there, but it was lit only by his memory, and that was enough; it was like fixing his eyes on a real fire, because there’s nothing more atavistic than the contemplation of a fire stoked by human memory. During the first winter of the war, firewood arrived from Irún, not just any firewood, and not firewood from the mountains around Irún, but wood from beams and roofs that had not been totally consumed when the city was burned. At the time when the rubble of Irún was being cleared away, those beams and joists and planks were cut into pieces to be sold as firewood. There was a business whose sole purpose was to sell scorched wood. And so, from the ruins of the burned city, at least enough material was extracted to keep the survivors warm. That winter was a harsh winter. It’s said that winters during wartime are always harsh, or so they remain engraved in the memory, as though winter had to add a portion of cold and chilblains to the sufferings caused by the wrath of men. The doctor ordered Severo to chop firewood for his neighbor. The boy from Cizur obeyed the doctor as if his orders came from an officer. Every two or three days, he cut up some wood into logs and kindling, filled a basket with it, carried it over to the villa at Las Cruces, and returned with news. He would say that he’d seen Isabel looking bad. Or that he’d seen her, and she was well disposed. On another day, Severo brought her three quarters of a salt pork loin, taken from a piece the boy had managed to subtract from two pieces salted for his captain. The day of the Epiphany had already passed when he brought her some chocolate. In those days, chocolate came in half-pound bars. Each bar was divided into one-ounce portions, so two bars contained sixteen ounces. Severo brought the woman eight ounces. Chocolate was good for pregnant women. The boy knew about women who were on the point of having a baby, because he had watched three of his sisters give birth. When it came to parturient females, he had a good eye, and he let the doctor know it, not bragging about his knowledge, nor suggesting that he’d be coming back someday soon with news of a birth that, in the doctor’s opinion, was not at all imminent, but with the simple naturalness of someone who talked about mares and women in the same way, the only difference being that mares weren’t offered chocolate. He felt no more implication in the tragedy of that unhappy woman than what he would have felt for one of his sisters in the same condition, to wit, widowed and pregnant, a situation that the boy from Cizur had no difficulty in understanding, after what he’d seen in the war. He sat in front of the fire without taking off his overcoat and held his rifle between his knees. Sometimes his face swelled up and seemed to become big and round. His mouth split open like a red wound when he smiled. He’d made his own calculations, and even though the doctor might think that he’d counted wrong, what he’d seen his sisters go through and what he knew about female animals convinced him he was right. One night when he came back from delivering firewood to Las Cruces, he made an announcement to the doctor, in the same considered tone he would have used when talking about a calf: “That woman’s going to have her baby any day now.”
And indeed, that was what happened. No midwife would have predicted what the boy from Cizur had announced. It was the middle of February. Rain fell in powerful gusts. The sky showed black, the color of stormy nights, but in this case an unmitigated, thick blackness that not even lightning flashes could tear. India ink had been spilled on the universe. Humans had been shut up in a box of rain, in a contraption invented by God to test his creatures’ patience, and their fear. It was one of those black nights that are recorded only in the Bible and the sacred books, precisely the kind of black night that only unlucky
women choose for giving birth. The Bay of Txingudi looked black, blacker than the hills on the other side. The water was a pool of tar, as if the sea were sending a black tide into the interior of the land. The massif of Jaizkibel rose against a sheet of black in the night, which was black with rain, as if it were raining tar. Nevertheless, on that night, there was a supply of electricity. The forty-watt bulb on the porch at Las Cruces was on, and more light could be seen in the drawing room. Rain was falling in disoriented gusts that came from every direction. It lashed the westward-facing windows, just as it drummed hard against the glass panels of the kitchen door. When a nocturnal wind howls, people say it’s a “dog night.” That night was a dog night and a baby night, too. The boy from Cizur had gone over to the villa of Las Cruces to deliver some firewood and light the Señora’s stove, or to bring her some chocolate or some meat or whatever little supplies he was in the habit of bringing. He came back, wrapped in his soaked overcoat. He opened the door all at once, and the rain blew in all the way to the floor tiles in the living room. Then he tossed back the hood of his overcoat, revealing his red face, and shouted, “Doctor! That woman’s dying.”
The Wrong Blood Page 16