I knew my mother so well that I can imagine the ceremony that followed, although she never told me the details. She had no false modesty, and always answered my questions forthrightly, but at any mention of her Indian, she would abruptly fall silent, adrift in pleasant memories.
She removed her cotton outer garment, her linen petticoat and underpants, and pulled the pins from the hair she wore in the large bun required by her employer. The long strands fell loose over her body, and, thus robed in her finest attribute, gently, with infinite care, she straddled the dying man, trying not to exacerbate his agony. She did not know exactly what to do next, because she had absolutely no experience in such tasks, but what she lacked in knowledge she made up for in instinct and good will. The muscles beneath the man’s dark skin tensed, and she had the sensation of galloping upon a great, majestic animal. Whispering newly invented words, and drying his sweat with a cloth, she eased herself to the exact position, and then moved cautiously, like a young wife accustomed to making love to an elderly husband. Soon he tumbled her over and embraced her with the urgency dictated by the proximity of death; even the shadows in the corners were transformed by their brief joy. And that is how I was conceived, on my father’s deathbed.
But, contrary to the hopes of Professor Jones and the French scientists at the serpentarium, all of whom wanted his body for their experiments, the gardener did not die. Against all logic he began to improve; his temperature went down, his breathing became normal, and he asked for food. Consuelo realized that without intending it she had discovered an antidote for poisonous snakebites, and continued to administer it with tenderness and enthusiasm as often as requested, until the patient was once again on his feet. Soon afterward, the Indian came to tell her goodbye; she made no attempt to detain him. They held hands for a minute or two, kissed each other with a certain sadness, and then she removed her gold nugget, its cord worn thin from wear, and hung it around the neck of her only lover as a remembrance of their shared cantering. He went away grateful, and almost well. My mother says he left smiling.
Consuelo displayed no emotion. She continued to work as she always had, ignoring the nausea, the heaviness in her legs, and the colored spots that clouded her vision, never mentioning the extraordinary medicament she had employed to save the dying man. She did not tell it even when her belly began to swell, nor when Professor Jones called her in to give her a purgative, believing that she was bloated as the result of a digestive disorder; nor did she tell it when, in her appointed time, she gave birth. She bore the pain for thirteen hours, continuing with her chores, and when she could stand it no longer she went to her room, prepared to live that moment, the most important in her life, to the fullest. She brushed her hair, hastily braided it, and tied it with a new ribbon. She removed her clothing, washed herself from head to foot, then placed a clean sheet on the floor and squatted on it in a position she had seen in a book on Eskimo customs. Bathed in sweat, with a rag in her mouth to choke back her moans, she strained to bring into the world the stubborn creature still clinging inside her. She was no longer young, and it was not an easy task, but scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, carrying loads up steep stairs, and washing clothes till midnight had given her firm muscles, and finally the baby began to emerge. First she saw two minuscule feet kicking feebly as if attempting the first steps of an arduous journey. She took a deep breath and, with a last moan, felt something tearing in the center of her body as an alien mass slipped from between her thighs. She was shaken to her soul with relief. There I lay, tangled in a bluish cord, which she carefully removed from around my neck to allow me to breathe. At that moment the door opened; the cook had noticed her absence, guessed what was happening, and had come to help. She found my mother naked, with me on her belly, still joined to her by a pulsing cord.
“Bad luck, it’s a girl,” said the impromptu midwife after she had tied and cut the umbilical cord and was holding me in her arms.
“But she came feet first, and that’s a sign of good luck,” my mother smiled as soon as she could speak.
“She seems strong, and she has good lungs. If you want, I can be the godmother.”
“I hadn’t planned to christen her,” Consuelo replied, but when she saw the other woman cross herself, scandalized, she did not want to offend her. “All right, a little holy water never hurt anyone, and—who knows?—it might even do some good. Her name will be Eva, so she will love life.”
“And her last name?”
“None. Her father’s name isn’t important.”
“Everybody needs a last name. Only a dog can run around with one name.”
“Her father belonged to the Luna tribe, the Children of the Moon. Let it be Luna, then. Eva Luna. Give her to me, please, godmother. I want to see if she’s whole.”
Sitting in the pool of my birth, her bones as weak as cotton wool, dripping with sweat, Consuelo examined my body for any ominous sign transmitted by the venom and, discovering no abnormality, breathed a deep sigh of relief.
* * *
I do not have fangs, or reptilian scales—at least no visible ones. The somewhat unusual circumstances of my conception had, instead, only positive consequences: these were unfailing good health and the rebelliousness that, although somewhat slow to evidence itself, in the end saved me from the life of humiliations to which I was undoubtedly destined. From my father I inherited stamina; he must have been very strong to fight off the serpent’s venom for so many days and to give pleasure to a woman when he was so near death. Everything else I owe to my mother. When I was four, I had one of those diseases that leave little pockmarks all over the body, but she healed me, tying my hands to keep me from scratching myself, coating my body with sheep’s tallow, and shielding me from natural light for one hundred and eighty days. During that period, she also brewed squash blossoms to rid me of parasites, and fern root to flush out the tapeworm. I have been healthy and sound ever since. I have no marks on my skin, only a few cigarette burns, and I expect to be free of wrinkles in my old age because the effect of sheep’s tallow is everlasting.
My mother was a silent person, able to camouflage herself against the furniture or to disappear in the design of a rug. She never made the slightest commotion; it was almost as if she were not there. In the privacy of the room we shared, however, she was transformed. When she talked about the past, or told her stories, the room filled with light; the walls dissolved to reveal incredible landscapes, palaces crowded with unimaginable objects, faraway countries that she invented or borrowed from the Professor’s library. She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea. When she was telling a story, her characters peopled my world, and some of them became so familiar that still today, so many years later, I can describe the clothing they wore and the tone of their voice. She maintained intact her memories of her childhood in the Mission; she retained all the anecdotes she had heard and those she had learned in her readings. She manufactured the substance of her own dreams, and from those materials constructed a world for me. Words are free, she used to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. The characters she summoned to the enchanted world of her stories are the only clear memories I have of my first years; the rest existed in a kind of mist where the household servants, the aged Professor prostrate in his bicycle-wheeled armchair, and the string of patients and cadavers he attended in spite of his infirmity, all blended together. Children annoyed Professor Jones, but he was usually lost in his own thoughts, and when he ran into me in some corner of the house, he scarcely saw me. I was a little afraid o
f him because I did not know whether the old man had fabricated the mummies or whether they had engendered him; they all seemed to belong to the same parchment-skinned family. His presence had no effect on me because we lived in different worlds. I roamed through the kitchen, the patios, the servants’ quarters, the garden, and when I followed my mother to the other parts of the house, I moved very quietly so the Professor would think I was a prolongation of her shadow. The house had so many different smells that I could go around with my eyes closed and guess where I was: aromas of food, clothing, coal, medicines, books, and dankness fused with the characters from the stories, enriching those years.
I was brought up on the theory that all vices issue from idleness, an idea implanted by the Little Sisters of Charity and cultivated by the learned doctor with his despotic discipline. I had no conventional toys, although the truth was that everything in the house served me in my games. During the day, there was no time for rest; idle hands were considered a source of shame. Beside my mother I scrubbed the wood floors, hung clothes out to dry, chopped vegetables, and at the time of siesta tried to knit and embroider—but I do not remember those tasks as being oppressive. It was like playing house. The Professor’s sinister experiments did not disturb me either; my mother explained that the head-thumping and the mosquito-bite treatments—fortunately, infrequent—were not indications of her employer’s cruelty, but the most rigorous scientific therapy. With her confident manner of handling the embalmed bodies like relatives down on their luck, my mother nipped in the bud any blossoming of fear, and never allowed the other servants to frighten me with their macabre ideas. I think she must have tried to keep me away from the laboratory. In fact, I almost never saw the mummies; I simply knew they were there on the other side of the door. Those poor people are very fragile, Eva, she used to tell me. I don’t want you to go into that room. Just a little push and you might break one of their bones, and then the Professor would be very angry. For my peace of mind she gave a name to each body and invented a past for every one, transforming them into friendly spirits like elves and fairies.
We did not often leave the house. One of the rare occasions we did was to watch a procession during the drought, an occasion when even atheists were prepared to pray, because it was a community event more than an act of faith. I remember hearing people say that not a drop of rain had fallen in the country for three years; the earth had split open in thirsty cracks, all the vegetation had died; animals had perished with their muzzles buried in the dust; and, in exchange for water, people who lived in the plains trudged to the coast to sell themselves into slavery. In view of this national disaster, the Bishop had decided to carry the image of the Nazarene through the streets and implore the Almighty to bring an end to this punishment, and as it was the last hope, all of us came—rich and poor, young and old, believers and agnostics. Professor Jones sputtered with rage when he learned of it—Barbarians! Indians! Black savages!—but he could not prevent his servants from dressing in their best clothes and going off to see the procession. The multitudes, with the Nazarene in the lead, set out from the Cathedral but did not get even as far as the Public Utility Company before they were overtaken by a violent cloudburst. Forty-eight hours later, the city had become a lake; storm sewers were clogged, roads inundated, residences flooded. In the country, houses were carried off by the downpour, and in one town on the coast it rained fish. A miracle, a miracle! the Bishop clamored. And we joined in the chorus, unaware that the procession had been organized after a meteorologist had forecast typhoons and torrential rains throughout the Caribbean—as Jones proclaimed from his wheelchair: Superstitious, ignorant, illiterate fools! the poor man howled. But no one listened. That miracle accomplished what neither the Mission priests nor the Little Sisters of Charity had been able to achieve: my mother accepted God, because now she visualized him seated on his celestial throne gently mocking mankind, and to her this god was very different from the awesome patriarch of religious books. Perhaps one manifestation of his sense of humor was to keep us in a state of confusion, never revealing his plans and proposals to us. But every time we remembered the miracle of the rain, we would die laughing.
The world was bounded by the iron railings of the garden. Within them, time was ruled by caprice; in half an hour I could make six trips around the globe, and a moonbeam in the patio would fill my thoughts for a week. Light and shadow created fundamental changes in the nature of objects: books, quiet during the day, opened by night so their characters could come out and wander through the rooms and live their adventures; the mummies, so humble and discreet when the morning sunlight poured through the windows, at twilight became stones lurking in the shadows, and in the blackness grew to the size of giants. Space expanded and contracted according to my will: the cubby beneath the stairs contained an entire planetary system, but the sky seen through the attic skylight was nothing more than a pale circle of glass. One word from me and abracadabra! reality was transformed.
I grew up free and secure in that mansion at the foot of the hill. I had no contact with any other children, nor was I accustomed to strangers, except a man in a black suit and hat, a Protestant with a Bible beneath his arm who reduced Professor Jones’s last years to ashes. I feared him much more than I did the Professor.
TWO
Eight years before I was born—on the same day El Benefactor died in his bed like any innocent grandfather—in a village in the north of Austria, a boy named Rolf came into the world. He was the last son of Lukas Carlé, the most feared of all the upper-school masters. Corporal punishment was a part of schooling; spare the rod and spoil the child was sustained by both popular wisdom and pedagogical theory, and so no parent in his right mind would have protested its application. But when Carlé broke a boy’s hands, the school administration forbade him to use the ferule, because it was clear that once he began he lost all self-control in a frenzy of lust. To get even, the students would follow his son Jochen and, if they could catch him, beat him up. The boy grew up fleeing bands of boys, denying his surname, hiding as if he were the hangman’s son.
Lukas Carlé had imposed in his home the same rule of fear he maintained at school. His marriage was one of convenience: romantic love had no place in his plans; he considered romance barely tolerable in opera or novels, and totally inappropriate in everyday life. He and his wife had been married without any chance to get to know one another, and from her wedding night on she despised him. To Lukas Carlé, his wife was an inferior being, closer to animal than to man, God’s only intelligent creation. Although in theory a woman was a creature deserving of compassion, in practice his wife drove him out of his mind. When he arrived in that village after long weeks of wandering—he had been uprooted from his birthplace by the First World War—he was about twenty-five years old; he had a teaching diploma and money enough to survive for one week. First he looked for work, and then a wife. He had chosen her because he liked the sudden gleam of terror he saw in her eyes, and he approved of her broad hips, which he considered necessary for begetting male offspring and for doing heavy housework. He was also influenced in his decision by two hectares of land, a half-dozen head of cattle, and a small income the girl had inherited from her father; all of which he immediately claimed as legitimate wealth.
Lukas Carlé liked women’s shoes with very high heels, and best of all he liked red patent leather. When he traveled to the city, he paid a prostitute to strut around naked, clad only in that uncomfortable footwear, while he, fully dressed, wearing even his overcoat and hat, and ensconced in an armchair like a feted dignitary, tingled with indescribable pleasure at the sight of her buttocks—as ample as possible, white, with dimples—jiggling with every step. He did not touch her, of course. He never touched such women, because he was fanatic about hygiene. Since he did not have the means to indulge in such luxuries as often as he would like, he bought some gay high-heeled French ankle-high boots and hid them in the most inaccessible part of the wardrobe. From time to time he
locked his children in their room, turned up the record player to full volume, and summoned his wife. She had learned to gauge her husband’s changes of mood and could anticipate—even before he himself knew—when he was feeling the urge to humiliate her. She would begin to tremble with dread, and dishes would fall from her hands and shatter on the floor.
Carlé did not tolerate any noise in his house—I have enough to put up with from my students, he would say. His children learned not to cry or laugh in his presence, to steal about like shadows and talk in whispers, and they developed such skill for passing unnoticed that sometimes their mother thought she could see through them, and was terrified that they might become transparent. The schoolmaster was convinced that he had been dealt a bad hand by the laws of genetics. His children were a total failure. Jochen was slow and clumsy, the worst possible student; he dozed in class, wet his bed, and was not suited for any of the plans his father had made for him. About Katharina, better not even to speak. The girl was an imbecile. Of one thing he was sure: there were no congenital flaws in his bloodline, so it was not he who was responsible for that poor sickly spawn. In fact, how could he be sure she was really his daughter? He would not put his neck on the block for anyone’s fidelity, least of all his own wife’s. Fortunately Katharina had been born with a heart defect and the doctor had predicted that she would not live very long. Much better that way.
Considering the relative lack of success of his first two children, Lukas Carlé was not overjoyed when he learned of his wife’s third pregnancy, but when a large rosy boy was born, with wide-open gray eyes and strong hands, he felt greatly cheered. Maybe this was the son and heir he had always desired: a true Carlé. He would have to keep the child’s mother from spoiling him; nothing so dangerous as a woman for corrupting a fine male seedling. Don’t dress him in wool; he needs to get used to the cold so he will be strong. Leave him in the dark; that way he will never be afraid of it. Don’t pick him up; it doesn’t matter if he cries till he turns purple, it’s good for his lungs. Those were his orders, but behind his back the mother wrapped her son warmly, gave him double rations of milk, cuddled him, and sang him cradle songs. This regimen of adding and removing clothing, of striking and cosseting him without apparent logic, of closing him in a dark wardrobe and then consoling him with kisses would have driven most children to madness. But Rolf Carlé was fortunate: he was not only born with the mental fortitude to bear what would have broken most others, but the Second World War erupted and his father enlisted in the Army, thus freeing him from his father’s presence. The war was the happiest time of his childhood.