An hour and a half later, he went to shave and change his clothes. After the long breakfast, the cat was ready for him to open the door. The doctor was fond of late habits, and by the time he finished shaving, it was after eleven-thirty. More or less at that same hour, lawyer Goitia began to get his things together, that is, the suitcases, the shoulder bag, and the heavy trunk of books he’d arrived with several weeks before. This latter item, which felt as if it contained the bust of Cicero, would have to be dragged to the taxi when it came for him later that afternoon. In the meanwhile, genealogical thoughts were assaulting the doctor, too, just as they were exercising the old Etxarri woman. Thus do the generations succeed one another, he thought, like the ages of the heavens and the ages of the heart. This was the third generation. The doctor, musing in the silence of his spirit, was a little saddened to see the boy lean out of the window and shake a sweater, and then to watch the cheerful way he dumped a wastebasket full of papers into the incinerator, where dead leaves from the garden were burned. This was the third generation, which former misfortunes could not reach, and in which were dissolved the vicissitudes of the past and the mysteries of bad luck. Old and crippled, the doctor was aware of his own solitude, as if some curse had fallen on him long ago and not yet run its course, but among his desires that morning, none was so urgent as the wish to see the boy conclude his sojourn in Las Cruces with the same unburdened heart as when he arrived. And of course, with a much better chance of passing his notarial examinations, depending on how well he’d used his time there. He was the son of Verónica Herráiz. And just as his mother had had two mothers without knowing it, the boy was the grandson of both Isabel and the old Etxarri woman, although to all intents and purposes, he possessed evidence only of the first, and neither the old woman nor the doctor was going to offer the boy any revelations about the second. There had been a time when the Goitia family used to come to Las Cruces in the summer, and there had also been a time when their summer visits stopped. One could imagine that Verónica knew who her real mother was and didn’t want to spend a summer vacation under the eyes of that mother, who was also the servant. Someone, perhaps Isabel herself, could have revealed the truth to her. Perhaps it had happened that way, and the doctor suspected that it had, but in any case, he hadn’t wasted any time trying to unravel that mystery. It wasn’t important to investigate the most trivial details, or to be more rigorous, or to assume that all this represented an obscure grief for the old Etxarri woman and some kind of frustration for the doctor himself. In any case, nobody had told the boy yet, no one had said to him, Son, this is your grandmother. But the boy was there, and for a few weeks the powerful flood of memories had overflowed the sluice gates.
Young Goitia came out of the house a second time to empty the wastepaper basket. The doctor activated his leg and cane and crossed the garden to meet him. As his neighbor approached the low wall between the two gardens, the lawyer stopped, wastebasket in hand. The tips of his shirt collar peeked out from his high-necked sweater like two triangular birds. He’d put on a pair of old trousers, as if he were moving house. He clumsily shifted the wastebasket to his other hand before greeting the doctor.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning, counselor. Did you get up early so you could pack?”
“Early? It’s eleven-thirty.”
“Let’s say the sun has just risen,” said the doctor, waving his cane at the broad, clear sky. “The hours of fog don’t count.”
The boy nodded without conviction. Then he turned his gaze to the landscape and received the warm sun on his face. A faint yellow gleam floated on the air. Fog was still hanging on the mountains above the tender blue of the seacoast. Out above the horizon, where the open sea began, clouds were forming a thick disk, as if they were hiding some other piece of land.
“What time’s your plane?” the doctor asked.
“Seven o’clock this evening.”
“Won’t it be hard for you to go back to Madrid?”
“Oh, no,” the lawyer said vivaciously. Then, by way of excusing himself, he changed the conversation. “I was carrying some papers and notes to the incinerator.”
“Notarial secrets?”
Young Goitia, a little confused, lowered his head. “Not quite yet. A candidate’s study papers.”
“Come, come. I’m sure we’re going to have a civil-law notary,” he prophesied.
Young Goitia smiled again. There was something delicate in his smile. The doctor loved that face with the same unexpected emotion he felt at seeing the sad cemeteries of autumn receive the sun’s caress. It was, in any case, a symbolic feeling. The doctor examined young Goitia with interest. Ever since the lad had come to Las Cruces, the doctor had tried in vain to satisfy a certain irresistible curiosity. He wanted to discern, in the boy’s face, some remote resemblance to the girl who’d arrived to serve at Las Cruces with a baby in her arms in the spring or summer of 1937, and whether because his memory was failing him or because the caprices of biological inheritance hadn’t transmitted any of María Antonia’s features to the young lawyer, the doctor was inclined to think that Goitia could have received his physical traits, on the maternal side, from the unknown sergeant who’d raped his grandmother. And it’s possible that old María Antonia Etxarri proceeded in the same way. For an instant, the doctor wondered whether old Antonia drew the same conclusion when she saw the boy’s face up close, or whether that was a refinement on his part, or a tribute he paid to his personal curiosity, or to the melancholy necessities of his failing recollection, which was obliged to illustrate its own memories with the forced corroboration of some evidence. On the other hand, it required no effort for him to transform young María Antonia Etxarri into the old Etxarri woman, and much more suddenly in words than in reality, for as is often the case with the more well-to-do classes, the doctor felt no obligation whatsoever to discard the habit of considering old a servant who was at least ten years younger than himself. The doctor concealed his brief emotion and offered to accompany Goitia to the incinerator. They walked down to the bottom of the garden, each on his side of the little stone wall. The lawyer carried the full wastepaper basket under his arm like an absurd bundle. The two men stopped when they reached the corner where the low garden wall joined the big wall, crowned with bottle shards, that separated the two properties from the road. In that corner stood the incinerator. It was a metal cylinder where the gardener would burn leaves on some afternoons, spreading abroad a bitter reek. The lawyer opened the incinerator, releasing an odor of wet ash and decomposing vegetable matter. He emptied the basket of papers into the cylinder and replaced its lid. The doctor waited a few moments for the operation to be completed. Then the two of them turned to go back. From where they were, both houses were visible, each on the gentle slope of its own garden. The trees had strewn a circle of yellow leaves in front of Los Sauces, and the geraniums near the porch were decomposing. The virgin ivy covering the façade of Las Cruces had begun to turn scarlet. And that panorama, which the two men discovered at the same time and which seemed to have been veiled to them until that moment, made them stop unexpectedly in their tracks, as if they were both receiving the same discreet message, leaping over the span of the years, not a message concerning origins or the illustration of a common history or a vivid image of happiness or of the tragedy latent in the sumptuous representation of autumn spread out before their eyes, but a message that somehow, for both of them, implied a strange, shared complicity. That couldn’t be the case. No fate could permit the abyss of the years to close up between them, and no confidence could endow the vista with the same significance for them both. Where the doctor could see the scene of the saddest and hardest winter of his life, the youth admired two enchanting summer villas dating from before the war. Behind them, on the mountainside, other villas had sprouted. Just up the road, a building was under construction. Time also included those references. Farther away rose the Jaizkibel, omnipresent and rugged, its brow still furrowed in the rema
ining shreds of fog. The boy remained pensive for a few seconds. The superfluity of colors among the bare trees, like a wrinkled tapestry heavily stained with gold and wine, was shocking.
“I think I’ll miss this place. These weeks have been very profitable,” the lawyer said. “I’ll miss you, too, and the old Etxarri woman.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other again. Won’t your mother come and spend a summer at Las Cruces?” the doctor asked, with the same inquisitive curiosity that had assailed him before.
“No. She prefers to rent a villa in Linces since my grandmother died.”
“Since before your grandmother died,” the doctor corrected him.
“Yes, you’re right, since before my grandmother died.”
“Didn’t your mother say anything about your coming here to study?”
“It was her idea.”
“Your mother’s?”
“Yes. I needed a quiet spot. But I wasn’t going to rent a villa just for that.” Goitia raised his hand to his chin, as if something inexplicable had crossed his mind. “Sometimes I wonder why my grandmother would leave the house to her servant.”
“Notarial secrets,” the doctor said, barely joking.
Young Goitia laughed out loud. “Who knows, maybe that’s it.”
The doctor kept silent. Once again, he appreciated the sincerity, the involuntary innocence of the comment, the brief, insensible oscillation of destiny that allowed the boy to be kept in the limbo of ignorance, on the last day of his stay at Las Cruces and forever. His ignorance was the guarantee of his happiness, after the allusion that had grazed the black, hard matter from which his own existence proceeded. Not even documents could be sufficiently eloquent. No document recorded what the doctor and the old Etxarri woman knew, or what the boy’s mother might have found out. And as the doctor saw it, there was no room for doubt that it was better so, that is, that the memory should remain enclosed in itself, without being transmitted to this boy, without even alluding to the obligatory parenthesis between what his mother could tell him someday and what the doctor might have been able to reveal to him. And when all was said and done, the secret could remain enclosed, as in a miniature, in the gorgeous autumnal mystery of the two villas.
The doctor attacked the little upward slope, retracing his steps and poking the wet grass suspiciously with his cane. The lawyer followed him on the other side of the stone wall with the empty wastepaper basket in his arms. When they reached the level of the villas, they separated. Their paths were different. The doctor crossed the circle of yellow leaves, heading for the rotting geraniums in front of the porch at Los Sauces. The lawyer, with the wastebasket in his arms, disappeared under the tresses of scarlet ivy that covered the façade of Las Cruces. As the plane for Madrid wasn’t scheduled to depart until seven o’clock, the doctor invited the lawyer, before they parted, to have coffee in the doctor’s house after lunch. The lawyer accepted with a thin smile worthy of a schoolboy. He was still embracing the wastebasket, like a young man in a snapshot of some academic prank, as if it were the last day of classes, and in a certain way it was, and also as if he found in the prospect of leaving Las Cruces a nostalgia at least equivalent to the pleasure of having a farewell cup of coffee with the doctor.
In the late afternoon, while young Goitia was at coffee with the doctor, the old Etxarri woman went up to the second floor in Las Cruces and looked into several rooms. Sometimes she carried out this mission with no other intention than to inspect the house and to calculate whether or not she could make a bit of money one day by renting rooms. Two bedrooms and a shared living room looked out onto the garden. Two other bedrooms with bathrooms had a view of the mountainside. Red ivy covered one of the balconies. The old Etxarri woman hadn’t ever thought about moving to the upper floor herself. As far back as her memory of her life in that house could reach, her territory had always been confined to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. The upper floor contained remembered anguish and mysteries that weren’t hers, or were only partly hers. In any case, they were account balances that produced no interest. María Antonia Etxarri’s pact with life did not include those accounts. She had a firm and grounded sense of things. But she was also a curious old woman, and she liked to listen to the murmur of the empty spaces and to feel, with a shiver, ghosts brushing up against her. She liked to imagine the games of a little girl who no longer existed. She could peer into the shadows and make out the greenish glow of a curled-up, gelatinous shape in the form of a fetus, and she dreaded the sudden apparition of the captain’s bloody ghost.
In young Goitia’s room, the bags were already packed. The window was open. From there, she could look through the big windows into the living room at Los Sauces and discern the silhouettes of the doctor and the lawyer as they sat drinking coffee. What they might be saying to each other in that conversation intrigued the old Etxarri woman, but it didn’t disturb her. She closed the window and went out into the hall. One by one, she inspected the rest of the bedrooms. In one of them, she opened a wardrobe and felt a dirty uniform. She opened a big closet in another room and ran her hand over the clothes as if she were counting lamb carcasses, dressed and hung up. All that could be sold to the rag man one day, while the scrap merchant would take care of the dining room cutlery, once she’d found out whether it was silver or pewter. Another of the bedrooms on that floor had been Verónica’s until Verónica went to Bilbao and got married and until the married Verónica went to live in Madrid and until she stopped spending summers at Las Cruces. There was a leak in that room. The aureole on the ceiling looked like the map of an island and was situated directly above a chamber pot. With the indifference of a cat, the old Etxarri woman passed in front of a mirror. This was now an undesignated room. But just as Saint Verónica was left with an image of Christ’s countenance stamped on a cloth, the old Etxarri woman still had a photograph of Verónica, with an inscription that read To my nanny María Antonia. The old woman kept that picture in a drawer in her room.
After a long while, María Antonia Etxarri returned to the lower floor. She crossed the drawing room and headed for the sewing room, whose old, honey-colored wicker-and-bamboo furniture was gilded by the late afternoon sun. That room had been the Señora’s sewing room, so María Antonia had never done her sewing there. She sewed in another room, close to the kitchen, which lacked the sewing room’s big windows but was well-lighted all the same. She had, however, appropriated the Señora’s sewing box, more to satisfy the unconfessable envy it had aroused in her for years than out of any real need. The box contained several thimbles, some of them silver, and a set of three scissors in three different sizes, all with worked handles. María Antonia had sufficient time ahead of her to turn all the objects in the house that she didn’t like into cash and add the sum to the eighteen million in her bank account, but she had no intention of selling that sewing box. Another, smaller sewing kit that had belonged to Verónica contained boxes of pins with colored heads and child-sized thimbles. María Antonia had kept the little kit, too, even though she remembered that the child had never liked to sew.
She stepped into the former gun room, where young Goitia had spent all those weeks studying. On the desk was an office lamp with a green, glass-paste shade. In María Antonia’s opinion, this was not the most appropriate lamp for a young man, because the green light, like the flame of a green candle, was the light that summoned the dead. The window, set at an angle and smaller than the sewing-room window, was an extension of it, just as it was extended in a symmetrical angle on the drawing-room side. The trunk of books, which Goitia had already packed, was ready on the floor. María Antonia had a premonition. The trunk made her think of a coffin. All that was missing was the crucifix. And it was a heavy trunk, too, like a coffin with a corpse in it. Señora Isabel had died like that, small and shrunken, just the right size to fit into that trunk. The old woman figured she would die like that, too. She could already see herself shrinking as the years passed, even though she was still active and
robust, and still capable of great exertions. She didn’t like that kind of luggage, hollow inside, long and low, with lids and iron fittings and handles, with everything that evoked a coffin. María Antonia opened a window to ventilate the gun room and dissipate her morbid premonitions in the late afternoon air. Then she heard the doctor and the lawyer bidding each other farewell on the porch at Los Sauces.
The Wrong Blood Page 24