Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (5 page)

“I absolutely abhor them,” his nephew muttered, looking about as though he’d like to wipe every last guest off the face of the earth. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”

“Just think how your sister would have felt if you hadn’t come to her wedding.” Dr. Quinteros pondered all the silly things that alcohol makes a person say. Hadn’t he seen Richard whooping it up at many a party? Wasn’t he an excellent dancer? Hadn’t he often seen his nephew trooping in at the head of the gang of boys and girls coming up to Charito’s rooms to have a spur-of-the-moment dance? But he didn’t remind him of any of these things, and merely watched him drain his glass and ask a waiter for another whiskey.

“Be that as it may, you’d better steel yourself,” he said to him. “Because when you get married, your mother and father are going to throw an even bigger party for you than this one.”

Richard brought the new glass of whiskey to his lips and, half closing his eyes slowly, took a sip. Then, without raising his head, in a muffled voice that reached the doctor’s ears as a slow, nearly inaudible whisper, he muttered: “I’m never going to get married, Uncle Alberto, I swear to God—never.”

Before he could answer him, a slender, fair-haired girl, a blue silhouette with a determined air, planted herself in front of them, grabbed Richard by the hand, and without giving him time to react, dragged him to his feet. “Aren’t you ashamed to be sitting here with the old men? Come and dance, you idiot.”

Dr. Quinteros watched the two of them disappear through the door of the foyer and suddenly realized he’d lost all his appetite. He could hear those two little words, “old men”—uttered so unthinkingly and in such a sweet piping voice by the youngest daughter of his friend Aramburú, the architect—ringing in his ears like a persistent echo. After drinking his coffee, he got up and went to have a look at what was going on in the living room.

The party was in full swing now and the dancing had gradually spread beyond its original matrix in front of the fireplace, where they had installed the orchestra, into the neighboring rooms, in which couples were also dancing and singing along with the cha-cha-chas and the merengues, the cumbias, and the waltzes, at the top of their lungs. Fostered by the music, the sun, and the drinking, the wave of joy had spread from the young people to the adults and from the adults to the oldsters, and to his surprise Dr. Quinteros saw that even Don Marcelino Huapaya, an octogenarian related to the family, was waggling and shaking his creaking old bones, following the rhythm of “Nube Gris,” with his sister-in-law Margarita in his arms. The atmosphere in these rooms full of smoke, noise, movement, light, and happiness suddenly made Dr. Quinteros slightly dizzy; he leaned on the banister and closed his eyes for a moment. And then, smiling and happy too, he stood there watching Elianita, still in her wedding gown but without her veil now, leading the dancing. She never once stopped for a second; at the end of each piece, twenty men surrounded her, asking for the next dance, and with flaming cheeks and shining eyes, she chose a different partner each time and returned to the maelstrom. His brother suddenly appeared at his side. Instead of the morning coat, he was now wearing a lightweight brown suit, but sweating nonetheless because he’d been dancing.

“I can’t believe she’s married, Alberto,” he said, motioning to Elianita.

“She looks simply adorable,” Dr. Quinteros said with a smile. “And you’ve given her a really lavish wedding, Roberto.”

“The best in the world is none too good for my daughter,” the brother exclaimed with a touch of sadness in his voice.

“Where are they going to spend their honeymoon?” the doctor asked.

“In Brazil and in Europe. The trip’s their wedding present from Red’s parents.” He waved in the direction of the bar and said laughingly: ’They’re supposed to leave early tomorrow morning, but if he keeps on at this rate, my son-in-law’s not going to be in any condition to go off on a honeymoon.”

A group of Red Antúnez’s pals had surrounded him and were taking turns drinking a toast with him. The groom, his face more flushed than ever, was laughing a bit anxiously and trying to cheat by merely wetting his lips in his glass each time, but his friends were protesting and making him down every last drop. Dr. Quinteros looked around for Richard, but he couldn’t see him either in the bar or dancing or in the part of the garden visible from the windows.

It was at that moment that it happened. The waltz “Ídolo” was just ending, the couples were preparing to applaud, the musicians were raising their fingers from their guitars, Red was facing up to the twentieth toast, when the bride suddenly raised her right hand to her eyes as though to chase away a mosquito, staggered, and before her partner could catch her, fell to the floor. Her father and Dr. Quinteros stood there motionless, thinking perhaps that she’d slipped and would get to her feet again in a moment, laughing fit to kill, but the commotion in the living room—exclamations, people pushing and shoving to reach her, her mama’s voice shouting “Elianita, Elianita, oh, my poor little darling!”—made them run to help her, too. Red Antúnez had leapt to her side and swooped her up in his arms, and with a group of friends following close behind, was now carrying her upstairs, with Senora Margarita leading the way, saying over and over: “This way, to her room, slowly, watch your step,” and pleading: “A doctor, somebody call a doctor.” Some of the members of the family—Uncle Fernando, Cousin Chabuca, Don Marcelino—were reassuring the guests, ordering the musicians to resume playing. Dr. Quinteros saw his brother Roberto motioning to him from the top of the stairs. How stupid of me, he thought. I’m a doctor, what am I waiting for? He bounded up the stairs two by two as people moved quickly aside to let him past.

They’d taken Elianita to her bedroom, a room decorated in pink, overlooking the garden. Roberto, Red, Venancia the nanny were standing around the bed, where the girl, still very pale, was beginning to come to and blink her eyes as her mother, sitting beside her, rubbed her forehead with a handkerchief soaked in alcohol. Red had taken one of his bride’s hands in his and was looking at her with mingled rapture and anguish in his eyes.

“For the moment, you are all to go outside and leave me alone with the bride,” Dr. Quinteros ordered, assuming his professional role. And as he ushered them toward the door: “Don’t worry, I’m sure it isn’t anything. But out you go—I want to have a look at her.”

The only one who refused to leave was old Venancia; Margarita practically had to drag her out bodily. Dr. Quinteros went back over to the bed and sat down next to Elianita, who looked at him in fear and trembling from between her long black eyelashes. He kissed her on the forehead and smiled at her as he took her temperature: it wasn’t anything, she mustn’t be frightened. Her pulse was a bit unsteady and she was having difficulty breathing. The doctor noticed that her dress was very tight-fitting across the bosom and he helped her unbutton and take it off.

“Since you have to change clothes in any case, you’ll save time this way, my girl.”

When he saw the cruelly tight girdle, he realized instantly what was wrong, but kept himself from making the slightest gesture or asking a single question that might betray the fact that he’d discovered his niece’s secret. Elianita’s face had grown redder and redder as she took off her dress, and she was so embarrassed now that she didn’t raise her eyes or say a word. Dr. Quinteros told her it wasn’t necessary to remove her underclothes, just the girdle, because it was making it hard for her to breathe. Smiling the while, and assuring her, his mind seemingly elsewhere, that it was the most natural thing in the world if on her wedding day, what with all the emotion of the occasion, plus all the hustling and bustling about and all the fatigue of getting ready for the big day, and above all if she were mad enough to go on dancing for hours on end without a minute’s rest, a bride happened to have a fainting spell, he palpated her breasts and her belly (which, on being freed from the powerful embrace of the girdle, had literally popped out) and deduced, with the certainty of a specialist through whose hands thousands of pregnant women had passed, that she was in her fourth month. He examined the pupils of her eyes, asked her a couple of stupid questions to put her off the track, and advised her to rest for a few minutes before going back downstairs—and above all not to go on dancing like that.

“You see, you just got a little too tired, my girl. In any event, I’m going to give you a little something to counteract all the day’s excitement.”

He stroked her hair, and to give her time to compose herself before her parents came back into the room, he asked her a few questions about her honeymoon trip. She answered him in a languid voice. Going on a trip like that was one of the best things that could happen to a person; with all the work he had, he could never take the time off to visit so many countries. And he hadn’t even been to London, his favorite city, for almost three years now. As he spoke, he watched Elianita surreptitiously put her girdle out of sight, slip on a bathrobe, lay a skirt, a blouse with an embroidered collar and cuffs, a pair of shoes out on a chair, lie down in the bed again, and cover herself with the down quilt. He wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to have a frank talk with his niece and give her some advice as to what she should and shouldn’t do on her wedding trip. No, the poor thing would have had a bad time of it, she’d have felt very embarrassed. Moreover, she’d undoubtedly been seeing a doctor in secret all this time and would know exactly what she should and shouldn’t do. Nonetheless, wearing such a tight girdle was dangerous, she might have a real scare, or harm her baby if she continued to wear it. He was touched to think that Elianita, that little niece he could only think of as an innocent child, had conceived. He walked over to the door, opened it, reassured the family in a loud voice so that the bride would hear him: “She’s healthier than any of the rest of us, but she’s dead-tired. Send somebody out to buy her this tranquillizer and let her rest for a little while.”

Venancia had rushed into the bedroom, and Dr. Quinteros saw over his shoulder that Elianita’s old nanny was cooing over her and comforting her. Her father and mother entered the room, too, and Red Antúnez was about to do so as well, but the doctor discreetly took him by the arm, led him down the hall with him to the bathroom, and closed the door.

“In her condition it was imprudent of her to have danced the whole evening like that, Red,” he said in an even tone of voice, as he soaped his hands. “She might have had a miscarriage. Advise her not to wear a girdle—and especially not such a tight one. How long has she been pregnant? Three months, four?”

It was at that moment that the first hint of the awful truth dawned on Dr. Quinteros, as swift and as deadly as a rattlesnake bite. In terror, sensing that the silence in the bathroom had turned electric, he looked in the mirror. Red was standing there, staring at him with incredibly wide-open eyes, his mouth contorted in a grimace that made his face look grotesque, and deathly pale.

“Three months, four?” he heard him stammer in a choked voice. “A miscarriage?”

Dr. Quinteros felt the earth sinking beneath his feet. What a stupid, ignorant fool you are, he thought. He remembered now, of course, with the terrible clarity of hindsight, that the whole thing—Elianita’s getting engaged, the wedding—had taken place within just a few short weeks. He turned his eyes away from Antúnez and stood there, drying his hands too slowly, as he searched desperately in his mind for some lie, some pretext that would rescue this youngster from the hell into which he had just plunged him. He managed only to mutter something that seemed to him to be equally stupid: “Elianita mustn’t find out that I know. I let her think I didn’t. And above all, don’t worry. She’s quite all right.”

He headed quickly for the door, looking at Antúnez out of the corner of his eye as he went past him. He was standing there, rooted to the spot, his eyes staring into empty space, his mouth wide open too now, and his face drenched with sweat. He heard him lock the bathroom door from inside behind him. He’s going to burst into tears, he thought, pound his head against the wall and tear his hair, he’s going to curse me and hate me even more than her, even more than—who? He walked slowly down the stairs, covered with guilt, full of misgivings, as he kept repeating to people, like an automaton, that Elianita was quite all right, that she’d be coming back downstairs in just a few minutes. He went out into the garden, and breathing a bit of fresh air did him good. He walked over to the bar, drank a glass of whiskey neat, and decided to go back home without waiting to witness the denouement of the drama that, out of sheer naïveté and with the very best of intentions, he had provoked. What he wanted was to shut himself up in his study, curl up in his black leather armchair, and immerse himself in Mozart.

At the front gate he came upon Richard, sitting on the grass in a lamentable state. He was sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, leaning back against the fence, his suit wrinkled and covered with dust, stains, bits of grass. But it was his face that distracted the doctor from the memory of Red and Elianita and made him pause: in Richard’s bloodshot eyes, alcohol and rage seemed to have wreaked their mounting havoc in equal degrees. Two threads of spittle hung from his lips, and the expression on his face was both pitiful and grotesque.

“This can’t be, Richard,” he murmured, bending over and trying to make him get to his feet. “Your mother and father mustn’t see you like this. Come on, let me take you home with me till you’ve sobered up. I never thought I’d see you in such a state, my boy.”

Richard looked at him without seeing him, his head dangling, and though he obediently did his best to stand up, his legs gave way. The doctor had to take him by the arms and hoist him to his feet as though he were lifting weights. He managed to make him walk, holding him up by the shoulders. Richard teetered back and forth like a rag doll and seemed about to tumble headlong at any moment. “Let’s see if we can find a taxi, because if we walk you’re not even going to make it to the corner, my boy,” he murmured, stopping along the curb of the Avenida Santa Cruz, and holding Richard up with one arm. Several taxis went by, but they were occupied. The doctor kept trying to flag one down. The wait, on top of the memory of Elianita and Antúnez and his anxiety as to the state his nephew was in, was beginning to make him nervous—him, Doctor Quinteros, who never lost his composure. At that moment, in the incoherent babble that was escaping Richard’s lips, half under his breath, he made out the word “revolver.” He couldn’t help smiling, and ever cheerful in the face of adversity, said, as if to himself, without really expecting Richard to hear him or answer: “And why do you want a revolver, my boy?”