María Antonia left the dining room. She closed the door behind her and returned to the kitchen with her Christmas bonus. She was satisfied, and she said nothing to the cook. It was possible that the cook got a Christmas bonus double or triple the girl’s—that is, a bonus of two or three pesetas—and old María Antonia Etxarri couldn’t help smiling at the thought of what the peseta in her fist had meant back then to young María Antonia, the child she had been, above all considering that at the end of her years and her life, when many a calendar leaf had been torn off and cast away, the old Etxarri woman could pride herself on having inherited a villa and on having eighteen million pesetas in the bank. But now she was crying. Now tears welled up in her eyes at the thought of what that had been like, all of it, the terrible years, the terrible days, the nights of fright and frost, and tears also welled up when she remembered the Christmas bonus. A peseta was a lot of money, and a coin so valuable was rarely seen in a young girl’s hand. The King of the Belgians, half paraplegic, or considerably handicapped by his stroke, continued to be the rich man of Vera. It was said that he gave out fifty pesetas in Christmas bonuses. The war had not changed his generosity in any way, and it’s possible that the course of events even prompted him to make a show of his largesse. With that peseta in hand, the girl could go on carrying the bulge in her abdomen with complete confidence. She plucked chickens. It would have been another thing entirely to be obliged to earn the peseta or to do dirty work for it in some brothel.
Then four more months passed, and she gave birth to her child. It was so easy that she could have done it standing up. The young mother’s labor was attended by the cook, who had expertise in this area as well. In those days, the radio never stopped broadcasting news. Bilbao fell around the middle or end of April, or later that spring. After palpating María Antonia’s belly, Don Leopoldo had assured her that the baby inside her would be a boy, but although he was the rich man of Vera, the fact didn’t make him a prophet, and the baby turned out to be a girl. Around that time, the nationalist troops that entered Bilbao celebrated a Te Deum in the basilica of Begoña. Don Leopoldo heard the service on the radio and wanted the little girl who had been born in his house to be named Begoña. But María Antonia Etxarri thought differently, and she called her baby Verónica. That was the name of the woman who wiped Christ’s face. María Antonia thought Verónica a fine name for a girl.
A thick fog came down from the mountains on those spring mornings. It seemed as though the clouds that settled on the mountain crests were torn to shreds by the beech forests. All day long, the village was a raft afloat in fog, although up above the mountains, the sky was blue. In the clearings of the woods, where once snow had lain, patches of rock appeared, cleansed and gleaming like quartz. It was a gloomy, rainy spring. And the wood pigeons, who knew no borders, were arriving from the north. María Antonia had always heard that babies born in springtime were lucky, because mothers’ breasts gave more milk in the spring, and it appeared that the saying was true. Her breasts seemed to contain several liters of milk. The cook compared María Antonia’s breasts with her own. The cook’s breasts had suckled two sons. She therefore knew what it was to have milk, and she acknowledged that María Antonia had at least as much milk as she’d had. On this account, there was no danger. Both women felt the rural pride in bountiful breasts and the ancient fear of flaccid breasts and babies dead of malnutrition.
María Antonia’s stepfather had returned to the Etxarri inn and begun to repair the extensive damages. María Antonia’s mother hadn’t returned; but after wandering in the mountains for several months, the cows, with the exception of a female calf requisitioned by the soldiers, had come back. For her part, María Antonia had no intention of returning to the inn. It would become a prosperous business again when the war ended, or rather, when the war was only a memory, but María Antonia did not envision that future and so had no wish to go back to Etxarri’s. One day, the King of the Belgians summoned her again. Had the King of the Belgians summoned her to commit some dissolute act, such as those that were rumored among the staff and recounted by the cook, that would have been terrible, but it wasn’t the case this time, either. The baby was now three months old. The cook regularly felt María Antonia’s breasts to be sure that she had abundant milk. Don Leopoldo wanted to speak to her about her future and that of her child. He was the rich man of Vera, and in the midst of war, he knew what the future would hold. Once again, he summoned her to the dining room. Don Leopoldo was alone. María Antonia stood still for a moment in the doorway. Then she stepped into the room with the baby in her arms and walked over the long pinewood boards of the parquet floor as if she were gliding, and the parquet didn’t creak. She passed the sideboard without looking toward the mirror that hung above it. Then she stopped and waited for Don Leopoldo to speak. The King of the Belgians made a sign with his hand and said, “Come closer. Are you afraid?”
“No, I’m not afraid,” said the girl, cradling her infant in her arms.
“You don’t want to go back to the inn, right?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“In that case, there’s something I can do for you.”
María Antonia remained silent. And little did she imagine that something more important than her own life, something that would affect both her life and her baby’s life, was at stake in that long, somber room, with windows that looked out on fog, nor could she have conceived the debt her life owed that man’s compassion, or what that man was gaining in exchange for his compassion, if indeed compassion was involved, because the child she held in her arms was a capital asset, the interest on which María Antonia hadn’t understood, and which this man’s decision would make her understand. María Antonia gently rocked her sleeping child in her arms. Don Leopoldo wanted to see the baby. The King of the Belgians rolled his chair near them. He leaned forward and pushed aside the mantilla that covered the infant’s face. She was already three months old, a robust little girl with very white skin, perhaps because of María Antonia’s good milk, the best the child could have had, according to the cook. Her eyes were brownish under a thin gray glaze, and there was a certain golden sparkle in her eyelashes. Her tiny finger- and toenails were bright and hard, a sign of good health and firmness of character, according to the cook. Her nascent eyebrows were like two tiny strips of down above her sleeping eyes. Her first growth of hair had been cut so that it would grow out in greater abundance. María Antonia thought the child looked like her, but the cook found unfamiliar features in the little face. The King of the Belgians grunted. She looks like a hungry little piglet, he declared. Then he said, “You’re going to go to Hondarribia. You’ll be a servant in Isabel Cruces’s house. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
María Antonia moved her head. She’d thought that someday she would have to leave the house in Vera, maybe when the war was over, maybe if other circumstances required her to leave, and though the war hadn’t ended yet, nor was it known whether in fact it would ever end, that made no difference, because the circumstances that had arisen, whatever they were, could be a good opportunity for her. She still had childish imaginings, and she remembered a song that had often given her food for thought. She wanted to live in a house where you could reach the stars and sleep with the sound of the sea. Something of her fantasy was visible in her face. The King of the Belgians, sitting in his wheelchair, looked at her with surprise, as if he’d read her thoughts.
“Do you understand what I said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you understand me or not,” said the King of the Belgians a little skeptically. He looked with curiosity at the girl, as if some strange ambition he couldn’t discover might give itself away. “In any case, you’ll be going into service at Las Cruces,” he concluded.
María Antonia had to visit the Etxarri inn so that her stepfather could see the baby. From the inn she would go to the villa of Las Cruces, where she was expected. After what had happened, her stepfathe
r naturally didn’t call her a tramp and a slut, but she wasn’t needed in the inn, especially with a baby, and everyone was glad to see her go into service. Much had to be done so that years later, after the war was over, the Etxarri inn might become a prosperous business. María Antonia never missed the place. When nights were foggy and stormy, it wasn’t possible to touch the stars from the villa of Las Cruces. But one always fell asleep in that house to the dull, heavy sound of high tide.
One of the King of the Belgians’s relatives took María Antonia and the child to Hondarribia, where Isabel, who had been advised of her arrival days before, was waiting for her. María Antonia had gathered together all her clothes. She’d acquired some things in Vera, the cook had given her others, and there were a few items she’d picked up from the inn. She put them all into an expandable leather suitcase that was in the attic and had belonged to some traveler of days gone by. Everything fit into that suitcase. The man who was related to the King of the Belgians didn’t utter a word for the entire length of the trip. When they reached the villa of Las Cruces, the relative drove the car through the gate and into the garden, stopped in front of the porch, and told María Antonia to walk to the back of the house and go in by the kitchen door. María Antonia obeyed. She went around the house, entered by the kitchen door, and waited, standing in the kitchen with the child in her arms. It was a fine kitchen. It had a good, modern sink and good larders, but no servants had ever worked there. It was a white, cold place, with glints of aluminum and brass. There was a coal stove and an electric stove with two burners. María Antonia’s eye was the eye of an expert. Something made her think that this kitchen could bring bad luck, but maybe she was mistaken, and the contrary could be the case as well, that is, the kitchen could contain both bad luck and its antidote, as can happen in a health center or a clinic. After some time passed, she was called into the drawing room and found herself face-to-face with the mistress of the house. And it’s possible that, at that moment, an unknown element was added to the girl’s impression that there hadn’t been any domestic help in the villa, an additional, precise factor that wasn’t abandonment or slovenliness or the strange feeling of violation or punishment that seemed to pervade every corner like a thin, cold sigh. Isabel looked the way flowers look when they’ve been exposed to a winter frost. Not that María Antonia could perceive this, except through the intuition of what abandonment and violation had signified in her own experience. But standing in the drawing room, barely past the threshold and the leaded glass doors, in front of the woman who was waiting for her wearing a blue housecoat and blue slippers, with her hair caught up in a blue ribbon and her hands folded as if she were praying, in front of that woman waiting for her with the person related to the King of the Belgians, María Antonia understood that something graver than an abandonment had taken place in that house. Once again, in the first moments of silence, she felt incapable of understanding what it had been. Then a sob came from the baby. The mantilla covered her face, but her tiny hands emerged from the folds like two extremities with independent lives. Isabel insisted that María Antonia come closer. When she greeted the girl, the timbre of her voice was strangely pure and emotional.
“So you are María Antonia?”
“Yes, Señora.”
“I pictured you older. How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen,” Isabel repeated softly and absently, as if she remembered some happy event associated with that time of life. Then she returned to the present and smiled. Isabel was more than eight years older than the girl who was entering her service, but their difference in age was canceled out by the hard, laborious young years that had marked María Antonia’s features and reddened her cheeks, while Isabel’s young years had modeled her face, despite her anguish, in the pale porcelain befitting a young lady. “Have you brought anything else?” Isabel added, looking at the bundle that María Antonia was rocking in her arms and trying to soothe.
“I have a suitcase.”
“Very good. You can go and fetch it.”
The leather suitcase was still in the King of the Belgians’s relative’s car. There was a moment of hesitation. The girl stood with the bundled infant in her arms and didn’t know where she could put it. She peered around, searching for a suitable spot, feeling stupid and uncomfortable. She didn’t know if she should leave the baby in the drawing room the way one would leave a fragile little package, or if she should look for a place in the kitchen. At that moment, Isabel stepped forward, held out her arms, and said, “I’ll keep the child.”
María Antonia handed her the baby, and the Señora received it with infinite tenderness, with inexpert hands, with extreme caution. She stepped away to a window, cradling the bundle in her arms and moving aside the mantilla that covered the infant’s face. “I’ll keep Verónica while you go and collect your bag,” she said, turning to face the window, and before María Antonia went out, she felt flattered that the Señora knew her daughter’s name. The drawing room was in semidarkness. When Isabel moved aside the mantilla and uncovered the baby’s face, she gazed at it as if she were examining some precious merchandise that she had just received and that she was prepared to take charge of, always provided that it was undamaged, but her gaze was not without tenderness and not without expectation, as if the precious merchandise had occupied her thoughts for many an hour. When María Antonia returned with the suitcase, Isabel had not moved from her place at the window. In the soft light, her blue housecoat took on a satiny sheen. The baby had stopped crying, like Moses in the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter. Don Leopoldo’s relative had lit a cigarette and was sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed. For a few minutes, nobody noticed María Antonia’s return. Finally, Isabel turned her head and saw that the girl was standing there.
“Come with me. I’ll show you your room.”
The two women left the drawing room. Isabel, with the baby still in her arms, went ahead, followed by María Antonia, carrying the suitcase that contained all her belongings. The servant’s room, located next to the kitchen, featured a white lacquer wardrobe and an iron bed, bigger and clearly more comfortable than the attic bed in Vera. This one had a thick mattress covered with a red bedspread. At the head of the bed, framed under glass, hung a colored print of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the village. A blood-red pinstripe ran through the green-and-salmon-colored braids of the wallpaper. It was a cozy room, and María Antonia immediately felt that it was, beyond a doubt, the place where her good luck would begin, in spite of the cold and the damp air. The window opened onto the mountain, not the sea, but that didn’t bother her. The toilet facilities were modern, that is, as modern as toilet facilities could be in those days, and certainly more modern than anything María Antonia had ever seen, as comfortable-looking, in their way, as the bed, as well provided with handy little white lacquer shelves as the wardrobe, and completely covered with tiles, with a mirror and a light above the mirror; it was a bathroom better than those she’d used in the inn and in the big house in Vera de Bidasoa, and in any case better than any bathroom she would have ever imagined having at her disposal. That was important, and the toilet augured a better future than the white china chamber pots in the attic of the big house in Vera and the washbasin where the water would sometimes freeze, not to mention the possibility that Don Leopoldo would someday choose to indulge his dissolute proclivities at her expense. María Antonia put her suitcase down on the floor.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes, Señora.”
“I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here,” said Isabel. “You’ll find it very tranquil.” Then, with a strange, mad look on her face, she added, “There are no men here.”
Still carrying the baby, Isabel walked out of the room, leaving María Antonia to unpack the few things she’d brought, which included her own clothes and some clothing for the baby. While she was putting them away in the wardrobe, she heard an automobile horn and the sound of an engine. The man related to
the King of the Belgians was leaving. Isabel stayed in the drawing room with the child. Then she went back to the servant’s room, because the baby had started crying again.
“She must be hungry,” María Antonia said.
Both women went into the kitchen. María Antonia sat in a wooden chair, unbuttoned her sweater and the top two buttons of her shirt, revealing her white bosom with its map of blue veins, and took out her teat, as frankly and simply as if she were opening a pantry. The baby changed hands. María Antonia gave her a dark nipple to suckle. Isabel stood nearby expectantly, as if she’d turned over the infant to its wet nurse. Maybe it was in this ordinary, banal, almost wordless way that everything happened. Maybe there was no distrust, on either side, right from the start. One could imagine no simpler, more natural movement, one woman handing the bundled infant to the other, and the other receiving the bundle in her arms, as if the women had established a pact between them, and the functions corresponding to each had been agreed upon. Or maybe from the moment María Antonia stepped inside, the two women, without considering any other possibility, had mutually acknowledged that the bundle belonged to both of them, as if by a previously negotiated arrangement, since in that house a maid was needed and a baby coveted, with equal urgency. Because on one side, there was covetousness and yearning for motherhood and frustrated motherhood, and on the other, naïveté and a hint of suspicion, enough to prevent her from understanding what was paralyzing the young Señora and making her stand by expectantly while she, María Antonia, suckled her baby. And while the baby fed, gripping the girl’s dark nipple, Isabel could neither step away nor even move; her arms were suddenly empty, and she could only contemplate that most profound and essential act of maternity without being able to resign herself to it, gazing not with curiosity or tenderness, but with barely dissimulated covetousness and yearning, maybe because, contrary to what her simple gestures might imply, she was most deeply and bitterly moved, and her perturbation, however she managed to control it, could betray itself only through her eyes. María Antonia held the child away for a moment before giving her the breast again.
The Wrong Blood Page 20