María Antonia climbed the stairs of the house behind the cook. In the big, rambling houses of Vera that she’d known, the attics were as vast as meeting rooms, with enough space for bedrooms, for storing trunks, and for a granary. The cook bent her head to avoid the big beams above the turning of the stair. María Antonia’s hair barely grazed them. There were three rooms. Amid the complicated carpentry of the roof, the rest of the attic served as an attic.
When they entered the room, the cook said to María Antonia, “This will be your bed.”
“Are there sheets and spreads?”
“There are. This house has everything, and there’s no shortage of linen.”
Then the cook gave her some clothes, because she’d lost hers when she left the inn. Later, when her pregnancy became visible and her stomach was growing, she was given clothes appropriate to her condition. The cook gave her two skirts, some bed linen, and a shawl. And so María Antonia, in those difficult months, had food and clothing, and she helped in the house with whatever there was to be done and learned many good things from the cook. It was in that house that María Antonia first thought about having her own house someday, and it seems that she launched her imagination very far into the future with that thought, leaping over the years, the lustrums, and the decades, until one day she found herself the owner of Las Cruces. But back then, as always and with everything in her life, she could evoke her obscure desires only with the words of a song:
I want a pretty little house
With flowers around it, and trees,
Where you can touch the stars with your hands,
Where you sleep with the sound of the sea.
And apparently her imagination had indeed made a jump in time, past tragedies and premonitions, and come to rest in Las Cruces, under the fall constellations, facing the sound of the tides, in the villa that was definitively hers, because Doña Isabel had bequeathed it to her. But back then, in Vera de Bidasoa, in the house of the rich man of Vera, she was still a girl who’d been raped, and she still saw shadows moving in the night. Sometimes they were soldiers coming down from the mountain passes, frozen, wrapped up in their overcoats, back from patrolling the well-patrolled frontier with France. And on other occasions, the shadows were fugitives, men on the run, seeking the protection of the mountains and a chance to cross the border, shadows trying to evade the other shadows, the ones wearing overcoats, and some shepherds had been executed for serving fugitives as guides, and some smugglers left over from peacetime suffered the same fate, or else they made a fortune doing business in the war.
In any case, María Antonia looked out the window of her attic room, which faced north, and watched winter come. When dawn appeared, there were icy flowers on the windowpanes. The nights spilled an offering of frost onto the roofs, and the cold entered bodies as if it wanted to inhabit them, like a foretaste of deathly cold, a cold all the more fearful and unbearable for residing in the living, lingering in joints, leaving long, scarlet lines on legs and hands, and numbing fingers with a filigree so painful that the cold seemed to be tracing the circulation of the blood with a steel needle. The dining room, the bedrooms on the lower floors, and the kitchen were heated, but the cold took possession of the attic rooms. Why was she remembering all that? Certainly not to complain. Not even the shadow of a complaint crossed her mind. The old Etxarri woman accommodated the cold and the winter darkness in her memory, and she was able to compensate for them with the grateful recollection of a good fire, one of those fires that make the blood beat in your temples, a hearth fire in the stone fireplace of a real home. And at the time, she was an ignorant little girl, far from an adult, and already a woman, compelled to go to bed with a sergeant in the Carlist requetés who had been without his wife on the night of their first wedding anniversary. But what she’d felt then had not been sorrow, nor was it sorrow now. Why not? She didn’t know. Sorrow has hidden forms and manifestations that pretend not to be sorrow, but they can weigh down a whole life, like a load of charcoal in the soul. And in the space between those two figures, between the pregnant young girl and the uncouth old woman, her entire existence had transpired, so that the two were linked only by memory. But as for the intervening years, considering that tragedy and suffering and premonitions are the very school of life, the old Etxarri woman couldn’t complain. She’d had her part of suffering, just as the cows had their portion of grass, and from it they took their nourishment, since that was what strong girls and healthy cows had to do. She’d known other winters before that one. There was a washbowl filled with water in the room, and in the morning it was covered with a thin sheet of ice, but no one in that house experienced the misery of the war.
There was no lack of blankets. The cook slept in the same room, under three blankets. She was a big, white woman, with hands like her body, big and white. She was a good cook. She knew about cooking, and she knew about other things as well, and before María Antonia’s stomach started to show, the cook had suggested to her a poultice of abortifacient herbs. She also thought that something could be accomplished with a knitting needle. All that awakened dark fears in María Antonia, not fear associated with inducing an abortion—she wasn’t much tempted by that idea—but the even greater fear that the baby she was carrying in her womb would be a monster, with a black mouth and a swollen head like the corpses that had turned up in the river, because of having been conceived in the greatest evil that could be inflicted on a girl, evil that was bound to have consequences. As for an abortion, she could never do such a thing, it was beyond her capacity, and even if she had to give birth on the threshold of the church, she would give birth, because that was her instinct. She felt strong where others would have felt weak, and before she went to sleep, she would gather her forces and curl up, knees touching elbows and fists clenched under her chin, protecting her stomach, and then she would stare at the window with wide-open eyes, contemplating the sumptuous blue of the night. Those were terrible, icy nights. She slept under two blankets. The cook’s great bulk lay in the other bed, snoring away. From her, María Antonia learned how to prepare stews and also how to choose the best vegetables. That house lacked for nothing during the war. The cook’s white, chubby hands, the ones that had offered her herb poultices and knitting needles, played with potatoes and fashioned big round loaves of bread. Having first severed a chicken’s crest in order to bleed it, she’d held it under one arm and finished it off by smothering it in her other fist. And while they were in the kitchen, and since María Antonia’s stomach was getting heavy, the cook whispered to her about the greater evils that it had been María Antonia’s good fortune to escape.
“You’re lucky you didn’t wind up a soldiers’ whore in a tent brothel,” the cook said.
The girl made no reply.
“Do you hear what I’m saying?”
María Antonia nodded. The cook pressed the chicken, whose wings were still flapping, more tightly under her arm. Some Moroccan units, which had been among those repulsed in the attack on San Marcial, had spent a little time in the village before being relieved by fresh troops. Some even more frightening thoughts occurred to the cook. The light from the fire lit up her hair.
“Do you know where Moors stick it in women? In both holes.”
“Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true.”
María Antonia shivered. After the experiences she’d had in the course of her brief existence, she could imagine that she’d escaped some atrocious things. The cook lifted the lifeless chicken by its long neck, holding it high, like a trophy, gave it to María Antonia to pluck, and then went out to the coop for another chicken. María Antonia held the dead chicken between her legs and began to pluck it. There was a bucket filled with hot water at her side. From time to time, she dipped the chicken in the hot water to loosen the quills of its feathers and make plucking it easier. In the house of the King of the Belgians, food was never in short supply. Two chickens were to be cooked for Christmas Day. By María Antonia’s reckon
ing, five months had passed since the events, that is, since that detachment of troops had arrived at the inn, and with them the sergeant who had raped her. And four months had passed since she’d first come to the house in Vera, after wandering the highway—which was crammed with soldiers moving up to the front—for an entire month, on foot and alone. And in those five months, her stomach had grown round and strong, a pregnant girl’s healthy belly, on which she rested the chicken she was now plucking. A fire was burning in the hearth. The kitchen fire had also been lit. The cast-iron back of the fireplace sent out blue and orange flashes. Water was boiling on the stove. There were other servants in the house, including two women of the cook’s age and a man who had neither been called up by the army nor run away from it. But María Antonia found herself alone in the kitchen at that moment, assiduously yanking out a chicken’s feathers. The cook came in from the yard, holding the second victim by the legs. The animal flapped its wings desperately. This chicken, like the first, had red feathers. Its open eye, round and bright, was the color of wine, and its legs were yellow and shiny, a sign of good health. The cook smiled with the ludic, ferocious expression of a gladiator. So is the existence of animals and people, too, María Antonia thought, so it is and so it ends, cut off by a blade or by sickness, whether that existence has been long or short, and the old Etxarri woman, thinking about what the girl she once was had been thinking, could not but approve her thoughts. Nor could she recall, as her memory scanned the past, any other kitchen as big as that one was, none so luminous and ardent by the hearth, or so cool and gloomy in the depths of the pantry, abounding in pots and casseroles, well stocked, with a stone floor, with white tiles above a granite sink, a wooden draining rack where plates and dishes were lined up like books in a library, and a small iron tank, the house’s central source of hot water, which was heated in pipes in the cast-iron stove and collected in the tank, and a calendar with a hunting scene on the wall, and under the print a little cardboard box for the needles and spools of thread used to sew together stuffed meat rolls, and the calendar page, which in her memory always indicated the month of December 1936. The cook clamped the chicken under her arm just as she’d held the previous chicken, and in order to bleed it, she sliced off its crest with a knife, as if she were shaving its head. Then she clamped its beak in her fist to smother it. The animal beat its wings even more violently. María Antonia turned away her eyes and concentrated on her task. She bent her head over both her bulging stomach and the chicken she was plucking, over the two things occupying her lap, the chicken and her swollen belly, as if they were the same thing or the same destiny, and she occupied her mind by thinking that her life would be more miserable than the lives of those chickens if she had wound up in a tent brothel, where Moors would be having their atrocious way with her. But she would have liked to explain the essential thing, and she figured that nobody in the house would be interested in hearing it. The essential thing was to sense what she was carrying in her womb, to sense how it was suspended inside her. It was something strong, something at once blind and sensitive, and it made her feel the way a robust tree might feel just before spring, assuming that a tree could have female feelings, which was not, to María Antonia’s way of thinking, a sure thing. Nevertheless, she could be certain that her swollen belly contained part of her and part of the anonymous sergeant who had made her pregnant, but it was more—almost totally—a part of her, even though, during the course of the past five months, she hadn’t forgotten the face of the man who’d impregnated her or the circumstances in which her impregnation had taken place.
Don Leopoldo, the King of the Belgians, sent for her. He was in the living room, which he rarely left. The girl laid her task aside, washed her hands in the pail of tepid water, and dried them on her apron. The kitchen door opened onto the yard and the field behind the house. The living and dining rooms were above the kitchen on the main floor, occupying it entirely except for the room that Don Leopoldo had transformed into a bedroom after his mishap. Two balconies looked out onto the village street. The windows on the other side looked out over fields that sloped down to the river. María Antonia climbed up the flight of stairs, holding her apron with both hands. She’d thought that climbing any flight of stairs to where a man was waiting for her was a sure sign that she was going to be raped, in spite of the state she was in, but she was mistaken, and the King of the Belgians, rich man though he was, had never imagined doing that, nor was he in any condition to try, and he had taken her into his home only out of pity and compassion. According to the cook, the King of the Belgians had given himself over to vice. He would send for one of the serving girls and make her urinate in front of him. He would require her to lift her skirt and squat down and urinate in a chamber pot in front of him. The cook said that the King of the Belgians, impotent in his wheelchair, had developed vices. Don Leopoldo was rich, and he could do whatever he wanted to. You could never know what strange vices men would develop, said the cook, and María Antonia had listened to her with incredulous ears. But the reason for her summons was nothing like that. María Antonia went up to where Don Leopoldo was, in fear that he would order her to urinate. At first glance, she saw that there was no chamber pot standing ready, and her distress disappeared. The dining room occupied approximately the same amount of space as the kitchen. It was almost bare of furniture, so that Don Leopoldo could move about freely in his wheelchair. Before entering the room, María Antonia could hear the clicking of the wheels on the parquet. Don Leopoldo wasn’t alone. He was attended by one of the servant girls, who was in charge of housecleaning. Another person, a relative, had been pushing the wheelchair and now stood beside it. María Antonia stopped in the doorway, and Don Leopoldo asked her to come in. He’d called her to tell her something, not to amuse himself.
“Your stepfather has returned to the inn, or to what’s left of the inn. Do you want to go back there to be with him, or would you rather stay here?”
“I’d rather stay here.”
“It can’t be long before your mother joins him.”
“I’d rather stay here,” the girl repeated.
“Very well,” said the King of the Belgians, and then, turning to his companion: “What did I tell you?”
Don Leopoldo’s relative shrugged his shoulders.
“Very well,” the King of the Belgians repeated.
The servant girl who did the cleaning turned to María Antonia and smiled. Don Leopoldo asked to be moved nearer the window, and his relative pushed the wheelchair.
“Come closer,” said Don Leopoldo, making a gesture with his hand.
María Antonia stepped closer to him. The long, gleaming boards of the parquet floor were outlined with great precision. The vinaceous stain on Don Leopoldo’s forehead seemed to have grown, and its color had a satiny sheen. The King of the Belgians wished to place his hand on María Antonia’s stomach, and the girl consented, not that she would have thought of objecting to his gesture, because there was no violence or wicked intention in it; on the contrary, it was a demonstration of compassion and affection. The King of the Belgians remained silent for a moment, palpating her bulging stomach, and then he withdrew his hand.
“It seems to me that you’ve got a fine baby boy in there,” prophesied the King of the Belgians, with the broad, twisted smile that the hemiplegia of his face allowed. “How about you, what do you think?”
“Whatever you say, Don Leopoldo,” the girl said.
“Did you hear that?” said Don Leopoldo, amused by her reply and turning his stiff face to his attendant. “Whatever I say!”
The relative, who was standing beside the wheelchair, grew impatient. “Come on, leave the girl alone. She’ll learn what her baby is soon enough.”
“I have nothing to do with it,” said the King of the Belgians. “But it will be a boy.”
Then he lifted the blanket that covered his legs and thrust his hand into his pocket. His other hand appeared to be made of wood, like the two small wheels of his chair.
He drew out a coin and handed it to the girl. “Take it. It’s your Christmas bonus. It will bring good fortune to the baby boy you’re carrying inside.”
“Thank you, Don Leopoldo,” María Antonia said, bringing her hands out from under her apron to receive the peseta. There was a mirror over the sideboard, and she saw herself reflected in it, with the bulge in her stomach and the peseta in her hand, and with a humble glow around her silhouette from the light entering through the window, and she wasn’t ashamed of having hastened to accept the coin. There was no shame in that. The door of the converted room that was now Don Leopoldo’s bedroom stood open, and the radio could be heard. The war seemed very far, but it wasn’t far. María Antonia didn’t know if that peseta would prove useful to her during the war or after the war, but in any case, there was no shame in taking the coin and clutching it in her fist and murmuring thanks and feeling her swollen belly with a certain satisfaction.
“Now you can go back to the kitchen,” said the King of the Belgians. “When your baby comes, someone here will take care of you.”
The Wrong Blood Page 19