by Hector Abad
PILAR
I can say that since that day when Alberto declared his love for me we’ve always been together. We’ve never spent even a month apart in more than half a century. And everything has brought us closer together, starting with our sorrows. The same year we started being a couple, Alberto’s father died. He was a heavy smoker, unfiltered Pielrojas, and he got lung cancer, which killed him at the age of fifty-seven. Alberto was barely sixteen, and his oldest brother, Rodrigo, twenty-six. They were very rich: they inherited several factories and many properties, but at first everything was administered by a relative, Don Salomón Pérez. I remember Mamá saying, when Alberto’s father died: “Poor Doña Helena, widowed with all those crazy sons. Let’s pray for her, she’s going to go through a lot of suffering raising so many boys on her own. Men are troublesome, out of every hundred, eighty are good for nothing.”
Since we were already engaged I went to his father’s funeral. I felt so sorry for Doña Helena, my future mother-in-law, dressed in black; from then on she always dressed in full mourning, until she died, when she was over eighty. Curt, distant, very pious, a daily Mass Catholic, daily rosary reciter, very charitable with the poor, but cold as ice with everyone, even with her sons and her grandchildren. I never saw her give a kiss or a hug to any of her children, or any of mine, her grandchildren. She was so cold that my children didn’t call her Grandma but Doña Helena. She suffered from something she called colerín calambroso, which was a stomach sickness that gave her horrible cramps and sudden diarrhea that struck so quickly she could not even make it to the toilet. That’s why she practically never left the house, except to go to Mass, or visit friends or relatives, and she always had a sad wince on her face, a gesture of nostalgia and desolation that seemed to make her look forever melancholy and distant. She had her good points though; every year, for example, on Alberto’s and my wedding anniversary, she always sent me a card thanking me for making her son so happy. I was very fond of her.
Doña Helena had given up driving, at the insistence of her older sons, and so she went everywhere by taxi. Her sons bought her two taxis: a white one and a black one, so she’d never be without someone to take her wherever she wanted to go and bring her home again. The drivers were also black and white: a black driver drove the white taxi and a white driver drove the black taxi. The driver of the white taxi was called Cucuma, well, we called him Cucuma and he was so nice, happy all the time; the driver of the black taxi was called Gustavo. They worked as normal taxi drivers in the off hours, but they always had to be available when Doña Helena needed them. Since she hardly ever went out, it was a good deal for the taxi drivers.
The sons, however, did not take taxis. They drove their own cars. When their father died, with a tiny portion of the inheritance, they each bought a car. Flashy, expensive cars, the likes of which weren’t seen again in Medellín until the mafioso era. Rodrigo bought a Ford Mustang, the latest model, when he received his share of the inheritance; Santiago, the second son, ordered a red Porsche from Germany; Lucía, within a few years, had a Camaro convertible and was the first woman in Medellín to win a motor race. Juvenal, the youngest brother, had an enormous British Range Rover, because he liked to drive on dirt roads. Alberto, on the other hand, who had as much money as the rest of them, made do with a small, simple, modest, secondhand car: a black Volkswagen Beetle, which we called the cucarachita. Alberto has always been like that, humble and simple; he doesn’t like drawing attention to himself. I don’t know what he did with the rest of the money; either he put it in a savings account or he gave it to the priests. I think if it had been up to him, he would rather have taken the bus. His siblings went around causing a commotion in Laureles, screeching around bends, spinning, sliding, and skidding in the grit on the corners. And every year or two they’d replace their cars with newer, bigger, brighter, flashier models. They were the neighborhood rich kids. Except for Alberto, he always went along calmly, slowly, first on his pale blue Lambretta and then on the bus, or in his Volkswagen Beetle. I saw him like that, with his shy smile, so humble and so handsome, and was more in love each day.
He came to visit me every night, at the low wall out front, before he was allowed in the house. We talked about any old thing, never touching even a hair. Sometimes he’d give me quizzes or ask me riddles. When he posed tricky questions, for example: “Pilar, what’s better: almost winning or almost losing?” I’d run upstairs and ask Eva, Eva what’s better, what’s better, and run back down, and tell him: “Silly goose, of course, almost losing, it’s better to almost lose.” I owe Eva a lot. Alberto once gave me a biography of Madame Curie to read, but I fell asleep every time I opened the book, so I asked Eva to read it quickly and sum it up for me. She loved it, and Madame Curie is still one of her lifelong idols, she still says she would have liked to be like her. I barely know if she was French, or Polish, I don’t even remember anymore. At school Eva always had to whisper answers to me during exams. Sometimes I’d grab her exam paper when she was almost finished and hand her my empty one, so she could fill that in too. I’d rub out Eva at the top and put Pilar, leaving our surname. One time she didn’t want to tell me the answers, I don’t know why, and I threw a little bottle of Indian ink all over her and stained everything.
Eva never forgot the beret of her school uniform and I often did. She suffered whenever she saw me on the bus with my uniform wrinkled or without my beret. She always put her uniform under her mattress so it would get pressed overnight, without getting shiny, because the material started to shine if you ironed it too much, Mamá had warned us. After her shower she’d put on her impeccable uniform, with all the pleats perfectly marked. On the bus, she sat like a perfect little señorita, so her skirt wouldn’t get wrinkled. And she’d brush her hair slowly, with setting lotion, back then, and lastly, her beret. One time when I didn’t have my beret on, because I was always forgetting it, I took hers off very slowly, from behind, as we were walking into Mass, without her noticing. I put it on and went to sit in the front pew of the chapel. Eva saw me pass her, in my beret, and she was pleased to see me wearing it. Thank God, she said to herself, where did she find it? When the nun arrived at the church, she inspected us all with her eagle eye from a platform, and saw Eva without her beret and was furious. She called her to the front, with a shout: “Eva Ángel, come up here!” When she got there she asked her where her beret was and Eva touched her head. She couldn’t believe she didn’t have her beret on, didn’t understand where it might have gone. And I was frowning, in the front pew, with my head lowered, but killing myself laughing inside. Oh, I was so naughty, how embarrassing. Eva was the exemplary, best-dressed girl in school. The nuns even used to take her around to all the classrooms so all the girls could see how the pleats of their skirts should be, how to knot their ties, with two ribbons exactly the same length, how to wear the pirulí, which was the cap that went with our gym uniforms, a sort of skullcap like bishops wore, but blue. She got in trouble that time, but she never told on me. She would be enraged inside, but since she’s as noble as only she is, she never told anybody about the bad things I did. Sometimes, at night, she’d even laugh, a nervous laughter, a mixture of anger and compassion for the way I was, that could never bring me any good, if there was any justice in this world. Since we slept in the same bed, from the darkness, sometimes, she’d say to me, before we fell asleep:
“Pili, sometimes I think you’re never going to be able to stop telling lies. It seems like you’ve learned to lie to get your way. That’s nasty, Pilar.”
I’d pretend to be asleep. I think in this world it’s almost impossible to survive without lying, or without at least a little craftiness. So many truths have not brought Eva anything but problems that she could have avoided just by keeping her trap shut or by telling, for pity’s sake, a tiny lie.
When Alberto held my hand for the first time I gave him a furious look (although overjoyed inside), told him to respect me, not to be so forward, did he think I w
as easy, or what. But I fell asleep holding that hand to my nose, what delight, smelling Pino Silvestre, and kept my hand out of the shower the next morning, to be able to smell him on my hand on the bus and tell my girlfriends that he’d held my hand, that they could sniff it if they didn’t believe me. Pino Silvestre, what a lovely scent, though I think that cologne has been discontinued, Alberto’s cologne of our youth.
We had a few little problems during our teenage relationship, of course. One day, Alberto went to visit Mona Díaz and I dumped him. Infidelities? I was not going to stand for that, much less with the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Another time he fell for Olguita Pérez, a pretty girl from the coast, who was tall, tanned, and a divine dancer, she swayed like a palm tree, she always wore red and at a dance the other boys dared him, got him drunk, and pushed him over to dance with her. He was thrilled. But God punished him for me. Two or three days after dancing with Olguita Pérez he came down with hepatitis, and when I went to visit him he told me he wasn’t so much in love with me anymore and maybe we should stop seeing each other. That time I almost died. When the situation eased, and his younger brother, Juvenal, started courting me, I pretended to pay attention to Jota, as I called him, though I didn’t like him one bit, to see if Alberto would react. It worked, because he opened his eyes and came to the house to beg me to take him back.
One day, about a year after that fight, he went on a spiritual retreat, and I was waiting for him in a new dress when he came back. I’d been saving for a month to be able to buy it. I remember the seamstress who made it for me, where she lived, what the pattern was like, imperial style, the color. I had ordered it in red, like the one the girl from the coast who almost stole him from me had been wearing, a scandalous red. And when the midday Mass finished he said we should stop seeing each other because the priest at the retreat said he seemed very much in love and it wasn’t good to be so engulfed from such a young age. That accursed priest, with his black cassock, achieved more than I could with my red dress. What he wanted was to steal him away from me and take him to the seminary. In Alberto’s family, since he was so good and polite and humble, since he always went to Mass, and since he was so pious and innocent, they all thought he was going to be a priest when he grew up. I spent about two weeks on tenterhooks, thinking he was going to go into the seminary, that he was going to choose between the red and the black, but finally he came to visit me and I found the way to keep him from going to the seminary.
There, after three years of being my boyfriend, he gave me my first kiss on the lips. I almost forced him.
“I bet you wouldn’t kiss me,” I said, when I was about to leave for a holiday in Cartagena.
Then he said, oh yes he would, and he kissed me on the lips. I ran to the church to confess that very day because if the plane crashed I’d go straight to hell. But I was the one who proposed everything: holding hands in the cinema, kissing, and finally marriage. I forced him to propose to me. One night I said to him:
“Alberto, don’t you think we should get married?”
And he said:
“Um, well, alright. When?”
“When are you free?”
He took out a calendar, a little card he had in his billfold and said:
“It could be December 21st because on the 20th I finish my exams.”
I was seventeen years old and as quick as a flash, I said:
“Perfect! Wait a tiny moment.”
I ran upstairs to where my parents were and said: “Papi, Papi, Alberto proposed. I have to drop out of school to prepare my trousseau.” Papá and Mamá stared at me, half terrified, wide-eyed, but they said okay. And I ran back downstairs as fast as I could, so he wouldn’t change his mind on me, and I said:
“Okay, Papá and Mamá say I can get married. December 21st it is, then. But first we have to have our engagement party.”
The next day I went to see Sister Fernanda, the mother superior of the school, who was very sweet, and I told her:
“Sister Fernanda, I’m going to leave school, I’m not going to finish my diploma.”
“But why? You only need seven more months to get your qualifications.”
“Oh, Sister, I’m going to be married.”
Her eyes welled up with tears of happiness. I think she’d always wanted to get married. And she said:
“That will be your life’s happiness. Don’t worry, off you go, in these last few months you’re not going to learn anything, especially if you’re thinking about getting married all the time. Have children, many children.”
I remember that Sister Fernanda, who was such a dear, had Parkinson’s, her hands shook when she read pious books to us in religion class. The ideal thing for a woman, according to what they taught us at school, was to marry a good man, and Alberto was the best husband I could get. He was pious, he was handsome, he was good-looking, and he was the best catch in Laureles. I dropped out to prepare my trousseau, our engagement, wedding, honeymoon, and all that.
In June of that year they fired Papá from the hospital, saying he was a radical and a supporter of unions and Communists. He wasn’t exactly a Communist, but he didn’t disagree so much with Fidel Castro or union leaders, and he said that some of the things the guerrillas were asking for, such as agrarian reform and redistribution of the land to the campesinos, were not so unreasonable. Don’t ask me, I don’t know anything, but that made people angry at the university, where they were very conservative, ultra-right, and it enraged them even more because they knew my grandfather Josué, Cobo’s father, was a cattle rancher, and the owner of La Oculta, which back then was still a big hacienda, with land enough to fatten up three-hundred calves and produce I don’t know how many shipments of coffee a year. They said Papá grew up in a glass house and shouldn’t be throwing stones. One day I came home and found all the books from his office in the garage, lying there, piled up in boxes. Papá’s face looked dreadful. I thought it was going to spoil my wedding. I didn’t worry about Papá getting fired, I just thought: Now how is he going to pay for my party? But Mamá told me not to worry, that we’d have the party no matter what, that she’d been putting away some savings at the bakery to pay for the wedding. Besides, she was planning to travel to Cartagena, and up to Maicao, in La Guajira, to buy contraband whiskey and champagne from the so-called Turkish stores, where everything was much cheaper. Maybe the only thing we wouldn’t be able to afford was the orchestra for the reception, which was supposed to be Los Melódicos, who were going to play for us so we could dance into the wee hours. In the church, during the ceremony, Toño was going to play violin pieces at the most important parts, when we received the blessing, after the elevation, while the guests took communion, and so forth. He was adorable, Toñito, in a black tuxedo and white bow tie, for the first time in his life, in his first concert as a soloist, so enchanting. His angelic music brought us good luck.
Since we married we’ve never been apart, and we’ve been rich and poor, happy and miserable, almost always normal, but we’ve always been together. I don’t forget what I said in the church, when we got married, because even though everyone says it, I did say it from the bottom of my heart, not just to say it but to fulfill it, and I’d repeat it today: “I, Pilar, take you, Alberto, as my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” I said these words through tears, I cried for the whole time in the church, from sadness at leaving Mamá and Papá, and my little sister and brother. In sickness and in health I have always loved him just as much.
We were both virgins when we got married, of course, with no idea about anything. Nobody talked about things like that at home, or only Papá, and only very indirectly. Eva wasn’t a virgin when she got married, and neither was Toño, when he did, because he used to go to bed with women too, at the beginning, when he wasn’t sure or he wanted to co
nceal the fact that he was on the other side. He had two girlfriends, I remember perfectly well, Rosa and Patricia, but later he only went out with boys who you could tell from a mile away what they were. Mamá suffered a great deal over that, at first, though she ended up accepting it. Papá suffered even more, even if he tried never to speak of it, but you could tell, it would slip out, because sometimes at lunch he’d be praising Fidel Castro, because in Cuba homosexuality was forbidden and fags got sent to re-education camps, to cure them, and if it didn’t he’d have them shot. And once he even said, speaking harshly, rapping his knuckles on the table, that they should do that everywhere because men were becoming effeminate, and how would there be people in this world, when it was impossible to have children that way, and surnames would disappear, like the surname Ángel, the surname of those who had arrived in Jericó from El Retiro and founded La Oculta, a surname that in our branch of the family depended entirely on Antonio, and he said his full name, Antonio Ángel, and looked him in the eye. Sometimes I think Toño spends so much time finding out about our ancestors as compensation: since he won’t leave any Ángels for the future, he’ll know everything about all the Ángels of the past.