Was I right or wrong in what I was saying? It scarcely mattered as long as I managed to reach the reclusive center of her soul. It scarcely mattered even if God was not what I said, but an omnipotent creator from whom injustice flowed like a never-ending river of blood. She turned to me almost tenderly:
“Father, let’s just say that I do believe in God. Who am I to boast shamelessly of my doubts? Yes, I have often thought that she is human, that she also suffers, spinning blindly in her own orbit like all the rest of us. I could even forget all about her if she were far away. But how am I to forgive her, how am I to trust in God’s justice when I see her living and breathing among us, wreaking havoc and fomenting all kinds of evil? And then my thoughts get confused, my words get muddled and I pray in a way I don’t want to pray. ‘Lord, have mercy on that woman,’ I say. But immediately my suffering begins again and I rebel, beating my chest with my fists: ‘Lord, punish that woman; prove that you exist and strike her down.’ Didn’t they teach me from an early age that He does exist and mercifully answers all our prayers? So I wait until evening falls, thinking to myself: ‘She hasn’t returned yet; she must be lying dead somewhere in the middle of the road.’ And as soon as it’s dark I run out, I open the gate, I walk and walk, I search everywhere—but her corpse is nowhere to be seen.”
“What do you expect?” I barked. “Do you really expect God to be the servant, the mere instrument, of your passions?”
She drew herself up, looking very pale. I could see she was straining to control her anger:
“And if she were human, as you would have me believe, if she suffered just like any of us, if she were good, would that change anything?”
I shrugged:
“In that case, I don’t know what to say. I cannot understand what evil afflicts you.”
I sensed that I had deepened still further the rift between us, and the ill feeling provoked by what I had just said was now almost palpable. There was no doubt that I had failed in my attempt to find the right words to touch that stony heart. For I was absolutely convinced that there was no wrong that could not be righted—it was I who, in my weakness, had fallen short of my priestly mission. I stared down dejectedly at my worn cassock. How useless it all was, how overpowering the ways of the world and how bitter its impulses. I stood up, convinced that I could go no further. Then she turned again and took a step toward me, as if to hold me back.
“It’s me, Father, that’s all. It’s simply the way I am.”
And there it was: she would never give way, forever anchored to her resentment as if to one of those immovable iron bollards on a quayside. The other woman wasn’t merely a rival, an enemy; she was the very image of the world, that same world which only a few minutes earlier I had been deploring, together with its vanity and all those things of which she felt unjustly deprived. Human logic, even that which seems to us most absurd, often contains its own secret coherence. I shook my head, and she, too, with a rapid blinking of the eyes that did not escape me, understood that we had reached the end. Then, slowly, unable to stop that nervous tic, she slipped the revolver back inside her blouse and looked at me one last time:
“It may well be, Father. But nothing will deter me. I am incapable of fear. And believe me, there’s nothing I can do but accept myself as I am.”
“Rest assured that I will pray for you.”
She shrugged, and a sort of smile spread across her face. Then she bade me a silent farewell and walked away. I watched her reach the door of the drawing room and disappear into the house. I did not dare to leave and stood there, immobile, my eyes fixed on the door through which she had vanished. Her voice still rang in my ears: “It may well be, but nothing will deter me.” I looked at the pillars, formidable and perfect in the dark. And I thought about how all houses, in their fixity, sooner or later become bastions of evil. Who knows, perhaps the love of God lives only in the open countryside and in places of restless instability.
33.
End of Ana’s Third Confession
As soon as I left Nina, I understood that, far from hurting her, I had merely succeeded in wounding myself. Her words, which were, I felt, filled with poisonous intent, began to seep slowly into me, penetrating my blood, and thus rekindling the anxiety that had once been my normal state of mind. (I remembered, in particular, the time I summoned Father Justino—Alberto was still lying dead in the cellar—and asked that he resuscitate him, work a miracle and make him live again. Never had I sunk so low in my despair—and later, as I calmed down and found myself in the sea of detritus that was me, I was horrified by the sterility of that empty, unsettling time, when I barely recognized myself. The return of that old affliction filled me with a kind of terror and, feeling my heart again weighed down by those memories, I ran to the bathroom, splashed my face with cold water, dabbed alcohol on my temples, imagining that it was the effect of a fever, and that it was all just a passing delirium. Alberto was well and truly dead. I had found it very hard to accept that horrible idea, but had been obliged to submit, because there was no chance that he would return to the world, nor that I would ever see his face again. At first, I told myself over and over that he was dead, knowing that I was merely repeating an empty, meaningless word—yes, he was dead, but that was like naming a tree I had never set eyes on or a place in the world where I had never set foot. I never really penetrated the reality of that death or assimilated the stark fact of his disappearance. I wandered aimlessly about the house, paced up and down the avenues in the garden, visited the places where I used to see him. I imagined that I would meet him unexpectedly and wave to him, thinking: There, didn’t I say as much? He’s still alive. Alberto is immortal. I don’t know whether it was pride or rebellion that drove me on, but thinking of him dead and gone forever was an absurdity I simply could not grasp.
Very gradually Alberto did die for me, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and I, silent and lucid, watched that agony, which lasted years. Yes, he died countless deaths in me; now in a tree he had leaned against, and which lost its magic to become a mere tree; now in one of the avenues in the garden that lost all its charm—the times I had walked down it!—to become an insignificant path I never bothered to walk again. Thus, everything that had surrounded him, that had lived with him and of him, or had served as a witness to his passage through this world, slowly lost its power, grew old and stiff and joined the ranks of all the other anonymous, boring things. That is how Alberto died, a long death, longer than his actual existence. What remained of him was what remains of any death—a grave. If the body wasn’t there, it didn’t matter: for me, his human form had long since become a myth. His grave, in my view, was the Pavilion, where he had breathed his last. Those bloodstained walls, which, afterward, I often caressed with trembling hands, provided the only space where I could watch over his memory. There I wept and remembered him; there I accepted that he had died, and often, lost in my grief, wondered if it had been a dream, if Alberto had ever been a real flesh-and-blood human being, if, like everyone else, he had actually existed. I did not know his soul or his passions, I had no idea if he was generous or selfish or pure—I did not know the sound of his laughter or, indeed, if he did laugh or what made him laugh—if he cried or if he had plans for the future. Dying so young, he had, in that brief time, become the very image of youth and was as fixed and remote as any other emblematic image, and was now like an errant breeze rippling the surface of beautiful, tender things, rather than a being who had been positively alive and loved, idealized and dreamed of like any other. Obviously, this was all in my imagination, and I had created an Alberto more fictional than real. But is not love a series of probabilities that we bestow on others? Alberto’s vitality came precisely from those gifts I endowed him with, and if I imagined him as happy, healthy, and full of noble intentions, it was because this suited my fantasy, and my passion needed only that Alberto and no other. Those feelings faded, of course, and the day came when I grew tired of imagining him as kind or loving; then I
replaced those old feelings with others I invented, with interests and situations that had never existed, but which, momentarily, filled his empty flesh and gave me the certainty, the flavor, the verisimilitude that the truth denied me. For example, I would imagine him engaged in humble, day-to-day tasks—gardening or kneeling by the stream and washing his thick plaid shirts. Or by the fence surrounding the estate, tending the roses that had been planted by my husband’s mother. That was enough to take me down to the stream, where I would gaze into the waters, which no longer served any purpose, or walk over to the fence and pick one last bloom that the winds had not undone, all the while thinking: This is what he used to do, he used to care for these plants. When my imagination no longer came to my aid, I would dig furiously into my memory, so desperate to find some sign of his life that I would see him again, blurred as if in a dream, but still present—walking along such and such an avenue or bending over that bed planted with mallows. Ah, I would say to myself, this was his favorite avenue, his favorite corner. I would then visit those places often, struggling to find the exact emotion he would have felt, and thus drinking in, yet again, like a toxin, his presence and his memory. It was, I know, a feeble consolation, and a day did come when I could imagine him as neither passionate nor bold, neither this nor that, because it all blurred into one, until it reached the stage when I lost sight of his identity and even his name. Alberto, became a name identical to all other men’s names. I was gripped by panic then: who was Alberto, what real human being did he represent? And I discovered sadly that the Alberto I had so loved, for whom I had made so many sacrifices, to the point of forgetting myself and my duties, had no eyes, no hands, no face, no other characteristic physical feature—he was merely a vague recollection. I was sorry then that I had no photo of him, no drawing, nothing that would have firmly fixed his face in my mind—and sitting for long hours, staring into space, I would vainly, patiently try to recompose him as he had once been and restore to the poor ghost who now inhabited my dreams his exact nose, the color of his skin, the shape of his eyes. How many deaths did he die, the one I loved, how many deaths before he reached this definitive, inconsolable death that left only a name floating on the surface of my memory? No, not just a name, because Alberto left something else. The cellar room, the wall still stained with his blood, and that bed covered with an old mat, where he had lain dying, and which represented him, splendid and real, in his final moments, and that would, for me, fix him forever in eternity. (Sometimes, succumbing to damp or simply time, a bit of plaster would begin to come loose, and I would carefully stick it back in its original place, as if I were restoring an image about to fade, a body lacking vital parts, and which would only survive over time thanks to my efforts and my patience.) That is what led me back to the cellar and made me protect it from any stranger’s gaze, like an altar that should be kept safe from profane eyes. I alone could penetrate that space and trace the outline of that stain, a dark continent extending over the whitewash, opening up like a web at either end, then rising up in one sharp line and, finally, exploding like a noiseless, lightless firework. (I remember—and the memory always rekindles my passion—I remember, when I was alone with him and realized he was dead, how I hurled myself desperately upon him, hoping to wrench from his body the final breath I imagined must still exist in his shattered heart. How I clung to what remained of him and tried to lift him up, begging, weeping, swearing, struggling with the weight of his body, which I propped against the wall, marking the whitewash with those signs whose meaning, later, I would so often try to decipher . . .)
Well, it was that same fleshless being into which Nina’s words breathed a little life. “André. Certain similarities. Eyes and lips. Have you never noticed?” That is why she loved André, why she gave herself to her own son. Then, in wonderment, it was my turn to ask: did she love Alberto so very much that she was prepared to trample on all conventions, break all moral laws, to defy God himself, by sleeping with her son? That woman must know what she was doing, must know what kind of love she was dealing in. Cheap slut, I said to myself, the worst kind of prostitute, amoral, monstrous creature—and yet what did any of that matter? She was a woman, very much a woman in her madness. How often she must have trodden the paths of that guilty love, followed the meanders of that rich, young flesh, of a love exacerbated by age and desire. The vision of that itinerary rose implacably before my eyes, making my head reel: Alberto’s skin, his manly smell, his vigor. How they must have loved each other, in the four corners of the Chácara, as if in the wild tangle of a new Paradise. And she was repeating that adventure with André, with her own son, because she found in him such strong echoes, such similarities, enough to provide a substitute for those earlier, unforgettable pleasures. No, it was not some mythical Alberto who now appeared before me, it was a ghost finally made flesh. And, it must be said, Nina’s words had given him that dangerous identity. I needed only to add a slightly scornful air, a mere sketch with no human substance, and there was André, and I had never noticed, never even looked at him, or seen the miracle happening right before my eyes. The reason was clear: it had never occurred to me that André was not Valdo’s son. I was brutally sure now that he was the gardener’s child. Ah, if Valdo ever found out, if the Meneses ever knew the truth . . . I smiled to myself at this possibility, imagining the family gathered together to resolve the matter, with me feigning surprise—the Meneses, ever the victims. The money Demétrio would spend, the emissaries they would employ to clear the matter up, to investigate. And the key to that secret lay with me. Only I could say, and with absolute certainty, that the person André most resembled was the gardener. The idea set my blood boiling—and I imagined going off at once in search of André. But how to broach the subject? What words to use? I had never been close to him, so how could I now justify my sudden interest? Petty concerns, it’s true, given that what mattered above all else was the truth. (No, I was lying: I wasn’t interested in the truth, but in André. No, not André, Alberto. What did I care if André was or wasn’t Valdo’s son? It was those echoes and reminiscences of which Nina had spoken that I wanted to see in his face.)
I confess, I did not hesitate for a moment. I opened my bedroom door and went out into the hallway. Everyone was asleep, and the house was plunged in the most absolute of silences. I went to André’s room and knocked—to my surprise, I saw the door open very slowly, and, from inside, my nephew’s voice asked softly:
“Is it you?”
Who did he think it would be? Who would he be waiting for at that hour of the night? Any doubts I might have had about their illicit romance were instantly dispelled. I pushed the door open and, in the darkness, because he had not turned on the light, I felt his ardent breath on my cheek.
“You came!” he cried in a voice quivering with emotion.
I moved closer, not saying a word, and our faces almost touched. He stammered something else, probably another “you came” made incomprehensible by sheer emotion, and then, suddenly, with a muffled cry, he drew back. From my troubled breathing, the smell of my hair, or simply the secret fluid given off by lovers and which only they can recognize, he must have realized that I was not Nina.
“Ah, I thought you were . . .” he said, alarmed.
“You thought I was Nina,” I responded. “Well, I’m not.”
He murmured:
“Aunt Ana!”
He could not have sounded more astonished, and perhaps imagined I was spying on him and had come there merely to tell him off. How wrong he was. This was the ideal moment—while he was still too embarrassed and startled to react—to find out what I had hoped to discover and to gauge the truth of what Nina had said.
“What if I am Aunt Ana?” I said, and I took a certain pleasure in my own shamelessness. “You were, after all, expecting a woman, weren’t you?”
He said again in the same astonished tones:
“Aunt Ana!”
I stepped forward, orienting myself in the darkness by the sound of his v
oice:
“I’m not Aunt Ana. I’m not anything. I am simply a woman like any other.”
I touched him and felt his trembling, transfixed body. With a violence that took even me by surprise, I flung my arms around him:
“I am Ana, just Ana. You go to bed with your own mother, so why not with your aunt?”
“You’re mad!” he cried. “You’re my aunt . . .”
I tightened my embrace:
“Not your real aunt.”
This time, he said nothing, but I could hear his breathing growing increasingly agitated. He was probably recovering from the initial shock and thinking how to respond, whether to retreat or allow me to continue with what he must be thinking was sheer insanity. That pause gave me the strength to go further—and I wrapped my arms still more tightly around him, like a serpent its prey, and I felt for his lips with my own parched lips, fondling him, squeezing him, feeling beneath his clothes his warm blood and his vibrant masculinity.
“Please don’t do that!” he begged.
But I was already pressing him against the wall and running my hand over face, lips, jaw, ears. Impervious to anything but that wild impulse, I murmured:
“I want to know what you’re like. Ah, if you only knew how much I need this . . . I want to touch your nose, to feel your lips against mine. Kiss me, André, kiss me the way you kiss your mother or as you would any other woman, even a woman of the streets.”
While I was speaking, I continued to caress that fugitive face, feeling it hot beneath my fingers, forcing him to accept my caresses, controlling him with the twin yoke of surprise and shock, for he was still afraid and did not yet dare push me away.
“You’re not a child any more, André, you won’t tell anyone, you won’t betray my secret. Just one kiss, just so I can feel the shape of your lips . . .”
Chronicle of the Murdered House Page 37