Based on the dejected expression on my mother’s face, which awaited us at the door when she summoned us to the table, we realized that something very serious had happened. With one sharp movement of her hand, she ordered us into the house.
“How could you do such a thing!” were the only words she spoke as we walked past her.
But when we noticed that one of the windows in my father’s bedroom, the only one without bars, was open, we suspected what had happened: Albertito, with that masterful kick that neither he nor anybody else could repeat even if they spent their entire life trying, had managed to send the ball on an insane trajectory, which, in spite of walls and trees and bars, had hit the wardrobe mirror right in its heart.
•
Lunch was painful. My father, incapable of reprimanding us in front of his guest, swallowed his rage in a silence that nobody dared break. Only over dessert did he show a bit of graciousness, regaling us with a few anecdotes that cheered everybody up. Alberto followed his lead and the meal ended with laughter. This did not, however, erase the general impression that the lunch, the invitation, my father’s good intentions to take up with his old friends, which he never did again, had been a total fiasco.
The Riketses left in due time and to our great terror, for we feared that our father would take the opportunity to punish us. But the visit had exhausted him, and without saying a word to us, he went to take his nap.
When he woke up, he called us to his room. He had rested and was calm, leaning back on his pillows. He had opened the windows wide so that the afternoon light would enter the room.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the wardrobe.
It was truly regrettable. Having lost its mirror, the wardrobe had lost its life. Where before had been glass, there was now merely a rectangular piece of dark wood, a gloomy space that neither reflected nor said anything. It was like a shimmering lake whose waters had suddenly evaporated.
“The mirror where my grandfathers looked at themselves!” he said, sighing, and dismissed us with a wave of his hand.
From that day on, we never again heard mention of his ancestors. The disappearance of the mirror had made them disappear, as well. His past ceased to torment him and instead, curiously, he leaned into his future. Perhaps because he knew that soon he would die and that he no longer needed the mirror to reunite him with his grandparents, not in a different life, for he was a nonbeliever, but in the world that already enthralled him, as the world of books and flowers had before: the world of nothingness.
Paris, 1972
from
SILVIO IN EL ROSEDAL
SILVIO IN EL ROSEDAL
EL ROSEDAL was the most coveted hacienda in the valley of Tarma, not because of its size, for it was a mere five hundred hectares, but because of its proximity to the town, the fertility of its land, and its beauty. Wealthy Tarma ranchers, who owned enormous pastures and potato fields in the high cordillera, had always dreamed of owning this small estate, which, besides a place of repose and relaxation, could be turned into a model dairy, capable of supplying milk to the entire region.
But destiny conspired to deprive them of the property, for when its owner, the Italian Carlo Paternoster, decided to sell it and move to Lima, he chose a fellow countryman, Don Salvatore Lombardi, who had never, moreover, set foot in the mountains. Lombardi was also the only bidder who was able to pay Paternoster in cash and up-front. The ranchers in the mountains were much wealthier than he, and millions passed through their hands every year, but it was all invested in crops and livestock, and involved as they were in the complexity of credits and debits, they were usually able to enjoy the fruits of their fortune only in the abstract shape of bills of exchange and lines of credit.
Don Salvatore, on the other hand, had worked for forty years at a hardware store in Lima, one that he eventually purchased, and he had amassed a respectable bit of capital by squirreling away one bill at a time. His dream was to return to Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, buy a farm, show his paesanos that he had made a lot of money in America, and die in his native land respected by the locals and above all envied by his cousin, Luigi Cellini, who as a child had punched him in the nose and broken it, as well as stolen one of his girlfriends, but who had never set foot outside that alpine terrain, nor owned more than ten cows.
Unfortunately, it was not a good time to return to Europe, where the Second World War had just broken out. Besides, Don Salvatore had developed a lung disease. His doctor recommended that he sell the hardware store and find a peaceful place with a good climate where he could spend the rest of his life. Through mutual friends he found out that Paternoster was selling El Rosedal, so he gave up his dream of returning to Tyrol and moved to the Tarma hacienda, leaving his son in Lima to settle his affairs.
As fate would have it, he swept through El Rosedal like a summer cloud: three months after moving there and starting renovations on the manor house, after buying a hundred head of cattle and bringing furniture and even a pasta-making machine from Lima, he choked on a peach stone and died. Hence Silvio, his only heir, came to be the exclusive proprietor of El Rosedal.
•
The property fell upon Silvio like an elephant from a fifth-story window. Not only did he lack all skills necessary to manage a dairy ranch or anything else, but the idea of burying himself in the provinces gave him gooseflesh. The only thing he had ever wanted to do since childhood was be a virtuoso violinist and stroll along Lima’s Jirón de la Unión, wearing a hat and a plaid vest, like some elegant Limeño gentlemen he had seen. But Don Salvatore had sacrificed him to his accursed idea of returning to Tyrol and wreaking revenge on his cousin Luigi Cellini. Tyrannical and miserly, he put his son to work in the store before he’d finished high school, right after his mother died, and kept him there behind the counter like any other employee—though with an allowance instead of a wage—wearing a canvas apron and dispensing screws, pliers, feather dusters, and cans of paint. He never made friends, had a girlfriend, cultivated his most secret desires, or found a place for himself in a city where he did not exist: to the wealthy Italian community, engaged in banking and industry, he was the son of an unknown hardware store owner; and to the native society, he was just another immigrant without status or power.
The only moments of happiness he had known as a child were when his mother was still alive. An extremely refined woman, she sang opera, accompanied herself on the piano, and for four years paid for violin lessons for her son out of her own savings. Then there were a few youthful nocturnal escapades in the city, where he looked for something without knowing what it was, hence never found, which cultivated in him a certain appetite for solitude, introspection, and reverie. Then came the routine at the store, his entire youth buried in the buying and selling of lackluster objects, and the progressive elimination of his most intimate hopes, until he turned into a man devoid of initiative and passion.
For him then, at forty years old, to take on the responsibility of an agricultural estate in addition to his own life seemed way beyond the pale. It was one or the other. His first thought was to sell the hacienda and live off the proceeds until they ran out. Whatever remnants of prudence he still had, however, encouraged him to hold on to the property, place it in the hands of a good administrator, and enjoy the profits, thereby freeing him up to do whatever he wished, if he ever wished to do anything. For this, he would have to go to Tarma and figure out in situ how to carry out his plan.
He had seen the hacienda only once, and fleetingly, when he had come at a moment’s notice to pick up Don Salvatore’s body and bring it back to Lima for burial.
Now that he returned with more time, he was impressed by the beauty of his property. It consisted of a series of ensembles that arose one out of the other, unfolding in space with the precision and elegance of a musical composition.
First of all: the house. This old two-story colonial mansion was built in the shape of a U surrounding a large dirt courtyard, with a stone arcade on the ground floor and a veranda with an enclose
d glass balcony and wooden colonnades on the second, topped by a gable roof. From the middle of the central wing there rose a kind of turret, topped by a square, tiled mirador, a rather strange construction that partially ruptured the unity of the enclosed space but at the same time lent it a spiritual air. Upon entering the courtyard through the large gate that opened onto the road, one felt immediately embraced by the wings on either side and sucked into what could only be an enigmatic, serene, and delightful existence.
The servants lived on the ground floor. The upstairs, the living quarters of the masters, consisted of a series of spacious rooms, among which Silvio identified three drawing rooms, a dining room, a dozen bedrooms, an old chapel, a kitchen, a bathroom, and several other empty rooms that could be used as a library, a pantry, or something else. All the rooms were covered with old wallpaper, quite faded though still elaborate and distinctive—hunting scenes, landscapes, still lifes of fruit, or portraits of famous people of bygone times—that invited perusal rather than contemplation. And, fortunately, the rooms still had their old furnishings, for Don Salvatore had not had time to replace them with the mass-produced items still sitting in boxes in a storeroom downstairs.
Behind the house was the rose garden, el rosedal, for which the hacienda was named. It was an enchanted spot, where all the roses in the world, and surely since time immemorial, blossomed throughout the year. There were white roses and red roses and yellow, green, and purple roses, there were wild roses and hybrid roses, roses that looked like celestial bodies, mollusks, a tiara, the mouth of a coquette. Nobody knew who had planted them, what criteria they had used, or for what purpose, but the result was a multicolored labyrinth where the eyes could exult and wander.
Next to the garden was an orchard, with a few fig and pear trees but a full five hectares of peaches. The trees were low-growing, but their branches succumbed to the weight of the pink fleshy fruit covered in their adorable fuzz, which were a delight to the touch before being a gift to the tongue. Now Silvio understood how his father, motivated by an urge both aesthetic and gluttonous, had devoured one of those fruits whole, stone and all, paying with his life for his impulsive act.
And, passing through the gates of the orchard, the open countryside. First, the alfalfa fields, stalks growing as tall as a boy along both banks of the Acobamba River, followed by the pastures, as flat as could be, always swathed in damp grass, and along the edges of the property, a forest of eucalyptus trees that started in the flats and continued for a short way up the mountainside, where they gave way to broom, succulents, and prickly pears.
•
Silvio congratulated himself on not giving in to his initial impulse and selling the hacienda, and since he liked it just the way it was, he immediately gave orders to suspend the renovations that Don Salvatore had undertaken. He agreed only for them to finish repainting the light pink façade and repair the plumbing, the leaks in the roof, the wood floors, and the locks. He also refused to hire a steward and left the management of the entire place in the hands of the old foreman, Eleodoro Pumari, who, thanks to his experience and his thirty-odd descendants, was the most qualified person to fully realize the potential of his inheritance.
These minor duties required that he delay his return to Lima, though the thought that winter was in full swing on the coast weighed heavily on his decision. There was nothing Silvio hated more than winter in Lima, with its endless drizzle, never a star in the sky, and that sensation of living at the bottom of a well. In the mountains, on the other hand, it was summer, the sun shone all day long, and the cold air was dry and invigorating. He therefore decided to strike up a more intimate relationship with his property and try for a budding one with his new city.
At first, the people of Tarma gave him a reticent welcome. Not only was he not a local, but his parents were Italian, making him an outsider twice over. They soon realized, however, that he was an unassuming, healthy, sane, and serious man, as well as a bachelor. This last attribute was the best argument for them to open the doors into their clan. A bachelor was vulnerable and by definition soluble into local society.
The clan consisted of a dozen families who owned all the land in the province, all except El Rosedal, which continued to be an island apart in the sea of their power. At its head was the wealthiest and most powerful landowner, Don Armando Santa Lucía, the mayor of Tarma and the president of the social club. He was the first to invite Silvio to one of their gatherings, and the rest of the clan soon followed suit.
Silvio accepted this first invitation out of politeness and a touch of curiosity, and was gradually swept up into a round of banquets, outings, and horseback rides, which were linked one to the next according to the laws of emulation and compensation. He spent the entire summer at one hacienda or another, accepting one invitation after another. Some of these gatherings lasted for days, turning into itinerant and ever-growing parties, with new contingents continually joining in. Silvio remembered dining one Sunday at the home of Armando Santa Lucía with five other landowners, then leaving the gathering on Thursday, near the province of Ayacucho, after having breakfast with some forty landowners.
As he had little fondness for drink and ate sparingly, he turned down several of these invitations in the hopes of breaking the chain, but the rainy season had begun and gatherings took on a more intimate and tolerable aspect, now circumscribed to dinners and dances at homes in Tarma. If summer was the season for masculine escapades, winter was the empire of women. Silvio soon realized that he was surrounded by spinsters, female cousins, daughters, nieces, and goddaughters of landowners, all of whom were brazenly courting him. These mountain-dwelling families were tireless, and each always had a batch of women in reserve, whom they opportunistically placed into circulation for their ambiguous purpose. The image Silvio retained of his mother was too vivid, and his ideal of feminine beauty too refined, for him to suffer much temptation, hence the frequency of his visits slowly dwindled until he had stoically secluded himself in his hacienda.
Every day he spent there, he felt better, so much so that he kept postponing his return to Lima, where, truth be told, he had nothing at all to do. He loved walking under the stone arcade, eating a peach under a tree, watching the Pumaris as they milked the cows, leafing through old newspapers as if they referred to a nonexistent world, but above all, walking through the rose garden. Rarely did he pick a flower, but he smelled them and could identify a different species in each perfume. Every time he left the garden he felt an immediate desire to return to it, as if he had forgotten something. Several times he did just that, but he always left with the impression of having paid an imperfect visit.
•
Thus, several years passed. Silvio had by now fully settled into country life. He had gained a bit of weight and had the tendency to spend the entire day in his pajamas. His strolls around the hacienda became increasingly limited to the house and the rose garden, and finally he took it into his head to not leave the veranda for days and then only to go to his bedroom, where he took his meals and met with his foreman. He made so few trips to Tarma, and then only for particularly urgent matters, that the landowners stopped sending him invitations, and rumors began to circulate that questioned his mental stability or his manhood.
He traveled to Lima two or three times, usually to attend a concert or buy equipment for the hacienda, and he always returned after completing his task. Upon each return, he resumed his wanderings, recognizing his hackneyed memories of each spot though no longer deriving the same pleasure from them. One morning while shaving he thought he noticed the source of his malaise: he was growing old in a barren, lonely house without ever having really done anything besides enduring. Life couldn’t possibly be that thing that is forced on us, and that we pay off, like a mortgage, without protest. What, then, could it be? In vain he looked around, searching for a clue. Everything seemed to be in its place. But there should be a sign, a clue, something that would allow him to break through the barrier of routine and indolence and
finally gain access to some knowledge, to true reality. Such ephemeral restiveness! He calmly finished shaving and his skin felt fresh, in spite of his age and even if, in the depths of his eyes, he noticed a restless, supplicating flicker.
•
One afternoon, exceedingly bored, he picked up his binoculars and set out to do the one thing he had never done: climb the mountains of his hacienda. They rose out of the far end of the meadows, and their lower slopes were covered with eucalyptus trees. Making his way along the banks of the river and through the alfalfa fields and pastures, into the forest, he began the ascent under the blazing sun. The slope was steeper than he had expected, and it was full of cacti, magueys, and prickly pears, aggressive and harsh plants that obstructed his way with walls of thorns. The ground was rocky and inhospitable. In half an hour, he was exhausted, his hands swollen, his shoes torn, and he still hadn’t made it to the ridge. With great effort he continued until he reached one peak. This was, of course, only the first, for the mountains, after a brief descent, continued to rise into the blue sky. Silvio was dying of thirst and berated himself for not having brought his canteen; giving up on the idea of continuing to climb, he sat down on a rock to contemplate the view. He was high enough up to be able to see, spread out at his feet, the entirety of his hacienda, and beyond, very far away, the rooftops of Tarma. On the other side he could make out the peaks of the eastern mountain range, the Cordillera Oriental, which formed the boundary between the mountains and the jungle beyond.
As Silvio breathed in deeply the pure mountain air, he saw that the hacienda was shaped like a triangle, the house situated in the most acute angle, which unfurled like a fan toward the rest of it. With his binoculars he could see the meadows, where a sparse sprinkling of cows was grazing, the orchard, the house, and finally, the rose garden. The binoculars were not very strong, but through them he could vaguely make out what looked like a multicolored carpet in which certain shapes tended to repeat themselves. He saw circles, then rectangles, then more circles, and everything was arranged with such precision that he lowered his binoculars in order to get a more panoramic view of the garden. But he was too far away, and with the naked eye he saw nothing but a polychromatic blotch. Adjusting the binoculars again, he continued his observations: the shapes were there, but he saw them only partially and successively and from an angle that did not allow him to reconstruct the entirety of the image. It was very strange: he never imagined that in that motley rose garden there existed any order at all. Once he had recovered from the ascent, he put away his binoculars and initiated his descent.
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