“I’ll come back early tomorrow morning,” the doctor said.
She made no reply. The boy from Cizur placed the dead baby in a shoe box and made preparations to spend the night in the house. On the following day, he went to the cemetery with a package under his arm. Nobody asked him to do it. He offered to perform this service, because he had no guard duty that morning, and because to a certain extent, he’d grown fond of the tiny corpse he’d held in his arms. It looked as though that was going to be his tenderest memory of Hondarribia, and that his gesture would redeem the horrors in which he’d participated or which he’d witnessed in the war. He left the shoe box there, in one of the holes dug for stillborn babies, not entirely formed and not malformed either, but on the point of being formed, babies unbaptized and therefore nameless, the seraphim with oversized heads and fish eyes who cluster together in groups and go to limbo. Then the boy from Cizur walked back to Los Sauces with empty hands, with hands that were more than empty, because he didn’t know what to do with them.
Some weeks passed. The unit of volunteers from Cizur received orders to move out and join the second company of the third regiment of Carlist militia, requetés from Navarre, which had suffered casualties at Eibar, and the signal station was transferred with the unit. From loaded troop trucks, the soldiers said their farewells and shouted, “To Bilbao! To Bilbao!” And others sang to God and their dead in juvenile voices, for they were little past the age of innocence, and it was as if they weren’t heading to the front but rather going on an excursion and leaving behind a winter too inclement and too boring. And off they went. Severo took his leave of the doctor with a rustic’s plain and simple affection. The offensive against Vizcaya was being prepared. Bilbao would fall that spring. Thanks to the ruins of Irún, there was more than enough firewood to last the entire winter. But it was of no use to the doctor to remember the days and weeks that followed, when the awful night he’d lived through was already beginning to crystallize in his memory. It was of little use to him to remember the elements that were shaking around in his life back then, or to recall his bitterest emotions, or to weigh up which proportion he should assign to chance and which to his reiterated consciousness of his fault, because he didn’t believe that there had been a fault, though indeed there had been misfortune, and it was the irreparable consequence of a delivery carried out in those circumstances. He couldn’t deplore his incompetence or drown his memory in cognac for a whole lifetime, even though the subject of his incompetence inflamed his mind, as if he doubted the judgment of not guilty he’d rendered in the case of himself. Had he been at fault? These hands of his had assisted the woman in her childbed—that was indisputable—but nature was at least equally at fault, because nature had so dealt the cards. It didn’t seem likely that much had changed in the bedroom over there at Las Cruces. Probably no one had taken the hunting engravings down from the wall. Probably no one had thrown the crucifix into the nettles by way of getting rid of Him or judged that there could have been a higher responsibility for what happened. It was possible that the beds were still where they had always been, because the furnishings in such houses always have more longevity than the people who live in them. Perhaps a leak surrounded by an aureole had appeared in the ceiling. Perhaps young Goitia, who was so conscientiously preparing for his notarial examinations in the former gun room, slept in a bedroom near that other bedroom. The doctor hadn’t dared ask him. But back there, in his memory, the black rain of that night had remained, and the circle of light around the parchment-shaded lamp, and the bloody towels littering the bedroom floor, and the rustic boy from Cizur, holding the dead baby in his arms, gazed at the doctor with astonished eyes over the exhausted woman’s body. She had lost a great deal of blood and her labor had taken almost all her strength, but it was even more frightening to contemplate her now, immersed in the silence that seemed to have usurped her whole existence. Yet from her very grief, from her very silence, the woman would acquire increased strength, whereas what remained to her that night—the black night, because there was none blacker for many years—might not have been enough.
Four
THE WRONG WOMB
“THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW?” the old Etxarri woman asked, narrowing her eyes in incredulity.
“Yes, that’s what I said,” the lawyer replied, not absolutely certain that she had understood him.
The old woman frowned. Young Goitia had entered her kitchen with the intention of asking her for a glass of water, or with some other intention, but instead he’d suddenly announced that he would be returning to Madrid the day after tomorrow. The old woman hadn’t been prepared for that, and the lawyer was unable to understand the perplexity provoked by his announcement. Perhaps he should have phrased it differently. Perhaps the woman hadn’t understood the meaning of his words, that is, perhaps she hadn’t realized exactly which day he was talking about. He’d figured she should already know his plan, or else she should remember it, because Goitia had first announced it to her a week previously. But it was very possible that the old woman had forgotten all about it. She probably didn’t live according to the calendar. In any case, the lawyer underlined his meaning: “Tomorrow I’m going to get my books together and pack my suitcases,” he said, making packing gestures with his hands, in case the old woman still didn’t want to understand him.
She pondered for a few seconds. Then she reacted with a strange show of pride that disconcerted the lawyer. “The day after tomorrow,” she said in an oracular voice, “the day after tomorrow, I was planning to make bacalao.”
“Bacalao?”
The old woman nodded. She’d prepared bacalao for him once before. It was ten-thirty in the morning, and because she planned to dust that day, she’d bound up her hair with a handkerchief tied into two tight knots. The handkerchief gave her even more of a countrified air. She passed her tongue over her gums, as though a remnant of her breakfast had remained behind. After dusting, she intended to put half a salt cod to soak. She would soak it for thirty-six hours and change the water three times. A woman of her acquaintance put her bacalao to soak in the toilet tank for only twenty-four hours, changing the water every hour by pulling the flush chain, but in María Antonia Etxarri’s opinion, that was no way to proceed. She planned to use one of those holy cods that bear the image of Christ visible on their back skin, on the gray parchment of their scales, as on Verónica’s veil. She knew that a good bacalao could be recognized by the way the spots on its back figured the Holy Countenance, but to avoid overwhelming the lawyer, she kept that information to herself.
“Well, in any case, I have to go back to Madrid the day after tomorrow,” Goitia concluded.
María Antonia Etxarri didn’t insist. The lawyer scratched his head and left the kitchen without risking further comment. The old woman had been washing dishes, and she dried her hands on her apron. The chessboard floor tiles gleamed in the morning light, and there was a vague smell of bleach in the air. It was a sunny day, and the pots and pans hanging on the wall shone in all their glory. Backlit by the French doors, the old woman appeared transfigured for an instant. The autumn light enveloped her robust body. But that radiant-edged silhouette, practically haloed in sanctity, concealed the surprise and the affront caused by young Goitia’s announcement. She hadn’t imagined that the boy would stay there forever, she had even known that he’d be going before long, but the very thought filled her with a dark rancor. She considered Goitia a black-hearted ingrate for the small enthusiasm he’d shown at the prospect of bacalao—the lawyer hadn’t postponed his trip immediately upon hearing the jubilant news that she was going to cook bacalao—but the source of her rancor, the reason she felt affronted, might have been deeper in origin, almost indiscernible, proceeding from the old woman’s blood and entrails, as if from a very old and still unpaid debt. She moved away from the glass-paneled door, and the pale sun once again invested the floor tiles. The kitchen was illuminated with the geometrical innocence of a Flemish wood-panel painting. The old
Etxarri woman opened the door of a dark room and disappeared inside it. When she reemerged, pushing the door with an elbow, she was armed with a feather duster, various cloths, and a can of wax polish. Then she exited the peaceful, melancholy kitchen area, passed in front of the gun room without granting the lawyer so much as a glance, and headed for the dining room. Life moved, soft and gray, among the plumes of her feather duster and glided, smooth and satiny, under the determined buffets of her polishing cloth, because that, for her, was life and dedication, and she kept glory and rancor only in her guts. And while she dusted and polished, she had songs in her ears, songs like the music of the spheres, songs from her childhood and young girlhood.
Ay, Miguel,
Miguel, Miguel,
Mikeltxu…
She hadn’t known anyone called Mikeltxu, but a woman who’s been raped at the age of sixteen by a stranger ends up considering her rapist a kind of malicious ghost, and that ghost acquires a name, upon which falls all the bitterness and melancholy of old age. However, there was no need of any song to illustrate that María Antonia’s entire life had been conditioned by that distant event, back then as well as now, the present, when the luminous, real morning blended into the ashen and no less real twilight of her existence. Nothing had a name anymore. And so the songs gave a name to what she would have been unable to name otherwise. She could be seen through curtains, loaded down with her heraldic panoply: peacock feather duster, polishing cloth, and can of wax. She could be heard singing to the quick rhythm of her cloth as she polished the furniture. Anyone would have forgotten about her after that, and the lawyer, absorbed in gathering his papers, forgot about her.
Around midday, Goitia saw the doctor coming along the asphalt road that led to the village. First he saw the doctor’s hat above the garden wall. Then, where the built-up road reached half the height of the wall, he could see the doctor’s head and shoulders. The lawyer hadn’t moved from his study in some time. He’d spent half the morning collecting and sorting his notes. He stretched out his arms and pushed his chair back, and then he went out into the garden of Las Cruces to chat with the doctor when he opened the gate of Los Sauces.
“Good morning!”
“Good morning, my boy. You see how splendid autumn days can be,” the doctor said, describing a semicircle in the air with his cane and indicating the pale effect of the sun on the dead leaves.
“It is a very fine day.”
“Indeed.”
The doctor had taken a walk to get the stiffness out of his lower back, and he was returning with a newspaper under his arm, because he wasn’t too old or too crippled to go down to the newsstand in the village and buy himself a paper. But he was breathless from the effort, and he had no desire for conversation.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m going back to Madrid the day after tomorrow,” the lawyer said.
“Ah, yes?”
“Yes. The time I’ve spent here has been very profitable.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the doctor said.
The doctor slowly closed the gate. He was wearing a long raincoat and a scarf knotted under his chin. The day was clear and luminous, with one of those skies that autumn consecrates to celebrating the splendor of bare trees and dead leaves, leaving a pale veneer on the surface of things and robbing them of color. The doctor saluted his young friend by raising his cane toward his hat. “I’m glad to hear it,” he repeated as he went up the road to his house, on the other side of the stone wall.
“I’m going to score high on those exams,” Goitia said.
“Of course,” said the doctor, already some distance away.
Then he turned around. “By the way, have you told old Antonia?”
“Yes, I’ve told her.”
“And what did she say?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy the bacalao she’s planning to cook.”
“Have you ever tried it?”
“I certainly have. She served it to me two or three weeks ago.”
“You should stay for that reason alone.”
The lawyer burst out laughing. “No, I won’t do that.”
The doctor saluted with his cane again and hesitated for a few seconds. Then he shrugged his shoulders and set off toward Los Sauces. When Satan saw him approaching, he came out from among the flower boxes. It was a beautiful day, and the bare branches of the trees drew a zebra skin on the grass and the fallen leaves in the garden. That afternoon, the old Etxarri woman was moving around the kitchen, as she often did of an afternoon; but this time, perhaps, she was nervous or upset because of the lawyer’s announcement, or perhaps she was agitated by some obscure project, or perhaps she simply felt shut up or about to be shut up in her solitude. The night frightened her, the autumnal night, which came on too early, reducing the hours of daylight, and was filled with new constellations, the ones that hide behind the mountains during the summer, the Ass, the Goat, the Man with the Club, and the others whose names she didn’t know because she hadn’t been able to interpret them. Before nightfall, she went out into the garden, and the fermented air, thick with rotting grasses and flowers, tickled her nostrils as if it were cider air, or cider gas. Then she shut herself up again. The boy would have dinner in the village. Beyond the garden of Las Cruces, she saw the lights in the doctor’s house go on.
When the war passed near the Etxarri inn and left it in ruins, María Antonia went to Vera de Bidasoa and had the good fortune to be taken in by the rich man of Vera, Don Leopoldo, the King of the Belgians. At that time, Vera de Bidasoa was a village with blackened walls that had not suffered in the war, because it had offered no resistance, and the columns proceeding from Pamplona had passed through Vera without a fight on their way to the Endarlatza bridge. A garrison stayed in Vera and sent up detachments to guard the passes, watch the border with France, and maintain calm in those mountains, the same in Vera as in Elizondo, where the garrison was larger. But María Antonia Etxarri knew nothing about the course of the war. Her period was late, very late, and she didn’t know whether the cause was the stress of events or the humiliation of having been raped. This hadn’t happened to her with the two men she’d known before, the one who had been her boyfriend and the one who had taken advantage of her, but those men had acted with her consent, even though she wasn’t certain that she’d actually desired them. In any case, she’d resigned herself to her punishment when her stepfather beat her with his belt buckle and called her txona and dirty whore, maybe because he hadn’t dared to take advantage of her himself, and whatever had happened to her with those two men, her periods had continued to come regularly. But when three months had passed since she’d been raped in the inn, she had to recognize that she was pregnant; that was what she got out of the war. The King of the Belgians, as everyone called him, received her in his house. This was a building of two floors, with a patch of grass where a walnut tree stood. Moss and lichen and little ferns grew on the garden walls. Don Leopoldo was confined to a wheelchair, and someone pushed him to the dining room, where the girl was waiting for him. The wheels clattered over the joins in the parquet floor.
“Your parents have run away, and you can stay here until they return,” he said. “Do you understand? They have nothing to fear. Eventually, they’ll be back.”
María Antonia didn’t reply. She was looking at the wheelchair, which seemed to have served another generation. It had two big wheels like bicycle wheels and two smaller wooden wheels. The King of the Belgians was grateful to her stepfather, because Don Leopoldo had suffered his embolism in the inn some days before the outbreak of the war, and the stepfather had been the first to take care of him.
He patted the girl’s cheek with his right hand and then sat back in his chair again. A blanket covered his knees. The stroke had left his visage slightly askew, but his expression wasn’t disagreeable. He had a high forehead and prominent cheekbones, and the mishap hadn’t altered the strength of his face. A shiny, plum-colored blotch had spread across his forehe
ad. He was a generous, affable man, and in spite of his stiff mouth, he smiled. He cleared his throat—swallowing saliva was difficult for him—and turned to the person who had accompanied him. “She’ll share a room with the cook. This girl has suffered, and someone has to take care of her.”
“Very well.”
“Careful with the boys,” the King of the Belgians added, addressing María Antonia, for he knew what had happened to her. Someone had told him about it. Maybe he thought there was nothing else he could do. Then he turned his wheelchair around by himself and rolled away, click-clack-click over the broad pine parquet floorboards. He stopped for a moment to glance out the window and then left the dining room. Ever since his mishap, his life had been confined to the main floor, where he’d had his bedroom installed. Outside on the patch of grass, there were three cows around the walnut tree. An old bathtub served as their water trough. That patch of lawn was no garden, and Don Leopoldo’s house, for all that he was the rich man of Vera, didn’t have a garden, because he was a man of industry. He had an interest in a paper factory, as well as a business in Vera and, in Irún, a big hardware store that had been looted. Years before, in what had been the garden, he had ordered the building of a warehouse for the paper factory. A convoy of two trucks loaded with military equipment was parked on the lawn with the cows. The vehicles belonged to the garrison’s quartermaster corps. María Antonia Etxarri could see those trucks through the window, and she could also see them from the window of the room she shared with the cook. There were executions in Vera, too, against the walls of the cemetery. And among the atrocities that she could have recounted, there was the one concerning the two bound men whose floating bodies had appeared in the river. First they had been made to blaspheme—I shit on Christ—and then drowned so that they would go to hell. Or so it was said. The people who had seen the two bodies after they were fished out of the river said that their mouths were black for having dirtied the name of Christ and their heads swollen from the blows they’d received. One of the dead men was missing an earlobe. A rifle butt had squashed it, and a fish had eaten it away.
The Wrong Blood Page 18