“They’re always themselves, Señor Montero. They don’t have any pretensions.”
“What did you say his name is?”
“The rabbit? She’s Saga. She’s very intelligent. She follows her instincts. She’s natural and free.”
“I thought it was a male rabbit.”
“Oh? Then you still can’t tell the difference.”
“Well, the important thing is that you don’t feel all alone.”
“They want us to be alone, Señor Montero, because they tell us that solitude is the only way to achieve saintliness. They forget that in solitude the temptation is even greater.”
“I don’t understand, Señora.”
“Ah, it’s better that you don’t. Get back to work now, please.”
You turn your back on her, walk to the door, leave her room. In the hallway you clench your teeth. Why don’t you have courage enough to tell her that you love the girl? Why don’t you go back and tell her, once and for all, that you’re planning to take Aura away with you when you finish the job? You approach the door again and start pushing it open, still uncertain, and through the crack you see Señora Consuelo standing up, erect, transformed, with a military tunic in her arms: a blue tunic with gold buttons, red epaulettes, bright medals with crowned eagles—a tunic the old lady bites ferociously, kisses tenderly, drapes over her shoulders as she performs a few teetering dance steps. You close the door.
“She was fifteen years old when I met her,” you read in the second part of the memoirs. “Elle avait quinze ans lorsque je l’ai connue et, si j’ose le dire, ce sont ses yeux verts qui ont fait ma perdition.” Consuelo’s green eyes, Consuelo who was only fifteen in 1867, when General Llorente married her and took her with him into exile in Paris. “Ma jeune poupée,” he wrote in a moment of inspiration, “ma jeune poupée aux yeux verts; je t’ai comblée d’amour.” He described the house they lived in, the outings, the dances, the carriages, the world of the Second Empire, but all in a dull enough way. “J’ai même supporté ta haine des chats, moi qu’aimais tellement les jolies bêtes…” One day he found her torturing a cat: she had it clasped between her legs, with her crinoline skirt pulled up, and he didn’t know how to attract her attention because it seemed to him that “tu faisais ca d’une façon si innocent, par pur enfantillage,” and in fact it excited him so much that if you can believe what he wrote, he made love to her that night with extraordinary passion, “parce que tu m’avais dit que torturer les chats était ta manière a toi de rendre notre amour favorable, par un sacrifice symbolique…” You’ve figured it up: Señora Consuelo must be 109. Her husband died fifty-nine years ago. “Tu sais si bien t’habiller, ma douce Consuelo, toujours drappé dans de velours verts, verts comme tes yeux. Je pense que tu seras toujours belle, même dans cent ans…” Always dressed in green. Always beautiful, even after a hundred years. “Tu es si fière de ta beauté; que ne ferais-tu pas pour rester toujours jeune?”
4
Now you know why Aura is living in this house: to perpetuate the illusion of youth and beauty in that poor, crazed old lady. Aura, kept here like a mirror, like one more icon on that votive wall with its clustered offerings, preserved hearts, imagined saints and demons.
You put the manuscript aside and go downstairs, suspecting there’s only one place Aura could be in the morning—the place that greedy old woman has assigned to her.
Yes, you find her in the kitchen, at the moment she’s beheading a kid: the vapor that rises from the open throat, the smell of spilt blood, the animal’s glazed eyes, all give you nausea. Aura is wearing a ragged, blood-stained dress and her hair is disheveled; she looks at you without recognition and goes on with her butchering.
You leave the kitchen: this time you’ll really speak to the old lady, really throw her greed and tyranny in her face. When you push open the door she’s standing behind the veil of lights, performing a ritual with the empty air, one hand stretched out and clenched, as if holding something up, and the other clasped around an invisible object, striking again and again at the same place. Then she wipes her hands against her breast, sighs, and starts cutting the air again, as if—yes, you can see it clearly—as if she were skinning an animal …
You run through the hallway, the parlor, the dining room, to where Aura is slowly skinning the kid, absorbed in her work, heedless of your entrance or your words, looking at you as if you were made of air.
You climb up to your room, go in, and brace yourself against the door as if you were afraid someone would follow you: panting, sweating, victim of your horror, of your certainty. If something or someone should try to enter, you wouldn’t be able to resist, you’d move away from the door, you’d let it happen. Frantically you drag the armchair over to that latchless door, push the bed up against it, then fall onto the bed, exhausted, drained of your willpower, with your eyes closed and your arms wrapped around your pillow—the pillow that isn’t yours. Nothing is yours.
You fall into a stupor, into the depths of a dream that’s your only escape, your only means of saying No to insanity. “She’s crazy, she’s crazy,” you repeat again and again to make yourself sleepy, and you can see her again as she skins the imaginary kid with an imaginary knife. “She’s crazy, she’s crazy…”
in the depths of the dark abyss, in your silent dream with its mouths opening in silence, you see her coming toward you from the blackness of the abyss, you see her crawling toward you.
in silence,
moving her fleshless hand, coming toward you until her face touches yours and you see the old lady’s bloody gums, her toothless gums, and you scream and she goes away again, moving her hand, sowing the abyss with the yellow teeth she carries in her blood-stained apron:
your scream is an echo of Aura’s, she’s standing in front of you in your dream, and she’s screaming because someone’s hands have ripped her green taffeta skirt in two, and then
she turns her head toward you
with the torn folds of the skirt in her hands, turns toward you and laughs silently, with the old lady’s teeth superimposed on her own, while her legs, her naked legs, shatter into bits and fly toward the abyss …
There’s a knock at the door, then the sound of the bell, the supper bell. Your head aches so much that you can’t make out the hands on the clock, but you know it must be late: above your head you can see the night clouds beyond the skylight. You get up painfully, dazed and hungry. You hold the glass pitcher under the faucet, wait for the water to run, fill the pitcher, then pour it into the basin. You wash your face, brush your teeth with your worn toothbrush that’s clogged with greenish paste, dampen your hair—you don’t notice you’re doing all this in the wrong order—and comb it meticulously in front of the oval mirror on the walnut wardrobe. Then you tie your tie, put on your jacket and go down to the empty dining room, where only one place has been set—yours.
Beside your plate, under your napkin, there’s an object you start caressing with your fingers: a clumsy little rag doll, filled with a powder that trickles from its badly-sewn shoulder; its face is drawn with India ink, and its body is naked, sketched with a few brush strokes. You eat the cold supper—liver, tomatoes, wine—with your right hand while holding the doll in your left.
You eat mechanically, without noticing at first your own hypnotized attitude, but later you glimpse a reason for your oppressive sleep, your nightmare, and finally identify your sleep-walking movements with those of Aura and the old lady. You’re suddenly disgusted by that horrible little doll, in which you begin to suspect a secret illness, a contagion. You let it fall to the floor. You wipe your lips with the napkin, look at your watch, and remember that Aura is waiting for you in her room.
You go cautiously up to Señora Consuelo’s door, but there isn’t a sound from within. You look at your watch again: it’s barely nine o’clock. You decide to feel your way down to that dark, roofed patio you haven’t been in since you came through it, without seeing anything, on the day you arrived here.
&
nbsp; You touch the damp, mossy walls, breathe the perfumed air, and try to isolate the different elements you’re breathing, to recognize the heavy, sumptuous aromas that surround you. The flicker of your match lights up the narrow, empty patio, where various plants are growing on each side in the loose, reddish earth. You can make out the tall, leafy forms that cast their shadows on the walls in the light of the match. But it burns down, singeing your fingers, and you have to light another one to finish seeing the flowers, fruits and plants you remember reading about in old chronicles, the forgotten herbs that are growing here so fragrantly and drowsily: the long, broad, downy leaves of the henbane; the twining stems with flowers that are yellow outside, red inside; the pointed, heart-shaped leaves of the nightshade; the ash-colored down of the grape-mullein with its clustered flowers; the bushy gatheridge with its white blossoms; the belladonna. They come to life in the flare of your match, swaying gently with their shadows, while you recall the uses of these herbs that dilate the pupils, alleviate pain, reduce the pangs of childbirth, bring consolation, weaken the will, induce a voluptuous calm.
You’re all alone with the perfumes when the third match burns out. You go up to the hallway slowly, listen again at Señora Consuelo’s door, then tiptoe on to Aura’s. You push it open without knocking and go into that bare room, where a circle of light reveals the bed, the huge Mexican crucifix, and the woman who comes toward you when the door is closed. Aura is dressed in green, in a green taffeta robe from which, as she approaches, her moon-pale thighs reveal themselves. The woman, you repeat as she comes close, the woman, not the girl of yesterday: the girl of yesterday—you touch Aura’s fingers, her waist—couldn’t have been more than twenty; the woman of today—you caress her loose black hair, her pallid cheeks—seems to be forty. Between yesterday and today, something about her green eyes has turned hard; the red of her lips has strayed beyond their former outlines, as if she wanted to fix them in a happy grimace, a troubled smile; as if, like that plant in the patio, her smile combined the taste of honey and the taste of gall. You don’t have time to think of anything more.
“Sit down on the bed, Felipe.”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to play. You don’t have to do anything. Let me do everything myself.”
Sitting on the bed, you try to make out the source of that diffuse, opaline light that hardly lets you distinguish the objects in the room, and the presence of Aura, from the golden atmosphere that surrounds them. She sees you looking up, trying to find where it comes from. You can tell from her voice that she’s kneeling down in front of you.
“The sky is neither high nor low. It’s over us and under us at the same time.”
She takes off your shoes and socks and caresses your bare feet.
You feel the warm water that bathes the soles of your feet, while she washes them with a heavy cloth, now and then casting furtive glances at that Christ carved from black wood. Then she dries your feet, takes you by the hand, fastens a few violets in her loose hair, and begins to hum a melody, a waltz, to which you dance with her, held by the murmur of her voice, gliding around to the slow, solemn rhythm she’s setting, very different from the light movements of her hands, which unbutton your shirt, caress your chest, reach around to your back and grasp it. You also murmur that wordless song, that melody rising naturally from your throat: you glide around together, each time closer to the bed, until you muffle the song with your hungry kisses on Aura’s mouth, until you stop the dance with your crushing kisses on her shoulders and breasts.
You’re holding the empty robe in your hands. Aura, squatting on the bed, places an object against her closed thighs, caressing it, summoning you with her hand. She caresses that thin wafer, breaks it against her thighs, oblivious of the crumbs that roll down her hips: she offers you half of the wafer and you take it, place it in your mouth at the same time she does, and swallow it with difficulty. Then you fall on Aura’s naked body, you fall on her naked arms, which are stretched out from one side of the bed to the other like the arms of the crucifix hanging on the wall, the black Christ with that scarlet silk wrapped around his thighs, his spread knees, his wounded side, his crown of thorns set on a tangled black wig with silver spangles. Aura opens up like an altar.
You murmur her name in her ear. You feel the woman’s full arms against your back. You hear her warm voice in your ear: “Will you love me forever?”
“Forever, Aura. I’ll love you forever.”
“Forever? Do you swear it?”
“I swear it.”
“Even though I grow old? Even though I lose my beauty? Even though my hair turns white?”
“Forever, my love, forever.”
“Even if I die, Felipe? Will you love me forever, even if I die?”
“Forever, forever. I swear it. Nothing can separate us.”
“Come, Felipe, come…”
When you wake up, you reach out to touch Aura’s shoulder, but you only touch the still-warm pillow and the white sheet that covers you.
You murmur her name.
You open your eyes and see her standing at the foot of the bed, smiling but not looking at you. She walks slowly toward the corner of the room, sits down on the floor, places her arms on the knees that emerge from the darkness you can’t peer into, and strokes the wrinkled hand that comes forward from the lessening darkness: she’s sitting at the feet of the old lady, of Señora Consuelo, who is seated in an armchair you hadn’t noticed earlier: Señora Consuelo smiles at you, nodding her head, smiling at you along with Aura, who moves her head in rhythm with the old lady’s: they both smile at you, thanking you. You lie back, without any will, thinking that the old lady has been in the room all the time;
you remember her movements, her voice, her dance,
though you keep telling yourself she wasn’t there.
The two of them get up at the same moment, Consuelo from the chair, Aura from the floor. Turning their backs on you, they walk slowly toward the door that leads to the widow’s bedroom, enter that room where the lights are forever trembling in front of the images, close the door behind them, and leave you to sleep in Aura’s bed.
5
Your sleep is heavy and unsatisfying. In your dreams you had already felt the same vague melancholy, the weight on your diaphragm, the sadness that won’t stop oppressing your imagination. Although you’re sleeping in Aura’s room, you’re sleeping all alone, far from the body you believe you’ve possessed.
When you wake up, you look for another presence in the room, and realize it’s not Aura who disturbs you but rather the double presence of something that was engendered during the night. You put your hands on your forehead, trying to calm your disordered senses: that dull melancholy is hinting to you in a low voice, the voice of memory and premonition, that you’re seeking your other half, that the sterile conception last night engendered your own double.
And you stop thinking, because there are things even stronger than the imagination: the habits that force you to get up, look for a bathroom off this room without finding one, go out into the hallway rubbing your eyelids, climb the stairs tasting the thick bitterness of your tongue, enter your own room feeling the rough bristles on your chin, turn on the bath faucets and then slide into the warm water, letting yourself relax into forgetfulness.
But while you’re drying yourself, you remember the old lady and the girl as they smiled at you before leaving the room arm in arm; you recall that whenever they’re together they always do the same things: they embrace, smile, eat, speak, enter, leave, at the same time, as if one were imitating the other, as if the will of one depended on the existence of the other … You cut yourself lightly on one cheek as you think of these things while you shave; you make an effort to get control of yourself. When you finish shaving you count the objects in your traveling case, the bottles and tubes which the servant you’ve never seen brought over from your boarding house: you murmur the names of these objects, touch them, read the contents and instructions, pronoun
ce the names of the manufacturers, keeping to these objects in order to forget that other one, the one without a name, without a label, without any rational consistency. What is Aura expecting of you? you ask yourself, closing the traveling case. What does she want, what does she want?
In answer you hear the dull rhythm of her bell in the corridor telling you breakfast is ready. You walk to the door without your shirt on. When you open it you find Aura there: it must be Aura because you see the green taffeta she always wears, though her face is covered with a green veil. You take her by the wrist, that slender wrist which trembles at your touch …
“Breakfast is ready,” she says, in the faintest voice you’ve ever heard.
“Aura, let’s stop pretending.”
“Pretending?”
“Tell me if Señora Consuelo keeps you from leaving, from living your own life. Why did she have to be there when you and I … Please tell me you’ll go with me when…”
“Go away? Where?”
“Out of this house. Out into the world, to live together. You shouldn’t feel bound to your aunt forever … Why all this devotion? Do you love her that much?”
“Love her?”
“Yes. Why do you have to sacrifice yourself this way?”
“Love her? She loves me. She sacrifices herself for me.”
“But she’s an old woman, almost a corpse. You can’t…”
“She has more life than I do. Yes, she’s old and repulsive … Felipe, I don’t want to become … to be like her … another…”
“She’s trying to bury you alive. You’ve got to be reborn, Aura.”
“You have to die before you can be reborn … No, you don’t understand. Forget about it, Felipe. Just have faith in me.”
“If you’d only explain.”
“Just have faith in me. She’s going to be out today for the whole day.”
“She?”
“Yes, the other.”
“She’s going out? But she never…”