“My name is Eliza Sommers,” she said finally.
“And I am Joaquín Andieta,” he replied.
“I thought maybe your name was Sebastian.”
“Why?”
“Because you look like Saint Sebastián the martyr. I don’t go to the Papist church, I am a Protestant, but Mama Fresia has sometimes taken me when she goes to make promises to her saints.”
The conversation ended there because they didn’t know what else to say; they stole glances out of the corners of their eyes and then blushed in unison. Eliza could smell his scent of soap and sweat but didn’t dare move closer to sniff him, as she wanted to. The only sounds in the shrine were the whispering wind and their agitated breathing. After a few minutes, Eliza announced that she had to go back to the house before she was missed, and they said good-bye, brushing hands. They met the next few Wednesdays, always at a different time and for only brief intervals. In each of those tumultuous meetings they moved forward with giant steps through the delirium and torment of love. Hurriedly, they told each other what was indispensable to tell, because words seemed a waste of time; soon they held hands and kept on talking, their bodies closer and closer as their souls moved toward each other, until on the night of the fifth Wednesday they kissed on the lips, first tentatively, then exploring, and finally, losing themselves in pleasure until the fever consuming them was totally unleashed. By then they had exchanged abbreviated summaries of Eliza’s sixteen years and Joaquín’s twenty-one. They discussed the improbable basket with batiste sheets and mink coverlet in contrast to the Marseilles soap crate, and it came as a relief to Andieta that Eliza was not the daughter of either Sommers but was, like him, born of obscure origins, although they were still separated by a social and economic abyss. Eliza learned that Joaquín was the fruit of a passing ravishment; his father had vanished as quickly as he had sown his seed, and the boy had grown up not knowing his father’s name, carrying his mother’s, and, marked as a bastard, limited at every turn of the road. The family drove their dishonored daughter from their bosom and disregarded her illegitimate son. His grandparents and his uncles, merchants and minor civil servants in a middle class mired in prejudice, lived in the same city, only a few blocks away, but their paths never crossed. On Sundays they went to the same church, but at different hours, because the poor never went to noon mass. Branded by the stigma, Joaquín never played in the same parks or went to the schools his cousins attended, although he wore their old clothes and played with their discarded toys, which a kindhearted aunt sent to her banished sister through convoluted means. Joaquín Andieta’s mother had been less fortunate than Miss Rose, and had paid more dearly for her weakness. The women were about the same age, but while the English lady looked young, the other was worn down by poverty, consumption, and the dismal task of embroidering bridal gowns by candlelight. Bad luck had not diminished her dignity and she had brought up her son with inviolable principles of honor. Joaquín had learned at a very early age to hold his head high, defying any glimmer of mockery or pity.
“One day I will take my mother out of that shack she lives in,” Joaquín vowed during their whispered conversations in the shrine. “I will give her a decent life, like the one she had before she lost everything.”
“She didn’t lose everything. She has a son,” Eliza replied.
“I was her misfortune.”
“Her misfortune was to fall in love with a bad man. You are her redemption,” she declared.
The meetings between the two young people were very brief and never at the same hour, and Miss Rose could not watch Eliza day and night. She knew something was happening behind her back, but she could not go so far as to lock Eliza in her room or send her to the country, as duty prescribed, and she refrained from mentioning her suspicions to her brother Jeremy. She was sure that Eliza and her beloved were exchanging letters but was never able to intercept one, though she alerted all the servants. The letters did exist and were of such intensity that had Miss Rose seen them she would have been appalled. Joaquín never sent them, he handed them to Eliza at each of their meetings. In the most feverish language he told her what he did not dare in person, out of pride and propriety. She hid the letters in a box buried thirty centimeters deep in the small kitchen garden by the house, where every day she pretended to be diligently weeding Mama Fresia’s vegetables and medicinal herbs. Those pages, reread a thousand times in stolen moments, were the principal sustenance of her passion, because they revealed an aspect of Joaquín Andieta that did not emerge when they were together. They seemed written by a different person. That haughty young man, always on the defensive, somber and tormented, who embraced her madly and then pushed her away as if burned by the contact, in writing opened the floodgates of his soul and described his emotions like a poet. Later, when for years Eliza would follow Joaquín Andieta’s faint trail, those letters would be her only grasp on the truth, irrefutable proof that their delirious love was not an invention of her adolescent imagination but that it was real, a brief blessing and an extended torment.
After the first Wednesday in the shrine, Eliza’s attacks of indigestion vanished without a trace, and nothing in her behavior or her appearance revealed her secret except the demented gleam in her eyes and a more frequent use of her talent for making herself invisible. At times she gave the impression of being in several places at once, confusing everyone, or it might be that no one could remember where or when they had last seen her and just as they started to call her she would materialize with the air of someone who doesn’t know anyone was looking for her. She spent time with Miss Rose in her sewing room or cooking with Mama Fresia, but she had become so quiet and transparent that neither woman felt she was seeing her. Her presence was subtle, nearly imperceptible, and when she went away no one realized it until hours later.
“You’re like a ghost! I’m tired of looking for you. I don’t want you to leave the house, not even leave my sight,” Miss Rose ordered again and again.
“I’ve been here all afternoon,” Eliza would reply, undaunted, quietly appearing in a corner with a book or embroidery in her hand.
“Make some noise, child, por Dios! How can I see you when you’re quieter than a rabbit?” Mama Fresia would ask in turn.
Eliza said all right, and then did just as she wanted, but she took pains to seem obedient and stay in good favor. After a few days she had acquired an astonishing skill for clouding reality, as if she had practiced the magician’s art all her life. Faced with the impossibility of catching her in a lie she could prove, Miss Rose chose to worm her way into Eliza’s confidence by constantly bringing up the subject of love. There were more than enough excuses: gossip about her friends, romantic books they had shared or librettos of new Italian operas, which they learned by memory, but Eliza never said a word to betray her feelings. Miss Rose watched—vainly—for telltale signs: she went through the girl’s clothes and searched her room, she turned her doll and music box collections, her books, her notebooks upside down, but could not find Eliza’s diary. Had she found it she would have been disappointed, because there was no mention of Joaquín Andieta in those pages. Eliza wrote only to remember. She put down everything in her diary, from recurring dreams to an ever growing list of recipes and domestic lore, such as the way to fatten a hen or remove a grease stain. There were also speculations about her birth, the expensive basket and Marseilles soap crate, but not a word about Joaquín Andieta. She did not need a diary to remember him. It would be several years before she began to record her Wednesday rendezvous in those pages.
Finally came the night the lovers did not meet at the shrine but in the Sommers’ home. To reach that moment, Eliza had suffered the torments of an infinity of doubts; she realized this was a decisive step. Just for meeting in secret, unchaperoned, a girl sacrificed her honor, her most precious treasure, without which she had no future. “A woman without virtue is nothing, she can never become a wife and mother, better she tie a stone around her neck and jump into the sea,”
had been drummed into her time and time again. She believed there was no extenuating excuse for the sin she was about to commit; she did it with premeditation and conscious intent. At two in the morning, when no one was awake in the city and only nightwatchmen were making their rounds, peering into darkness, Joaquín Andieta managed to sneak like a thief onto the terrace of the library, where Eliza was waiting for him in her nightgown, barefoot, shivering with cold and anxiety. She took his hand and led him blindly through the house to a back room where the family’s clothing was kept in huge armoires, along with boxes of trimmings for dresses and hats that Miss Rose used and reused through the years. Flat on the floor, wrapped in lengths of linen, were the drawing room and dining room drapes, awaiting the turn of seasons. It had seemed the safest place to Eliza, far from the other rooms. At any rate, as a precaution she had put valerian in the small glass of anisette Miss Rose drank before going to bed, and into the brandy Jeremy sipped as he smoked his Cuban cigarette after dinner. Eliza knew every centimeter of the house; and since she knew exactly where the floor creaked and how to open doors so they wouldn’t squeak, she could guide Joaquín in the darkness with no light but her memory, and he followed, docile and pale with fear, shutting out the voice of his own conscience blending with that of his mother relentlessly reminding him of a decent man’s code of honor. I will never do to Eliza what my father did to my mother, he vowed as he groped his way along, holding the girl’s hand, knowing that any such pledge was pointless, for he had already lost the battle with the pulsing desire that had bedeviled him since the first time he’d seen her. In the meantime, Eliza was torn between the warning voices echoing through her head and the force of instinct, with all its awesome devices. She had no clear idea of what was going to happen in the room with the armoires, but she had already given in.
The Sommers’ home, suspended in the air like a spiderweb at the mercy of the wind, was impossible to keep warm despite the charcoal braziers the servants kept burning during seven months of the year. The sheets were always damp from the persistent breath of the sea and one slept with a hot-water bottle at one’s feet. The only place that was always warm was the kitchen, where the woodstove, an enormous affair with many uses, was never allowed to go out. During the winter, wood creaked, boards popped loose, and the framework of the house threatened to launch itself like an ancient frigate. Miss Rose never grew accustomed to the Pacific storms, just as she never got used to the temblors. True earthquakes, the ones that flattened everything, happened more or less every six years, and in each of those she showed surprising self-composure, but the daily vibrations that shook their lives left her in a foul mood. She did not like to put her china and glassware on shelves at ground level, as Chileans did, and when the dining room furniture shook and plates shattered, she cursed the country at the top of her lungs.
The storeroom where Eliza and Joaquín made love on the huge bundle of flowered cretonne draperies that in summer replaced the green velvet parlor drapes was on the ground floor. They loved one another surrounded by solemn armoires, hatboxes, and Miss Rose’s cloth-wrapped spring dresses. Neither the cold nor the smell of mothballs bothered them, because they were beyond practical concerns, beyond fear of the consequences, and beyond their own puppy like clumsiness. They did not know what to do, but they made it up as they went, befuddled and confounded, in total silence, guiding one another with little skill. At twenty-one, he was as much a virgin as she. At fourteen he had decided to become a priest to please his mother, but at sixteen he had fallen into reading liberal books and declared himself an enemy of the clergy, though not of religion, and had decided to remain chaste until he accomplished his plan to move his mother from her wretched home. It seemed a small repayment for her countless sacrifices. Despite their virginity and their terrible fear of being surprised, they were able to find in the darkness what they sought. They unfastened buttons and ties, shed their modesty and found themselves naked, sucking in each other’s breath and saliva. They inhaled feral scents, feverishly put this here and that there with an honest desire to decipher enigmas, plumb the other’s depths, and lose themselves in the same soul. They left summer drapes stained with warm sweat, virginal blood, and semen, but neither of them noticed those signs of love. In the darkness they could barely make out each other’s outlines and gauge how much room they had to keep from knocking down stacks of boxes and clothes racks in the furor of their embraces. They blessed the wind and the rain on the roof tiles because those sounds masked the creaking of the floor, but the thundering of their hearts and the rage of their panting and sighs of love were so deafening that they couldn’t understand why they didn’t wake the whole house.
Before dawn, Joaquín Andieta left by the same library window and Eliza went back to bed, drained. While she slept, wrapped in several blankets, he had a two hours’ walk downhill through the storm. Silently he slipped through the town without attracting the attention of the watchman, and reached his house just as the church bells were ringing for early mass. He had planned to go in quietly, wash, change the collar of his shirt, and go off to work in his wet suit, since he had no other, but his mother was awake, waiting for him with toasted stale bread and hot water for maté, as she did every morning.
“Where have you been, son?” she asked, so sadly that he could not deceive her.
“Discovering love, Mama,” he answered, throwing his arms around her, his face radiant.
Joaquín Andieta lived the torment of a political romanticism that had no echo in that country of practical and prudent people. He had become a fan of the theories of Lamennais, which he read in mediocre and confusing translations from the French in the same way he read the Encyclopedists. Like his mentor, he professed a Catholic liberalism in politics and the separation of church and state. He declared himself a fundamental Christian, like the apostles and martyrs, but an enemy of priests, who, he said, had betrayed Jesus and his true doctrine, comparing them to bloodsuckers feeding on the credulity of the faithful. He was very careful, nonetheless, not to expound such ideas before his mother, who would have died of mortification. He also considered himself an enemy of the useless and decadent oligarchy, and of the government because it did not represent the interests of the people, only the rich, as his colleagues proved with many examples in their meetings at the Santos Tornero bookshop and as he patiently explained to Eliza, although she seemed scarcely to hear him, more interested in smelling him than in listening to his speeches. He was prepared to give his life for the pointless glory of a burst of heroism, but he had a visceral fear of looking Eliza in the eyes and talking of his sentiments. They established the routine of making love at least once a week in that same room with the armoires, now their nest. They had counted on so few precious moments together that it seemed senseless to her to waste them philosophizing; if they were going to talk, she would rather hear about his tastes, his past, his mother, and his plans to marry her someday. She would have given anything to have him say in person the magnificent phrases he wrote to her in his letters. To tell her, for example, that it would be easier to measure the intentions of the wind or the patience of the waves on the shore than the intensity of his love; that there was no winter night cold enough to damp the ever burning fires of his passion; that he spent the days dreaming and nights awake, assailed by the madness of memories and counting, with the anguish of a condemned man, the hours until he would hold her again. “You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descend to hell. What is this hold you have over me, Eliza? Do not speak to me of tomorrow or yesterday, I live only for the instant, for the today, when I can again sink into the infinite night of your dark eyes.” Nourished by Miss Rose’s novels and the romantic poets, whose verses she knew by heart, the girl lost herself in the intoxicating delight of feeling adored like a goddess, failing to see the discrepancy between those inflamed declarations and the real person of Joaquín Andieta. In his letters he was transformed into the perfect lover, able to
describe his passion with such angelic spirit that guilt and fear disappeared to give rise to the absolute exaltation of his emotions. No one had loved like that before; they had been chosen among mortals for a passion like no other, Joaquín told her in his letters, and she believed him. Nevertheless, he made love hurriedly, like a starving man, without savoring it, like someone succumbing to a vice, tormented by guilt. He did not take the time to know her body or reveal his to her; he was overcome by the urgency of desire, and their secret. He always felt as if they never had enough time, though Eliza calmed him, explaining that no one came to that room at night, that the Sommers were both drugged, that Mama Fresia was asleep in her hut at the back of the patio, and that the rest of the servants’ rooms were in the attic. Instinct provoked the girl’s boldness, driving her to discover the multiple possibilities of pleasure, but soon she learned to hold back. Her initiatives in the game of love put Joaquín on the defensive; he felt criticized, wounded, his virility threatened. He was tormented by the worst suspicions, because he could not imagine such natural sensuality in a sixteen-year-old girl whose horizons were the walls of her home. Fear of pregnancy made things worse, because neither of them knew how to avoid it. Joaquín vaguely understood the mechanics of fertilization and assumed that if he withdrew in time they were safe, but he did not always achieve that. He was aware of Eliza’s frustration, but did not know how to comfort her, and instead of trying, he took immediate refuge in his role as her intellectual mentor, where he felt secure. When she longed to be stroked, or at least to rest her head on her lover’s shoulder, he pulled away, quickly dressed, and wasted the precious time they had left laying out new arguments for the same political theories he had repeated a hundred times. Eliza felt restless after those embraces, but she did not dare admit it, not even in the deepest part of her being, because that would be questioning the quality of their love. Then she fell into the trap of feeling sorry for her lover, making excuses for him, thinking that if they had more time, a safe place, everything would be fine. Much better than their rolling about were the hours afterward inventing things that hadn’t happened and the nights dreaming of what might happen the next time in the room with the armoires.