The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  “Is she cutting teeth?”

  “It’s too early for her to be cutting teeth,” said María Antonia, without dwelling on the Señora’s ignorance. “But she has hard gums, and she bites my nipples.”

  While the baby kneaded her breast again with tiny but already well-formed hands, the girl sat up straight in the chair. The rounded, pearly white flesh of her bosom seemed to illuminate her face. At her side, Isabel remained silent. There was a special dignity in that situation, whatever the end of the brand-new relationship might be. Isabel had known the baby’s name, Verónica, for weeks, because she’d been informed of it at the time when she’d learned that María Antonia would be coming to serve in her house, and as she registered that long, beautiful name, rich in its deployment of vowels, lovely as a sheet of copper, a process of appropriation had begun deep in her heart. It would have been intelligent to think that the spider’s stratagem had been put in place, or that Isabel was moving toward the satisfaction of her desires by following the dog’s curve, that line which apparently goes straight to its goal but which nevertheless describes, through imperceptible lateral movements toward immediate emanations and scents, a trajectory that doesn’t confirm its objective. And the scent came from the milk that hadn’t flowed from her breasts. She had bound her breasts so that the milk wouldn’t rise in them, and now she felt her body suffocated by the same oppression. It seemed that all the anguish of her solitude and her frustrated maternity had converged in that spot. For a few minutes, in the almost mystical silence that enveloped the scene, Isabel began to feel that an irretrievable part of her life was being left behind. Fate had branded her existence with fire and sowed salt in her bowels, and that same fate, which had toyed with her love and her instincts as with a palette of garish colors, now placed before her eyes a gentle and temperate scene of ordinary motherhood, as if taking pity on her, or perhaps so that she might see what she could still reach by another road, or perhaps to suggest to a tortured, skeptical heart, anticipating a barren life, the possibility of salvation. When María Antonia finished suckling Verónica, she lifted the infant from her breast and moved her to the other side. A thread of milk ran down from the corner of the baby’s mouth, and the girl wiped it away with a handkerchief. She wanted to cover her breast, but she couldn’t pull her shirt together while holding the baby. There followed another moment of hesitation, an uncertain instant in which Isabel held out her arms and María Antonia, as if she found that gesture of help natural and kind, handed over the child again, perhaps because of the Señora’s almost supplicant attitude, or because of an immediate impulse to obey. Probably neither of the two women had a premonition of what those gestures entailed, what concessions they implied, what mutual pact. Neither of them had the clear-sightedness necessary to understand it, but then again, the situation could also be interpreted differently, and we might entertain the possibility that neither the act of handing over nor the act of acceptance was innocent. Perhaps each of the two women cherished projects that would have turned out to be complementary, had they been compared, but neither of them could have confessed to having such projects. It would have been risky to draw conclusions and surmise that the baby girl no longer belonged to her natural mother. But if that wasn’t the case, and presuming that life lets itself be guided by spontaneous gestures, bland or unimportant, we could imagine that something had crystallized there, one of those elemental gestures on which the course of a destiny can depend. Isabel took the baby in her arms again. María Antonia covered her breast and buttoned her shirt and her sweater. Both women remained silent for a moment in the cold and sterile solitude of the kitchen. María Antonia seemed to have turned over her daughter to the common patrimony of the house where she had gone into service. With a hitherto unseen expression between voracious and domestic, Isabel rocked the baby in her arms. Then she moved away, whispering affectionate words. She looked satisfied, as if everything had been worked out in advance, and that might have been the most accurate conjecture, although it would be impossible to demonstrate.

  “Verónica, eh? They couldn’t have picked a better name for you.”

  María Antonia finished installing herself in her dominions. The domestic service in the house became organized, which meant that pots started boiling in the kitchen again, and María Antonia was able to put into practice what she had learned from the cook in Vera, in the King of the Belgians’ house. Over the course of the years, the old Etxarri woman had washed a lot of plates, had witnessed the arrival of electrical appliances, and had seen her room receive new wallpaper twice, prior to being painted cream and then blue, which was its present color; but back then, everything seemed to have remained immobile for an indefinite period of time, perhaps the suspended time of the country at war. From her months in Vera de Bidasoa, in the house of the King of the Belgians, María Antonia Etxarri had kept certain superstitions and remembered some pieces of advice. She could see the large kitchen in the great, rambling house in Vera, with its stone floor, and the cook sacrificing the Christmas chickens. María Antonia’s cheeks were still hot from the glowing embers of that winter’s fires. She would have wished to stretch out her hands to the fireplace again and feel the weight of her pregnant stomach again and let the fire warm the blood of her lost innocence again, and the blood she shared with the child inside her, but even if she’d known how to read the future in birds’ entrails, and even if the cook, with all her knowledge, had interpreted them for her, she wouldn’t have known how to express it. A few weeks after María Antonia Etxarri’s arrival at Las Cruces, Isabel called Doctor Castro and asked him to come and examine the baby. In Vera, the cook had said it was bad luck to have a doctor for a neighbor, because that meant you were next door to misfortune. Furthermore, it was equally bad luck to cross paths with a cripple, because cripples are heralds of twisted destinies. Chance, however, had so arranged things that the neighbor of the house where María Antonia Etxarri was going into service was a crippled doctor, and her first sight of the owner of Los Sauces struck fear into her heart. He was like a storm cloud, a menace looming over the entire house. But even though the old Etxarri woman had retained her suspicion of him over the years, she had to concede, for all practical purposes, that Doctor Castro, a physician and a cripple, shared the same ambiguity as the number thirteen, or black cats, and as such could be a harbinger either of bad luck or of good luck; and it had been her lot, fortunately, to find in him an instance of the second possibility.

  The spring air, clean and cold, got under the doctor’s raincoat, making its tails billow, swelling its shoulders, and giving him an aspect somewhere between ghostly and grotesque. The raincoat had deep openings under the arms. That had been a popular fashion many years previously, for reasons of hygiene or for greater ease of movement. It was a raincoat from the old days, one of those articles of clothing that survive a man, with big square pockets, a felt lining, and a narrow, round collar fastened with a leather button practically under the Adam’s apple. But the wind was coming in through the underarm openings, the raincoat was inflating like a balloon, and the doctor struggled to keep his balance, bracing himself on his cane. It was the early morning bluster, which precedes the strong northwest winds. The view spread out before him, displaying all the shades of green in the thin morning mist and exhibiting the gray-blue or steel-gray watercolor of the sea. Currents rippled the surface, tracing roads on the water, and one could imagine them as roads to nowhere, uncertain, capricious roads that no man could travel, much less a crippled man, the doctor thought resignedly, unequipped for walking on water, not to mention the leg he dragged around like the dead weight of age. Sometimes he set up his telescope on the terrace so that he could watch the ships entering or leaving the Bay of Txingudi or gaze at the cottages and summerhouses on the French shore. The estuary of the Bidasoa was the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. The Txingudi was the lagoon of the Styx, which leads to the country of the dead, and that country was the ocean, delicate and most beautiful in its immens
ity, as placid and powerful as a giant demonstrating his tenderness, its hue barely separated from the hue of the sky by an imperceptible line of light. The rising and falling of the tides, like an astronomical clock, marked the passage of Time. Through the telescope, the view with its miniature details evoked a landscape enclosed in a bottle. If songs had nourished María Antonia Etxarri’s imagination in the Las Cruces villa, the imagination of the doctor in Los Sauces turned to more elaborate representations. A man had to open up his imagination in order to feel trapped in Time as in the belly of a whale, whose guts, phosphorescent in the night, were all he could contemplate. Memory acted like a telescope, too, in its way. The doctor had scrutinized distant scenes, figures as old as his raincoat, singular miniatures trapped behind the clear, hard glass of memory, sometimes fragmented, as though seen through the mosaic of a frosted pane, and at other times cut and polished with precision. If set up on the Las Cruces side, the telescope could, with its monstrous avidity, enter a garden scene, or focus on hands putting balls of yarn into a basket, or on the surprising face of a baby no one, least of all the doctor, would have expected to see there; and that was the avidity of memory, always eager to satisfy its need for reliving what has been lived through and for raising to its insatiable mouth a tea-soaked madeleine.

  Events had been too sordid and too cruel. Life itself had taken on a purple cast, like the tunics worn by the mad. A great silence and a great calm reigned over the memory of that time, as if Isabel’s stillbirth had ushered in a period yet more horrifying because of how deep it was, and how silent. One had to lean over the well of silence and ponder the effect of those two absences, the lost love and the stillborn fruit, in order to be able to imagine the sorrowful nostalgia of having been, so briefly, a wife and a mother. Bilbao fell that spring. Isabel’s parents could join her at last. Many bridges had been destroyed. Rubble blocked the streets of Durango. Highways passed through devastated towns and villages, and on those roads, columns of prisoners and troops were moving, either toward the new front or toward the rear. Such was the gigantic whirlpool of events, whose axis of rotation kept shifting. And despite everything, in that corner of the landscape, facing the estuary, the river, and the sea, the spring of that year could have been described as tranquil, suspended as it was between heaven and earth, suspended between the diaphanous light of the sky and the incessantly changing sea. There was the tranquillity of days gradually growing longer, disturbed only by the nightly crackling of radio broadcasts, as if the radio were the dirge, the Dies Irae for men’s actions in those days. The doctor’s imagination had not been shaped by songs, certainly not, but by the news on the radio. That succession of military reports, briefly declaimed by monotonous or familiar voices, voices cracked or submerged in boiling oil, rose from his Bakelite radio set with the regularity of certain domestic sounds, as if someone were frying something in a skillet. Hondarribia was very far behind the lines in its unusual corner, above the Stygian lagoon and the river of forgetfulness. Towns and villages fell, and the front moved westward, out of the province of Vizcaya. The doctor would have liked to live, smell, and feel those times the way he felt the spring, peaceful and inevitable, on the nights of the war reports, but the threshold of those feelings lay on the near side of the very circumstances he was evoking, and only the radio, with its remote nightly litany of songs and orders, allowed him to get close. And the doctor thought that the fall of Bilbao had been the requiem for many things he hadn’t tried to recall, not even in his later years.

  But if he turned his eyes toward the villa of Las Cruces, he could see that the higher the sap mounted, the stranger the splendor of that spring became. Isabel’s parents finally arrived at Las Cruces. Doors in the house were opened and shut, shutters that had been barred for the winter were flung wide, windows let air into rooms that had not been ventilated for many months. Isabel was seen emerging from the places where she had remained shut up, not only from the physical places, but also, in a certain fashion, from the reclusion imposed on her by grief. She still appeared enveloped in mystery. Her gloomy consciousness of the night in which the doctor had assisted her had marked the nature of their relations and impregnated his imagination. He saw her go out into the garden, accompanied by her parents. He saw her giving the gardener some instructions, as if she were ready to take charge of the vital fury of spring and impose some semblance of order on the untidy vegetal explosion in the flower beds. Rose shrubs threw up stalks a meter high with tender purple shoots, displaying all the vigor of the brambles from which they had sprung. An obscene juice oozed from the leaf buds on the trees. The vulvas of the irises were bursting into wine-colored or striped flowers. The power of the black, awakening earth showed itself in a monstrous way. There was a catastrophic essence in that inexorable and tranquil explosion of spring and in the doctor’s perception of it, as if, when he saw Isabel strolling around the garden on her father’s or mother’s arm, amid the vigorous irises and roses, he imagined a scene from a fairy tale set in a land ruled by a dragon.

  Several weeks passed, and then one night Isabel’s father paid the doctor a visit. He knew that the doctor had attended his daughter, and he wished to convey his thanks. Since he didn’t know the doctor, he had to introduce himself. He was a little silhouette on the threshold of the door, cut out against the dark garden. He wore a summer cap, the kind used in golf or tennis or canoeing or whatever elegant sport had been played before the war. He’d no doubt recovered the cap from one of the closets in Las Cruces. The doctor turned on the porch light. Its forty-watt bulb lent a certain volume to the sad, pale man who stood before the doctor, haggard and bony after the months of scarcity that had afflicted Bilbao, and also a little ridiculous, in spite of the circumstances, because of that cap, as though the doctor’s visitor were a sporting type who had lost his racket or his golf clubs, or whose canoe had gone missing, in the war. Publio Cruces was a mature man, too old to cope with new situations. Everything the doctor knew about him had been gleaned from the society pages of the local newspapers before the military rebellion, and now circumstances had changed so much that remembering those days was like remembering a geological period in which certain races or certain animals had gone extinct. The doctor invited him inside. Cruces entered the living room as if he’d been expecting to find there the replica of his own house and seemed rather surprised to observe that the doctor’s house was unlike his in appearance and layout. The doctor had managed to acquire a bottle of cognac, whose contents he had been sampling most parsimoniously, and he offered his visitor a glass. Cruces courteously refused and sat down in an armchair. The doctor went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a drink, not at all discontented at having been spared from pouring a second one. Then he dragged his leg over to the other chair.

  Cruces remained silent for a few minutes, perhaps regretting his visit already, although the doctor suspected that the opposite was the case. He assumed that it represented a relief for the older man to leave Las Cruces and come calling on him. And indeed, Publio Cruces heaved a heavy sigh. The doctor had left a window open. They were breathing the fresh air from the garden and the salt air of the sea. From there, one could see, plunged in darkness, the garden of Las Cruces, from which the visitor had come. Perhaps the sight made him remember the wedding banquet in that same garden, brilliantly illuminated. Perhaps he hadn’t ever suspected that there was such a good view of his garden from the villa of Los Sauces.

  “I want to thank you for all you did for my daughter. That’s why I’m here,” he said, moving his gaze from the window and turning his sad eyes on the doctor. “Isabel should never have married that Captain Herráiz,” he added, as if his daughter’s misfortunes had been a consequence of her marriage.

  “I don’t think I can express an opinion on that subject,” the doctor said.

  “Of course you can’t express an opinion on that subject. I understand perfectly. Besides, at this point, opinions are useless. Did you know that her husband was in command of a
column of Reds?”

  “I did.”

  “The man was crazy. Who do you think will win the war?”

  The doctor didn’t reply. In any case, the crazies would win.

  “In Bilbao, we found out that he’d been shot in Alsasua. We couldn’t communicate with Isabel. We’ve learned that you’re the only person who was able to help her.”

  “I did what had to be done in her case. I can assure you that she had a very difficult time. I believe it’s going to be hard for her to recover from it.”

  “You think so?”

  “What happens to a woman when, first of all, her husband’s murdered, and then she loses the baby she’s carrying?”

  “Oh, ‘murdered’ …”

  “Call it what you want. A doctor knows how to maintain his composure, even in the midst of a war, but I’m also aware of the value of words.”

  “That woman is my daughter, and I can’t be indifferent to what has happened to her.”

  “I grant you that.”

  “I could have been shot if they had found this golf cap in my house. They’re shooting people for less in Madrid. Are you a bachelor?”

  “Yes, I’m a bachelor,” said the doctor, giving his bad leg a clap, as if to say it was enough for him and he needed no other companion.

  “You’re young. Maybe some day you’ll understand that an unequal marriage can turn out bad in every possible way. Incidentally, I don’t remember seeing you at the wedding.”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “A mistake. There was surely some mistake.”