The Stories of Eva Luna (21 page)

Two days before the wedding, when the tables for the wedding party were being set up in the garden, the fowls and hogs were being slaughtered for the feast, and the flowers being cut to decorate the house, Dulce Rosa Orellano tried on her wedding dress. She gazed at herself in the mirror, so like the day of her coronation as Queen of Carnival that she could not go on deceiving her own heart. She knew she would never be able to carry out the revenge she had planned, because she was in love with the assassin, but neither could she silence the Senator's ghost. She dismissed the seamstress, picked up the scissors, and walked to the room in the third patio that had been empty so many years.

Tadeo Céspedes looked for her everywhere, calling her frantically. The barking of the dogs led him to the far end of the house. With the help of the gardeners he kicked down the bolted door and rushed into the room, where once he had seen an angel crowned with jasmine blossoms. He found Dulce Rosa just as she was in his dreams every night of his life, in the same bloody organza dress, and he knew he would live to be ninety and pay for his guilt with the memory of the only woman who had ever touched his heart.

LETTERS OF BETRAYED LOVE

T
he mother of Analía Torres had died of delirium following her delivery. Her father had not been able to endure the grief and two weeks later had shot himself in the chest. For several days he lay dying with his wife's name on his lips. His brother Eugenio was left in charge of the family estate and arranged the fate of the tiny orphan according to his own standards. Until she was six, Analía had clung to the skirts of an Indian nursemaid in the servants' quarters of the house of her guardian; later, as soon as she was old enough to go to school, she had been sent to the capital as a boarding student with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, where she spent the next twelve years of her life. She was a good student and she loved the discipline, the austerity of the stone convent, the chapel with its court of saints and aroma of wax and lilies, the bare corridors, the shaded patios. What she liked least was the noisiness of the pupils and the acrid odor of the classrooms. Every time she was able to escape the nuns' vigilance, she hid in the attic among decapitated statues and broken-down furniture to tell herself stories. In those stolen moments she sank into silence with the sensation of indulging herself in a sin.

Every six months she received a brief note from her uncle Eugenio exhorting her to comport herself well and honor the memory of her parents, who had been good Christians in life and who would be proud that their only daughter was dedicating her life to the highest precepts of virtue, that is, preparing to enter the convent as a novice. At the first hint of this plan, however, Analía had informed her uncle that she was not inclined to follow it; out of pure contrariness, she adamantly maintained that position, because deep in her heart she enjoyed the religious life. Hidden behind the habit, in the ultimate solitude of total renunciation of pleasure, she might, she thought, find lasting peace; her instinct, nevertheless, warned her against her guardian's counsel. She suspected that his actions were motivated more by greed than by family loyalty. She mistrusted any idea that originated with him: there was bound to be a trap hidden somewhere.

When Analía was sixteen, her uncle came for the first time to visit her at school. When the Mother Superior called the girl to her office she found it necessary to introduce them; each had changed so much from the days of the Indian nursemaid in the back patios that they did not recognize one another.

“I see that the Little Sisters have looked after you well, Analía,” her uncle commented, stirring his cup of chocolate. “You look healthy, you might even say pretty. In my last letter I notified you that beginning with this birthday, you will receive a monthly sum for your expenses, just as my brother, may he rest in peace, stipulated in his will.”

“How much?”

“A hundred pesos.”

“Is that all my parents left me?”

“No, of course not. You know that the hacienda belongs to you, but agriculture is no task for a woman, especially not in these times of strikes and revolutions. For the moment, I shall send you a monthly allowance that will increase every year until you reach your majority. Then we shall see.”

“We shall see what, Uncle?”

“We shall see what is best for you.”

“What choice do I have?”

“You will always need a man to oversee the hacienda, my girl. I have done that all these years; it has not been an easy task, but it was my duty. I promised my brother in his last hours, and I am prepared to continue doing it for you.”

“You will not be forced to do it much longer, Uncle. When I marry I shall take charge of my estate.”

“When she marries, the child says? Tell me, Sister, does she have a suitor, then?”

“What a thing to say,
señor
Torres! We look after our girls very closely. It's just a manner of speaking. How the girl goes on!”

Analía Torres rose, smoothed the pleats of her uniform, made a rather mocking curtsy, and left the room. The Mother Superior served her visitor another cup of chocolate, commenting that the only explanation for such discourteous behavior was that the girl had had so little contact with members of her family.

“She is the only student who never goes home for vacation, and the only one who has never received a Christmas present,” the nun added curtly.

“I am not one for pampering a child, but I assure you I hold my niece in the highest esteem, and I have looked after her interests like a father. But you are right, my niece needs more affection; women are sentimental creatures.”

A month later the uncle again presented himself at the school. On this occasion he did not ask to see his niece but merely notified the Mother Superior that his own son wished to enter into correspondence with Analía and asked her to see that the letters were delivered, with the hope that a friendship with her cousin would strengthen family ties.

The letters began to arrive with regularity: plain white paper and black ink, rounded characters, and a large, firm hand. Some letters spoke of life in the country, of seasons and animals; others of poets now dead, and of their ruminations. Sometimes the envelope included a book, or a sketch featuring the same firm hand as the calligraphy. Analía intended not to read them, faithful to the idea that some danger lurked behind anything connected with her uncle, but amid the boredom of school the letters represented her only opportunity for escape. She hid in the attic, not to invent improbable tales but to read and reread her cousin's notes until she knew by heart the slant of the letters and texture of the paper. At first she did not reply, but as time went by she could not help herself. The contents of the correspondence grew more and more subtle in order to escape the censorship of the Mother Superior, who opened all mail. An intimacy developed between the correspondents, and soon they devised a secret code in which they began to speak of love.

Analía Torres did not remember ever having seen the cousin who signed himself Luis, because when she had lived in her uncle's house the youth had been in the capital attending school. She was sure he must be an ugly man, perhaps sickly or humpbacked, because it seemed impossible that so fine a sensibility and such a clear mind should be combined with a handsome appearance. She tried to sketch in her mind an image of her cousin: plump, like his father, his face scarred by smallpox, lame, and partly bald: the more defects she added the more she was inclined to love him. Radiance of spirit was all that really mattered; that was the only thing that survived the passage of time without deteriorating, the only thing that continued to grow with the years. The beauty of the dashing heroes of her stories was no virtue at all and might even become the source of frivolity, Analía concluded, although she could not help being slightly uneasy in regard to this reasoning. She wondered how much deformity she would be capable of accepting.

The correspondence between Analía and Luis Torres lasted two years, at the end of which the girl had a hatbox filled with letters and a heart lost beyond recall. If the idea had passed through her mind that the relationship might have been planned by her uncle to ensure that the estate she had inherited from her father would pass into the hands of Luis, she immediately rejected it, ashamed of such ignoble thoughts. On her eighteenth birthday, the Mother Superior called her to the refectory to tell her a visitor was waiting to see her. Analía Torres guessed who it was and for a moment had the impulse to run and hide in the garret of the forgotten saints, terrified by the eventuality of finally coming face to face with the man she had so long imagined. When she entered the drawing room and stood before him, it took her several minutes to overcome her disillusion.

Luis Torres was not the malformed dwarf she had constructed in her dreams and learned to love. He was a well-built man with a pleasant face: regular features, a still boyish mouth, a dark, well-trimmed beard, and light eyes fringed with long eyelashes but empty of expression. He looked a little like the saints in the chapel—rather too pretty and slightly foolish. Analía recovered from her shock and decided that if in her heart she had accepted a hunchback, she could love even more this elegant young man who kissed her on one cheek, leaving a lingering scent of lavender water.

*  *  *

From the day she was married, Analía detested Luis Torres. When he crushed her between the embroidered sheets of a too-soft bed, she knew that she had fallen in love with a ghost and that she could never transfer her imaginary passion to the reality of marriage. She fought these sentiments with determination, first putting them out of her mind as immoral and then, when it became impossible to ignore them any longer, trying to delve into the depths of her own soul and pull them out by the roots. Luis was an agreeable man, at times even entertaining. He did not harass her with outrageous demands nor try to modify her bent toward solitude and silence. She herself admitted that with a little good will on her part she could find a certain happiness in their relationship, at least as much as she would have known in a nun's habit. She had no precise reasons for the strange repulsion she felt toward the man she had loved for two years before meeting. Neither could she put her emotions into words, and even had she been able to do so she would have had no one to tell them to. She felt tricked by her inability to reconcile the image of the epistolary suitor with that of her flesh-and-blood husband. Luis never mentioned the letters, and if she raised the subject he would close her lips with a quick kiss and some flippant observation about romantic love's being unsuited to married life, in which trust, respect, shared interests, and the good of the family were much more important than adolescent love letters. There was no true intimacy between them. During the day each carried out his or her own duties, and at night they met among the feather pillows, where Analía—accustomed to her convent school cot—felt she was suffocating. Sometimes they hurriedly embraced: she motionless and tense, he with the attitude of one who is satisfying bodily demands in lieu of any other recourse. Luis would immediately fall asleep; she lay staring into the darkness, with an unvoiced protest in her throat. Analía tried various schemes to overcome the revulsion she felt for her husband, from the exercise of fixing in her memory every detail about her husband, with the aim of loving him out of sheer determination, to that of emptying her mind of all thoughts and transporting herself to a dimension where he could not reach her. She prayed this was merely a temporary repugnance, but the months went by and instead of the longed-for relief her animosity grew to loathing. One night she dreamed of being caressed by a repulsive man with black ink-stained fingers.

The Torreses lived on the property Analía's father had acquired when the region was still a half-savage territory belonging to soldiers and bandits. Now it was close to a main highway and a short distance from a prosperous town that was the seat of annual agricultural and cattle fairs. Legally, Luis was the administrator of the hacienda, but in reality it was Analía's uncle Eugenio who fulfilled that function, since Luis was bored by the details of country life. After the midday meal, when father and son installed themselves in the library to drink cognac and play dominoes, Analía would hear her uncle making decisions about investments, herds, crops, and harvests. On the rare occasions when she dared interrupt to offer an opinion, the two men listened with professed attention, assuring her they would keep her suggestions in mind, but then did as they pleased. At such times Analía would gallop through the pastures to the foot of the mountain, wishing she had been a man.

The birth of a son did not in any way improve Analía's feelings for her husband. During the months of her pregnancy, her withdrawn nature became more pronounced, but Luis was patient with her, attributing it to her condition, and anyway, he had other matters to occupy him. After the baby was born, she moved into a separate room furnished with nothing but a hard narrow cot. When their son was a year old, however, and Analía still locked the door of her room and avoided any occasion that meant being alone with him, Luis decided it was time to demand more considerate treatment; he warned his wife that she had better change her attitude before he shot the lock off her door. She had never seen him so outraged. She obeyed without comment. Through the next seven years the tension between them intensified to such a degree that they found they were secret enemies but, being well-mannered, in the presence of others they treated each other with exaggerated courtesy. Only the boy suspected the dimension of his parents' hostility, and at midnight would often wake up crying because he had wet the bed. Analía enclosed herself in a shell of silence and felt as if she was drying up inside. Luis, in contrast, became more expansive and irresponsible; he abandoned himself to his many appetites, he drank too much, and for days he disappeared on unmentionable escapades. When he no longer tried to disguise his dissipation, Analía found good reason for distancing herself even more from him. Luis lost all interest in running the hacienda, and his wife took his place, happy with this new arrangement. On Sundays her uncle Eugenio would sit after dinner discussing decisions with her, while Luis sank into a long siesta from which he revived at nightfall, bathed in sweat, his stomach churning, but ready for renewed revelry with his friends.

Analía taught her son the rudiments of writing and arithmetic and tried to direct him toward a taste for books. When the boy was seven, Luis decided it was time for a more formal education, away from his mother's babying; he tried to send him to school in the capital, to see if he would grow up a little sooner, but Analía opposed him with such ferocity that he had to accept a less drastic solution. The boy was sent to school in the nearby town, where he stayed from Monday to Friday; on Saturday mornings a car was sent to bring him home for the weekend. After the first week Analía anxiously observed her son, searching for excuses to keep him with her, but she could find none. The child seemed happy; he talked about his teacher and his schoolmates with genuine enthusiasm, as if he had always known them. He stopped wetting his bed. Three months later he came home with his first report card and a brief letter from the teacher congratulating him on his good performance. As Analía read the note, she trembled, and smiled for the first time in many days. Elated, she hugged her son, asking a thousand questions about his school: what were the dormitories like, what did he have to eat, was it cold at night, how many friends did he have, what was his teacher like? She seemed much more relaxed and did not again raise the question of removing him from the school. As the months went by, the boy continued to bring home good marks, which Analía hoarded like treasures and repaid with jars of marmalade and fruit for the entire class. She tried not to think about the fact that this compromise would suffice only for his elementary education and that within a few years she could not avoid sending him to school in the city, where she could see him only during vacations.