The Wrong Blood

by Manuel De Lope

  “I don’t think it was a mistake. I had moved in only a short time before. And then I had an accident. This leg—”

  “I understand,” Cruces said with indifference. Then he added, “Each of us has suffered a misfortune.”

  The doctor raised the glass of cognac to his lips. He was listening to the voice of egoism, a deliberate, sad, weak voice, but spoken out of a dry heart and without tears, perhaps without any feeling other than self-interest, and perhaps expressing the speaker’s relief at having survived uncertain circumstances, circumstances in which he might have lost his life for belonging to a fancy golf club. Publio Cruces turned the ridiculous cap in his hands. There was something pathetic in his gesture. Perhaps misfortunes and fear had led him to reclaim his social class with a slightly hysterical and victorious nostalgia, the acutely egoistical feeling that follows fear, even though the fear had proceeded from no real threat, but rather from his imagination of what he could have feared. The months that he’d spent in the city while it was under siege and subject to bombardments had affected him in a peculair fashion, given that on the one hand he feared Bilbao’s destruction and the destruction of his interests, while on the other he wished with all his heart for the arrival of the rebels. His passage through the places where the troops had advanced gave him an idea of the widespread devastation. And his fear, once he was over it, acted like a spring to his egoism, as sometimes happens with weak persons, incapable of conceiving private acts of vengeance, but deeply satisfied when other powers take on that function. After some moments of silence, he put the golf cap aside, crossed his legs, and turned toward the doctor. “May I smoke?”

  “But of course.”

  He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and extracted a cigarette case that contained two pitiful cigarettes bound together by a rubber band. Tobacco was hard to come by, and the cigarettes contained a few strands mixed with the shredded stuff used in bad cigars. Publio Cruces offered the doctor a cigarette. The doctor declined. The visitor took one, tapped it against the case a few times, and lit it as elegantly as if it were made of fine Egyptian tobacco. He was inwardly satisfied that the doctor hadn’t accepted the other cigarette, which was the way the doctor felt about the glass of cognac his guest had refused. A draft of air carried the smoke toward the window. The two men knew that they were in conflicting but not irreconcilable positions, at least not directly irreconcilable, even if one of them expressed his satisfaction at the course of events and the other showed his bitterness, or his skepticism, or simply the much greater sense of unease he felt at having to be a mere spectator of those events, a spectator with a ruined leg. The doctor knew that he was helpless. And yet that helplessness was what had saved his life, preventing him from joining either of the two sides, simultaneously sparing him both humiliation and victory, and thereby allowing him to judge more freely and generously, or at least that was what he liked to believe.

  The visitor sat up slightly and moved an ashtray closer to his chair.

  “Now I must tell you that my wife and I are returning to Bilbao in a few days,” said Publio Cruces, relishing every puff of his cigarette with great delight. “Isabel is going to stay in the villa.”

  “She can’t stay there.”

  “We’ve tried to dissuade her, but she’s made her decision. It’s where she would have liked to live with her … captain.”

  “Will she be alone?”

  “She won’t be alone. A friend from Vera de Bidasoa is going to send a servant girl to move in with her.”

  “And she’s going to accept that?”

  “She’s already accepted it,” said Publio Cruces, gazing with disappointment at his burning cigarette, which was swiftly vanishing. “Besides, we’ll come and spend time with her. The real reason for my visit is this: You helped her in her worst moments. We know that if she wants to stay here, at least she’ll be able to count on you.”

  “It goes without saying.”

  “We can’t stay here, and she doesn’t really want us to,” the visitor said, excusing himself. “Why not? Can you explain it?”

  The doctor made no reply.

  “Why doesn’t she want us to stay with her?” Cruces insisted, genuinely perplexed.

  “It may be that she has her own ideas in her own head,” said the doctor. “Many people want to remain in the place where they’ve suffered the most. It’s her way of overcoming her grief. Forcing her to check into some kind of sanatorium would serve no purpose.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Besides, that sort of thing isn’t even possible at the moment. All the sanatoriums have been turned into prisons or barracks.”

  Publio Cruces lowered his sad eyes and moved his head. In his most private thoughts, he found it difficult to understand all the things that were going on. There were frustrated passions, and lack of filial affection, and blood—blood, too—and the refined antebellum golfer sensed all that, but he wasn’t able to specify what was happening. It was as if the situation had shifted slightly; the deranged person was him, and his suffering was to have been a witness as an entire world collapsed. Then he looked toward the window again. The moon was shining. Part of the villa seemed to be illuminated by great sheets of livid light, between the leafy masses of the trees. He remained pensive for a moment, as if, upon seeing from that perspective the villa where his daughter was, he understood that it could be a house of healing for her, or a place of repose, or without going so far, perhaps it was actually a good idea for her to remain there, it would solve a problem for him, and that last consideration did as much to improve his state of mind as the reflection that when all was said and done, the best course of action Captain Herráiz could have hit upon was to get himself killed. His cigarette was burning out. Cruces hastily raised its remains to his lips, inhaled, and expelled a long cloud of smoke, which a subtle enchantment dragged toward the tall rectangle of the window. The expression on his face was more tranquil. The fresh air cleared off other ghosts and contributed to renewing his optimism. He stubbed out what remained of his cigarette and carefully placed the butt in his case. The shortage of tobacco was a torment. However, it was said that things were beginning to get better. Provisions for the civilian population had reached Bilbao, and people were consuming appetizers of shrimp and beer on the terraces of San Sebastián. That frivolousness seemed to animate his thoughts with possibilities he hadn’t dared contemplate for many months. He barely hesitated before silencing his bad conscience. He also believed it would be inadvisable to expose himself. The relief he dissembled was comparable only to the concern he pretended to feel.

  “Naturally, my daughter will want for nothing,” he said, putting the cigarette case back in his jacket pocket. “We’ll visit her from time to time. And maybe later, she’ll decide to come home and live with us in Bilbao.”

  He rose from the armchair and picked up his golf cap. He looked around, thinking he’d forgotten something, but then he remembered that the cigarette case was in his jacket pocket, and that was all he needed. The doctor likewise stood up. Publio Cruces stepped over to the window. He gazed at his house and garden for a few moments, surprised again to find himself in his neighbor’s house and to see the villa of Las Cruces from that previously unknown perspective. Then the doctor accompanied him to the door. The sea was at high tide. They could hear, close by, the sucking sound of the undertow. There were great, torn clouds in the sky, and the salt-impregnated air seemed to bring the visitor an inexplicable sense of euphoria, adding it to the dense, nocturnal euphoria of late spring, as if the year’s first season, in drawing to a close, released primitive forces, and the sound of the war stayed very far in the background. The doctor returned to his chair. He turned off the lamp, stretched out his leg toward the dark landscape on the other side of the window, and drank the rest of his glass of cognac.

  It had been said that the war would be won or lost in the northern campaign. That had been said, or it was said afterward, when the course of events could be
established. But in the doctor’s memory, things followed a more immediate rhythm and a tighter schedule. It wasn’t long before María Antonia arrived in the villa of Las Cruces. Her baby arrived with her, but the doctor didn’t notice the child right away.

  Some days later, he saw the two women in the garden, and one of them had the baby in her arms. Then he watched the other woman receive the baby from the hands of the first. That was all. The scene could not have been simpler, and for that very reason it struck him as unusual. Probably everyone knew. Everyone had known in advance that the girl being sent by Don Leopoldo, the rich man of Vera, was nursing a baby, and probably everyone knew her story, Isabel knew it, her parents knew it, whatever their original intentions may have been, and it was precisely because the girl had a baby that the King of the Belgians had sent her. At Isabel’s direction, María Antonia came to see the doctor about her chilblains. The doctor asked if the baby was hers, and the girl didn’t reply, she didn’t say, “It’s mine,” nor did she say it wasn’t hers, perhaps because she took it as understood that the baby could only be hers, included among the services she rendered in the neighboring house, or more probably because she’d already been instructed not to say anything. The doctor didn’t know that María Antonia was suspicious of physicians and cripples, as the cook in Vera had taught her to be. He treated her chilblains as best he could. The girl said that Isabel would pay him for the consultation, and the doctor told her to come back in a few days for a final treatment.

  Chilblains. Back then, they were a common ailment. They were little purple flowers, stinging, sensitive, painful filigrees of veins and capillaries that formed on fingers and toes—and sometimes on earlobes—and drew, just under the surface of the skin, tiny, tight, ulcerated nets that would occasionally burst. Chilblains could bleed and fester. They bloomed in the winter, when it was excessively cold. María Antonia’s chilblains had lingered since the previous winter on two fingers of her right hand and one finger of her left, and those fingers burned whenever they touched anything. The doctor ordered her to take off her shoes and socks so that he could see if she also had chilblains on her toes. He knelt before her in a humiliated posture, a kind of homage, as though Christ were paying homage to Mary Magdalen. He anointed her feet with tincture of iodine and with belladonna unguent, a yellow cream like soft wax, and put iodine and belladonna on her fingertips as well. He warned her that the unguent was toxic, repeating himself so that the girl would understand that she must not put her fingers in her mouth for several days, and that she must take precautions when handling the baby. María Antonia did as he said. She was extremely careful when suckling, and in the garden, only Isabel held the baby in her arms. The burning sensation caused by the chilblains diminished and eventually disappeared. In María Antonia’s eyes, the doctor, although a cripple, gained a certain reputation.

  “If the chilblains come back, I’ll put some more belladonna on your fingers,” he said.

  María Antonia didn’t blink. “Yes, sir.”

  In a certain way, the circle was closing, as the seasons follow one another and the cycle of the year closes. The fatal celebration of summer had already begun. A powerful inertia was moving things and establishing an equilibrium of sentiment, adding plenitude where before an abyss of suffering had yawned, filling with tenderness the endless, disagreeable, and antisocial hours that seemed to have formed the single, unrelenting sustenance of life. It could not have been otherwise. Destiny rages among mortals, obeying pacts and conflicts apparently well above their heads, in the upper spheres of chance or providence, as in the days of the mythologies. And that seemed to have been Isabel’s fate until pity was taken on her, either down in hell or up in heaven—it hardly mattered which—and it’s possible that the gods or fate had chosen the man from Vera de Bidasoa as an instrument of their designs, because the Jovian idea of sending the girl and the baby came from the King of the Belgians, who knew that Isabel was looking for a servant, and surely also knew that she had lost her baby. And in the end, the crippled man played a role, too, for the doctor saw himself forming part of the fabric that had been woven around her, the woman with the murdered love and the accursed womb, not only because he’d been a witness to her misfortune, but also because his hands had entered her very entrails, and because he was still nagged by the unjust but insidious suspicion of his incompetence as a doctor. Chilblains. That had been his big success, a second opportunity after having been called once before, to attend a stillborn, premature birth. One day during that time, the doctor saw Isabel playing with the baby in the garden. María Antonia stood a few meters off, a little uncomfortable, a little intimidated by the extensive grounds of her new home. Isabel was laughing and holding the baby, who wasn’t many months old. At that moment, she looked as though all her hopes had been realized. The scene had a special fullness, like scenes that follow a rigorous fast or a long penitence. Then Isabel handed the baby to María Antonia, who received the child after first wiping her fingers on her dress, because she was afraid they might still carry some traces of unguent. The girl was something to see, worrying about her poisoned fingers and taking great precautions as she suckled her baby. It was Isabel who held the infant to María Antonia’s breast, while María Antonia, sitting in a chair, kept her hands behind her back. It was a unique, hitherto unseen posture for suckling, one woman raising her bust and pulling her breast out of her shirt with a certain arrogance, and the second woman, as if performing an amorous service, holding the infant’s mouth to the nipple. A cradle had been placed under a tree in the garden and covered with a veil of gauze to protect the little creature from the dance of the mosquitoes. Isabel took the child and placed her in the cradle. She bent over the baby; her gesture was maternal, but not kindly. It contained a strange avidity, which the doctor related to the posture of certain all-consuming insects. There was a similarity. Isabel leaned to the cradle in the prayerful attitude of the Mantis religiosa, the insect that devours for love, contemplating its prey. With her hands joined and her head tilted to one side, Isabel smiled at the infant. It was a show of affection, a performance compromised by what the woman would have wished to offer her own baby, that is, a gauze-covered cradle in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid the tumult of insects, under the magnificent foliage of a chestnut tree; and so she also offered maternal affection, as if the baby were truly her own. Therefore, to the doctor’s eyes, that show hid what was really transpiring and needed only to be interpreted. He couldn’t be so naïve as not to think that everything had been decided beforehand. With the rather childish arrogance that the doctor had already observed, María Antonia put away her sturdy peasant’s breast and buttoned her shirt. Her primitive intuition concerning the value of affection enabled her to know just how far her power was extending. Not for nothing had she brought the child to that house so that her Señora could have a child. She could admit, with muffled greed, that there had been an interplay of interests. There was credit and debit, with one party giving up her own blood and the other party receiving the blood of a lineage not her own. For the most precious things that María Antonia brought to that house were not her presence and the services that her chilblained hands could perform, but the milk of her breasts and, above all, her baby.

  One afternoon, Isabel sent for the doctor to come and see about the child. The doctor, carrying his little medical bag, went down the garden path, circled the garden wall, and limped up the path that led through the garden of Las Cruces to the house. Isabel, who had seen him coming, was waiting for him in the shade of the porch. She wore a white dress printed with little yellow flowers. Because it was starting to get cool in the late afternoons, she’d thrown a small shawl over her shoulders. When she greeted the doctor, she removed her dark glasses and revealed her large, bright eyes. The doctor stopped on the porch for a moment, and she invited him inside.

  “Thank you for coming. I think the baby has a little fever.”

  “Where is the baby?”

  “She’s upstairs,�
�� Isabel replied.

  The doctor had an intuition, but there had been other foreshadowing signs. The smell of the house had changed. It had been entered by the ample air currents of spring, which had swept away, or carried down to redoubts in the cellar, the squalid odors of winter. He recognized the entrance of the house and recovered as he did so the memory of that tragic night, which seemed to be lodged far away in the back of his mind. María Antonia was in the kitchen. She looked out for a moment through the half-open door, drying her definitively chilblain-free hands on her apron. Under the apron, she wore a dark blue dress, long, cut with a certain elegance, with bulky shoulders like a flower, sleeves gathered at the wrist, and mother-of-pearl buttons. She’d arrived at the house with two changes of clothes, a cotton skirt, and a gray sweater, a gift from the cook in Vera. The Señora had given María Antonia her old clothes, and the girl had made them her own. After greeting the doctor, she closed the door and disappeared into what was already her territory. Isabel led the doctor into the drawing room and asked him to wait a few minutes. Then she joined the servant in the kitchen.

  The drawing room had changed, too. The window was open. The tulle curtains billowed gently. The slipcovers had disappeared from the furniture. The walls had been cheered up with some sparkling silver trays. Painted plates adorned the shelves of a long sideboard. A vase of flowers stood in the center of the table. A medium-sized insect, gleaming and jet-black, entered the house through the window. It took two tours of the drawing room, felt attracted by the flowers in the vase, and went out again, buzzing like a little artifact. On the other side of the drawing room was the closed door to a smaller room, and opposite it was the sewing room, a kind of diminutive, glassed-in parlor, equipped with a piece of furniture made from wicker and bamboo and filled with little drawers, and a round table covered with an embroidered cloth. The doctor stepped into the sewing room and examined the garden outside. Then he returned to the drawing room. Life in that house could be luminous with the light that inundated the sewing room through its big windows. A life as well-ordered as the dishes on the sideboard, and a practical life, such as the one he had no doubt was being lived in the kitchen. The doctor pricked up his ears. The murmurs he heard came from the kitchen conversation. After a short while, Isabel returned. Suddenly, the doctor felt dizzy. Maybe something was badly wrong with the baby. He said, “Is there some problem?”