“There’s no problem,” Isabel replied. “María Antonia wants me to convey her thanks to you for having cured her chilblains. She’s going to make some maize cakes for you. If she can get maize. The baby’s upstairs. She’s been sleeping with me for several weeks now.”
Isabel led the doctor to the stairs. “This way.”
Gripping the handrail, the doctor watched her light legs as they preceded him up the stairs. On the upper floor, the landing opened in two different directions. The doors were shut. One of the corridors led to the bedroom where the doctor had attended Isabel on the night of her stillbirth. Isabel went down the other corridor, which was half dark. At the end there was a small living room, situated like a tower over the sewing room on the lower floor and lit by tall windows. He followed Isabel, whose white dress was luminous in the semidarkness. When she reached the door to one of the bedrooms, Isabel stopped and raised a finger to her lips. Then, delicately turning the handle, she opened the door.
And there was the baby, lying in a big cradle next to a double bed with a walnut headboard. The shutters were half closed. The afternoon light cut the wooden floor with two vertical lines. The child was asleep. Isabel approached the cradle, bent over the sleeping form, and with infinite care took the infant in her arms. She didn’t wake up at first. Then she started gently waving her little hands. She shifted about uneasily for a few moments, and finally she burst out crying.
“She ran a fever last night,” said Isabel, softly rocking the child, soothing her with little pats. “Maybe we should have waited until she woke up.”
The doctor asked Isabel to lay the child on the bed and open the window to let the light in. Isabel obeyed. The doctor opened his medical bag, took out a thermometer, and, after removing the mantilla that was covering the infant, examined her. The baby smelled like sour milk, a healthy baby smell. Everything seemed to be in order. The room smelled of diapers and talcum powder. The baby had stopped crying, and the light from the window made her close her eyes. Her tiny mouth opened in a yawn, showing her pink gums. She’d probably had one of those inexplicable bouts of fever that sometimes afflict babies. She was a well-formed infant, with cheerful, as yet undefined features that permitted a glimpse into what the lineaments of her face and her expression would be. She wasn’t afraid. Although her little pink face was somewhat flushed by a few tenths of a degree of temperature, she showed no sign of illness. As the examination went on, the doctor began to feel a strange vigilance behind his back. He raised his head and glanced around. At one spot on the wall, there was an unmoving eye: the glittering brass pendulum of a stopped clock. It was the captain’s cold eye. The doctor was doubtless the first man to enter that room. A big wardrobe with mirrored double doors stood against one wall. A uniform was probably still hanging in there. That was probably where the groom’s dress uniform and the bride’s white wedding dress were kept. Isabel remained unmoving, her arms folded, in the square of light coming in through the window.
“What’s the baby’s name?” the doctor asked.
“Verónica.”
The doctor turned back to the infant, who was gently waving her arms with her eyes closed, as if she wanted to levitate off the bed. “Well, Verónica,” the doctor said affectionately, “you have a bit of fever. It looks like you’re in a hurry to grow.”
Then he turned to Isabel. “It’s nothing serious. Only a few tenths of a degree of fever. It will disappear overnight. Has her mother run a fever, too?”
“Her mother?”
“The servant girl.”
Isabel glared at him furiously. It took only a few seconds for the doctor to understand that he’d committed an error. The transfer of the baby to that room, her cradle next to the immense, deserted, rather tragic matrimonial bed, signified much more than he’d imagined at first. He should have caught on sooner, while he was climbing the stairs, while he was following her down the hall and passing the closed doors before reaching the room. It was Isabel’s real room, the one where she should have given birth, in the bed that should have been her matrimonial bed after her honeymoon. She didn’t reply immediately to the doctor’s blunder, perhaps because she didn’t consider it a blunder. In her imagination, she believed herself the victim of a deliberate provocation. Anger prevented her from uttering a word. Although he didn’t think he should apologize, the doctor murmured an apology.
Finally, she said, “You can consider Verónica my daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
“From now on, you can consider her so.”
Her voice sounded strangely melodious and false, as if she were making an effort to pacify her rancor. The doctor put the thermometer back into his bag. Isabel took the child in her arms. She briefly rocked the little package, its face barely peeking out of the mantilla, before replacing the baby in her cradle. Then, standing bolt upright, her eyes brighter than ever, almost on the point of weeping, Isabel faced the doctor. “Her name is Verónica Herráiz,” she said, stressing the last name. “This is her first cradle,” she added, pointing to the cradle, where the baby was once again asleep in her feverish dream world.
The doctor made no reply.
“Do you have an objection?”
“I believe I’m entitled to my own opinion on the subject. I’m aware of certain facts,” the doctor said in an insinuating drawl.
“Are you?”
“Let’s leave it at that,” said the doctor, collecting his bag and heading for the door. “There’s nothing wrong with the baby. She’ll probably sleep until it’s time for her to be fed again.”
“You didn’t understand what I said,” Isabel insisted.
“I believe I understood perfectly.”
“Everything’s settled,” she said in a firm voice. “What you know or don’t know makes no difference.”
The doctor opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Isabel remained beside the cradle for a few moments. After ascertaining that the baby was asleep, she half-closed the shutters again and left the room behind the doctor.
“Doctor.”
The doctor turned to her. There was something both heroic and pathetic in the woman’s attitude. It wasn’t merely a ploy to salve her wounded pride, or an act of vengeance against her enforced sterility. Isabel raised her voice insistently. She had tied together the ends of the shawl around her shoulders and was wringing the fringes in her hands. Her white dress, sprinkled with yellow flowers, made her look like an apparition in the semidarkness. The closed door to the room where the baby lay sleeping was behind her, and she looked as though she were defending that closed door, or as though she were defending some secret that the intruder might carry off and expose. But nobody in his right mind would have thought that was a secret, at least nobody in the circle of her acquaintance, and it would have seemed even less likely that there was any need to expose it or conceal it or create an unmentionable atmosphere around it. What internal violence had made the woman want to block any suspicion of her frustrated motherhood? Isabel came forward a few steps, her hands clenched in her shawl. There was a deranged glitter in her bright eyes.
“Doctor,” she said imploringly, raising her voice. “You saw me bear a child in this bed.”
The doctor stopped with one hand on the stair railing. She was hanging on his lips, waiting for him to speak. It was the crucial scene. The woman may have been betting her mental health on a few comforting syllables, on some small hint that would forever signify that her grief and her joy had been simultaneously understood. Within a second, the doctor grasped what his role must be.
“Of course I did,” he said in a kindly tone.
“You delivered my baby.”
“I was here,” the doctor agreed, slowly moving his head. “I helped you give birth with these hands.” Then he added, “You mustn’t worry.”
She breathed a relieved sigh, as if all the tension accumulated in that minute—a decisive minute for her—had found comfort in the doctor’s simple words. She said, “Thank yo
u.”
And at that moment, it was as though her body were taking on another shape. Her convulsed fragility was being transformed. She released the shawl she’d been wringing in her clenched fingers and joined her hands under her chin to hide her emotion. Then her whole face lit up in a smile. It was impossible to know if she herself believed what she had asked for, that is, the confirmation of something that hadn’t happened and to which the doctor had made himself an accomplice, but it made no difference whether she believed it or not, or whether other feelings qualified the doctor’s compassion for her madness, or her misfortune. In all probability, everything was settled, as she herself had said. In all probability, the rich man of Vera, her parents, and whoever else considered himself concerned in the affair, probably all of them had settled in advance on providing her with a child, as if the matter lay solely in their power, and they had counted from the beginning on María Antonia’s consent, and all that was lacking was the useless concurrence of a physician. In Irún, the archives had been burned. Many parochial registers had been destroyed. There had been sufficient charity and administrative influence, that is, sufficient levels of both charity and administrative influence so that the baby could be inscribed in some register as Verónica Herráiz, and surely, that act of charity and that administrative influence were to be splendidly recompensed by a new Isabel, sensible and filled with determination, or by her father, or by whomever else. The chaotic times, the same disastrous times that were causing so much misfortune, had brought her some succor, and in the room with the outsized double bed, a baby with a second mother was sound asleep. There were always going to be people who would believe that the child was the daughter of the captain whose comrades in arms had put him in front of a firing squad, and as for those who didn’t believe it, or who knew or guessed the truth, they would keep silent out of respect for the two mothers, obeying the strange and ancient modesty that envelops the supplanting of one blood by another. The doctor was taken aback for a few minutes. He didn’t know if his testimony, delivered from the top of the stairs and directed to the semidarkness of the corridor where she was waiting, was unnecessary testimony or not, a statement that no registry would ever solicit, but which the woman was eager to hear. Compassion pushed him so far that he didn’t think he had lied. He would have wanted his complicity to be accepted by others besides her; he went so far as to wish that he had truly helped her to deliver a child on the disastrous night that now seemed so far away. The circumstances had been appropriate. The meeting in her room, which the mirrored wardrobe doors reflected in a strange concavity, under the unmoving eye of the brass pendulum, had been enough for her, had enabled her to demand his benign testimony as a tribute to her suffering. What was being sorted out wasn’t an adoption or an appropriation, but the degree of craftiness and the number of lies that would be necessary to ensure that the grievances life had inflicted on those two women would be in some way compensated. One of them turned over her child and received in return a certain amount of gratitude and, above all, peace. The other received the baby and drained the chalice of her suffering. The doctor was immediately conscious of all this. The situation, suspended and crystallized in a few words, needed no further explanation.
The doctor took his leave. “I believe I should go. Don’t hesitate to call me if you need me again.”
“I’ll do that,” said Isabel, relieved. Then she stepped back into the bedroom where the baby was and closed the door behind her. Holding on to the rail, the doctor went down the stairs. He’d left his cane in the umbrella stand, and he headed toward it. On the way, he passed the kitchen door, which was half open again. He saw María Antonia stick out her head, which was expectant, round, and healthy. There was something about it reminiscent of a summer watermelon. Her look expressed a mute interrogation, a desire to know what had been revealed on the upper floor. Maybe she was really interested only in Verónica’s fever. When he saw her, the doctor sensed that she wouldn’t be capable of going into explanations. Her occupation as a wet nurse was worth as much as or more than her occupation as a mother. Or perhaps she had understood that Verónica’s future and her own future in that house, from which no one would ever dare to expel her, were at play in the exchange of functions. One sure thing is that the child had not been given the last name of her first mother’s family—if one may so put it—much less her unknown father’s family name, but this was the least significant aspect of the whole business. The doctor picked up his cane and turned to the girl, who was thrusting out her full-moon face from the other side of the half-open door. After hesitating a moment, he took a few steps toward her. The girl started to close the door, as if she were afraid of something. Then she stood firm and waited for the doctor.
“Listen, the Señora tells me you’re doing just fine here in this house, and I’m sure you are. Is everything all right?”
María Antonia didn’t answer him. She pressed herself against the doorjamb.
“Is it true that you’ve handed over your daughter.…” The doctor stopped before finishing his sentence. It was obvious that the girl wasn’t going to reply to that or any other question, because she’d already begun to form part of the house, part of its heart, and her Señora’s secret was her secret, too. The doctor looked at her strong hand, which was defending the kitchen door. “How are your chilblains?” he asked.
The girl, still intimidated by the young, crippled doctor, looked at him in amazement. “I don’t have chilblains anymore,” she stammered.
“Glad to hear it. If you’re lucky, they won’t come back this winter.”
The doctor opened the door to the garden. The afternoon was drawing to a close, and the grass was taking on an orange-tinged gleam. “You must take care of the little girl,” the doctor said before leaving the house. “And please, that woman needs taking care of, too.”
He crossed the garden and found himself on the road that went along the garden wall. He’d planned to go back to his house, drop off his medical bag, and go out again. He needed to take a longer walk and exercise his bad leg, which had conducted itself so well, going up and down the stairs in Las Cruces. But the north was still a war zone, and the curfew that had been decreed began at nightfall. By a curious mirror effect, the doctor’s memory projected an impression of peace onto those circumstances. It was the astronomical peace of twilight, the interior peace of having resumed the simplest functions of his profession, the strange, recently acquired peace of the house he was walking away from. That summer came the news that Santander had fallen. At the time, the war was being fought throughout the broad territory of Spain, and no one knew how long it would last. Setting up his telescope on the terrace and contemplating the descent of dusk and the face of the heavens, admiring the slow rising of the tide in the molten-gold waters of the Txingudi, and lingering to watch the lights come on, gradually more and more of them, on the other side of the frontier—all that was out of the question. Equally out of the question was going out the back door and pointing the telescope at the crests of the Jaizkibel and looking for propitious signs in the summer constellations, disregarding the ominous news contained in the war reports. There remained only one refuge where he could find a secret peace, so fragile, so resigned, so newly lodged in his heart that he himself had no way of explaining it. It was the peace of the weak and the just, and it granted him the tranquillity of opening the gate and limping back to his house to pour himself a glass of cognac. There was no sadder peace than that.
The day when young Goitia was to leave Las Cruces dawned foggy. The sun seemed to have camped on the clouds and stopped moving, leaving the world bathed in an uncertain light. As the morning progressed, the smooth surface of the sea and the bulky shapes of the mountains started emerging from the landscape, as on the first day of the creation.
Doctor Castro went out into the garden in his slippers, with a sweater over his pajama coat, a bathrobe over his shoulders, some old flannel trousers instead of the matching pajama pants, and his cane. He gras
ped the cane in one hand and with the other held the front of his bathrobe closed. Releasing the robe for a moment, he ran a hand through his disheveled hair. His head hurt. He’d spent the night dreaming of death. The dream had left a bitter taste in his mouth and an ominous shadow in his heart. But as the fog, like a lavish symphony, gradually lifted before his eyes, he began to recover his spirits. He realized that once again, as had happened on many nights over the course of many years, he’d crossed the barrier that sleep throws up between waking and dying.
The old Etxarri woman at Las Cruces passed through the kitchen and out the garden door to hang out laundry with her white, gnarled hands. She had a red scarf wrapped around her nose. She’d done some wash, the clothes were in a tub she carried on her hip, and she was going to hang them out, because she knew, with the knowledge shepherds and sheep share, that the fog would lift before noon. She pinned them to the line, those spectral articles, shirts, kitchen cloths, age-old panties, raising her arms in the thin light, signaling her presence in the mist with the red blotch of her scarf. Then she went back inside with the empty tub. She remembered the days when she was a girl, before she came to that house, the days of Etxarri’s inn, the days of the big, rambling house in Vera de Bidasoa. Those were days shrouded in fog, out of which emerged a cow’s ghostly forehead, or a soldier’s face, or the weather-beaten, sibylline countenance of the cook in Vera. And should she wish to bring all those faces together—the cow’s, the cook’s, and the soldier’s—maybe she’d be holding a good hand of cards, some high trumps that could explain what those nebulous times had been like better than any swindling memory, as heraldic shields explain a family’s blood with a bull’s head, a helmet, or a siren’s face, for she knew about escutcheons, carved in stone and held up by two dwarves, or two lions, or a lion and a cat, and she had concluded that her own history deserved something equivalent to the shields that powerful families ordered stonemasons to carve. She could add Verónica’s face, too. That was a happy and never forgotten trump, whose memory accompanied her best hours. And as she remembered all this in the lush morning fog while busying herself with the humble task of hanging out clothes to dry, the old Etxarri woman’s heart was moved. Because Verónica Herráiz had been her blood without actually becoming her family, and consequently, in the desolation of her secret, couldn’t figure in the heraldic shield that María Antonia, had she been powerful, would have ordered to be carved. The doctor saw her go back into the house with the empty tub, leaving behind her the clothesline, peopled with ghosts. The profile of the façade dissolved into geometrical planes. The roof eaves were a blurry line the color of slate. The dark green foliage of a laurel tree was outlined against snippets of light without shadow. The doctor watched as the red blotch of the scarf disappeared. The dampness penetrated to his bones, and he pulled his bathrobe tighter as he stood in the doorway. It might have been ten in the morning, and there was great pleasure in believing that time had stood still. Then he heard someone uttering his name, most pitifully, inside the house, with a melodious and sad voice that only the doctor understood. It was Satan, the cat, calling him and demanding a saucer of milk. The doctor went inside to tend to the cat. As the old Etxarri woman had foreseen, in the mid-morning the veil of fog confounding heaven and earth began to lift in a delightful symphonic progression. The doctor’s reflections on death and sleep gradually faded. He ate his breakfast while sitting in a wicker chair near the window, still in his bathrobe, with the black cat at his side. His fear of the sleep of death was not resolved, but as the spectacle emerged from the lifting fog, he indulged in the fantasy of dying while seated in a chair and watching the creation of the world.
The Wrong Blood Page 23