“The General is right. Nobody dies of hunger here—you reach out your hand and pluck a mango. That’s why there’s no progress. Cold countries have more advanced civilizations because the climate forces people to work.” The patrón made these assertions lying in the shade, fanning himself with a newspaper and scratching his belly. He even wrote a letter to the Ministry of Trade, suggesting the possibility of towing an iceberg from the polar zone, crushing it, and scattering it from airplanes to see whether it might change the climate and combat the laziness of his countrymen.
While those in power stole without scruple, thieves by trade or necessity scarcely dared practice their profession: the eyes of the police were everywhere. That was the basis for the story that only a dictator could maintain order. The common people, who never saw the telephones, disposable panties, and imported eggs, lived as they always had. The politicians of the opposition were in exile, but Elvira told me that in silence and shadow enough anger was brewing to cause the people to rebel against the regime. The patrones were unconditionally loyal to the General, and when members of the guardia came by the house selling his photograph, they showed them with pride the one already hanging in a place of honor in the living room. Elvira developed a relentless hatred of that chubby, remote, military man with whom she had never had the slightest contact, cursing him and casting the evil eye on him every time she dusted his portrait.
FOUR
The day the postman found Lukas Carlé’s body, the forest was freshly washed, dripping and shining, and from its floor rose a strong breath of rotted leaves and a pale mist of another planet. For some forty years, every morning, the man had ridden his bicycle down the same path. Pedaling that trail, he had earned his daily bread and had survived unharmed two wars, the occupation, hunger, and many other misfortunes. Because of his work, he knew all the inhabitants of the area by name and surname, just as he could identify every tree in the forest by its species and age. At first sight, that morning seemed no different from any other, the same oaks, beeches, chestnuts, birches, the same feathery moss and mushrooms at the base of the tallest trees, the same cool, fragrant breeze, the same shadows and patches of light. It was a day like all the rest, and perhaps a person with less knowledge of nature would not have noted the warnings, but the mailman was on edge, his skin prickling, because he perceived signs no other human eye would have registered. He always imagined the forest as a huge green beast with gentle blood flowing through its veins, a calm-spirited animal; but today it was restless. He got off his bicycle and sniffed the early morning air, seeking the reason for his uneasiness. The silence was so absolute he feared he had gone deaf. He laid his bicycle on the ground and took a couple of steps off the path to look around. He did not have to go far; there it was, waiting for him, hanging from a branch above his head, a thick cord around its neck. He did not need to see the hanged man’s face to know who it was. He had known Lukas Carlé ever since he arrived in the village years before—come from God knows where, somewhere in France, maybe, with his trunkloads of books, his map of the world, and his diploma—and immediately married the prettiest of the village girls, and within a few months destroyed her beauty. The mailman recognized Carlé by his high-top shoes and schoolmaster’s smock, and he had the impression of having seen this scene before, as if for years he had been expecting a similar dénouement. At first he felt no panic, only a sense of irony, the urge to say to him: I warned you, you scoundrel. It was several seconds before he grasped the enormity of what had happened, and at that instant the tree groaned, the body slowly turned, and the hopeless eyes of the hanged man met his. He could not move. There they were, staring at each other, the postman and the father of Rolf Carlé, until they had nothing more to say to each other. Only then did the old man react, hurrying back to his bicycle. As he bent over to pick it up, he felt a dagger thrust in his chest, as deep and burning as the stab of love. He straddled his bicycle and started off as quickly as he was able, doubled over the handlebars, a moan trapped in his throat.
He reached the village, pedaling with such desperation that his aged courier’s heart nearly burst. He managed to give the alarm before collapsing in front of the bakery, with a buzzing like a wasps’ nest in his brain and the glitter of fear in his eyes. The bakers picked him up and laid him on the table where they made their pastries, and there he lay, gasping for breath, dusted with flour, and repeating that at last Lukas Carlé was strung up on a gallows as he should have been long ago, the scoundrel, the damned scoundrel. And that was how the town learned the news. The word flashed through the village, startling the inhabitants, who had not heard such an uproar since the end of the war. Everyone rushed into the street to comment on the death, except five students from the top form, who hid their heads beneath their pillows, pretending to be fast asleep.
Within a brief time the police had pulled the doctor and the judge from their beds and had set off, followed by various neighbors, in the direction indicated by the trembling finger of the postal employee. They found Lukas Carlé very near the road, swinging like a scarecrow, and then they realized that no one had seen him since Friday. Because the forest was cold and the dead man’s weight had become monolithic, it took four men to cut him down. The doctor needed only a glance to know that before dying of asphyxia Carlé had received a severe blow to the back of the head, and the policeman needed only another to deduce that the sole witnesses who might offer an explanation were the students themselves, whom Carlé had accompanied on the school’s annual outing.
“Bring the boys in,” ordered the Chief of Police.
“Why? This is no sight for children,” replied the judge, whose grandson was one of the victim’s students.
But they could not overlook them. During the brief investigation, which the local authorities carried out more from a sense of duty than from any authentic desire to know the truth, the students were called to testify. They said they knew nothing. They had gone to the forest, as they did every year at that time; they had played soccer, conducted the usual wrestling matches, eaten their lunches, and, baskets in hand, scattered to collect mushrooms. In accord with their instructions, when it had begun to grow dark they met at the roadside, even though the schoolmaster had not blown his whistle to summon them. They looked for him, without success, then sat down to wait, but as night fell decided to return to the village. It had not occurred to them to inform the police because they supposed that Lukas Carlé had either returned home or gone back to the school. That was all. They did not have the least idea how he had come to meet his fate hanging from the branch of that tree.
Rolf Carlé, in his school uniform, his shoes recently polished and his beret pulled down to his ears, walked beside his mother along the corridor of the Prefecture. The youth had the ungainly and urgent air of many adolescents; he was thin, freckled, with alert eyes and delicate hands. They were led to a bare, cold room with tiled walls; in the center, on a stretcher beneath a bright white light, lay the body. The mother took a handkerchief from her sleeve and carefully cleaned her glasses. When the coroner lifted the sheet, she leaned over and for an interminable minute observed the distorted face. She made a sign to her son and he, too, stepped forward to look; then she lowered her eyes and covered her face with her hands to hide her joy.
“That is my husband,” she said finally.
“That is my father,” Rolf Carlé added, trying to keep his voice steady.
“I-I am very sorry. This is very distressing for the two of you,” the doctor stammered, not understanding the source of his embarrassment. He covered the body, and the three stood in silence, staring uncomfortably at the silhouette beneath the sheet. “I haven’t as yet performed the autopsy, but it looks like a suicide. I am truly sorry.”
“Well, I suppose that’s that,” said the mother.
Rolf took her arm and, unhurriedly, they left the room. The echo of footsteps on a cement floor would be forever linked in their memories to a feeling of peac
e and relief.
“It was not a suicide. Your schoolmates killed your father,” Frau Carlé declared once they were home.
“How do you know that, Mama?”
“I just know, and I am grateful they did it, because if they hadn’t, we would have had to do it ourselves one day.”
“Don’t talk that way, please,” whispered Rolf, frightened. He had always thought that his mother was resigned to her fate, had never imagined that her heart harbored such rancor against her husband. He thought he was the only one who hated his father. “It’s all behind us now, we must forget about it.”
“No, on the contrary, we must always remember it.” She smiled with an expression he had never seen before.
The inhabitants of the village tried so stubbornly to erase the death of Professor Carlé from their collective memory that had it not been for the murderers themselves, they would have succeeded. But for years the five boys had been working up courage to perform that crime and they were not inclined to keep silent; they sensed that it would be the most important act of their lives, and they did not want it to vanish in the smoke of forgotten deeds. At the schoolmaster’s funeral they were there in their Sunday suits to sing hymns and to lay a funeral wreath in the name of the school; they kept their eyes lowered so no one would surprise them exchanging guilty glances. For two weeks they were as quiet as the tomb, expecting each morning that the town would awake with enough evidence to send them to jail. Fear possessed their being, and it persisted until they decided to give it words. Following a soccer game, the opportunity presented itself in the dressing room where the sweat-drenched, high-spirited players were changing their clothes, joking and roughhousing. Without any prior agreement, the five lingered in the showers until all the others had left, and then, still naked, they stood before the mirror and studied one another, verifying that none of them bore visible signs of what had happened. One smiled, dissolving the shadow that had divided them, and they were themselves again, punching and backslapping and playing around like the overgrown boys they were. Carlé deserved it; he was a beast, a psychopath, they agreed. They reviewed all the facts and realized with amazement that they had left such a trail of clues it was incredible they had not been arrested. It was then they understood that they would not be punished, that no one was going to raise a voice to accuse them. One of their fathers was the Chief of Police, and would be in charge of any investigation; another’s grandfather would be the judge at the trial; and the jury would be composed of relatives and neighbors. Everybody knew everybody else; they were all interrelated and no one had any desire to stir the mud of that murder, not even the family of Lukas Carlé. In fact, everyone suspected that the wife and son had been hoping for Carlé’s demise for years, and that the general wind of relief caused by his death had blown first through their house, sweeping it from top to bottom and leaving it cleaner and fresher than it had ever been.
The boys vowed to keep the memory of their deed alive, and they succeeded so well that the story passed from mouth to mouth, enhanced at every telling, until it was transformed into a heroic feat. They formed a club and sealed their brotherhood with a secret oath. Occasionally they met by night at the edge of the forest to commemorate that unprecedented Friday in their lives, preserving the memory of the stone that had stunned him, the previously prepared noose, the way they had climbed the tree and then slipped the lasso around the neck of the still-unconscious schoolmaster, how at the instant they were hauling him up his eyes had opened, and how his body had jerked in its death spasms. They sewed an identifying circle of white cloth on the left sleeve of their jackets, and in no time at all the villagers guessed the meaning of that symbol. Rolf Carlé also knew, torn between gratitude for having been liberated from his tormentor, humiliation at bearing the hated man’s name, and shame for not having either the spirit or the strength to avenge his father.
* * *
Rolf Carlé began to grow thin. Every time he lifted his food from his plate, his spoon was transformed into his father’s tongue; at the bottom of the bowl, through the soup, he could see the dead man’s terrified eyes; the bread was the color of a hanged man’s skin. At night he trembled with fever and in the daytime he invented excuses not to leave the house. He had excruciating headaches but his mother made him eat and go to school. He bore it for twenty-six days, but on the morning of the twenty-seventh, the day that his five schoolmates appeared at recess with white circles on their jacket sleeves, he suffered an attack of vomiting so severe that the principal became alarmed and called an ambulance to take him to the hospital in the neighboring town, where he stayed for the remainder of the week, vomiting up his soul. When Frau Carlé saw her son’s condition, she knew instinctively that his symptoms were not caused by ordinary indigestion. The village doctor, the same who had attended his birth and issued his father’s death certificate, examined him carefully; he prescribed a series of medications and advised his mother not to worry: Rolf was a strong, healthy boy, his anxiety would soon pass, and before she knew it he would be back on the playing field and flirting with the girls. Frau Carlé administered the remedies faithfully, and when she saw no improvement doubled the dosage on her own. Nothing seemed to work; the boy, numbed by his misery, did not regain his appetite. The image of his hanged father blended with the memory of the day they had been taken to bury the dead in the prison camp. Katharina’s mild eyes never left her brother; she followed him all over the house, and finally she took his hand and tried to pull him under the kitchen table to hide, but by now they were both too big. So she huddled beside him and began to whisper one of the long litanies of their childhood.
Early one Thursday morning, Frau Carlé went in to wake her son for school and found him lying facing the wall, pale, exhausted, and clearly determined to die; he could not any longer withstand the assault of so many ghosts. She realized that he was being consumed in flames of guilt for having wished to commit the murder himself. Without a word, Frau Carlé went straight to the wardrobe and began rummaging through it. She found belongings that had been lost for years: outgrown clothing, children’s toys, the X-rays of Katharina’s brain, Jochen’s shotgun. There she also found the stiletto-heeled red patent-leather boots, and she was surprised that they evoked so little bitterness. She did not even have the impulse to throw them out; instead, she carried them to the mantel and placed them beside the portrait of her deceased husband, one on each side, as if on an altar. Finally she found the green bag with heavy leather trim that Lukas Carlé had carried during the war; and in the same meticulous way that she performed her household and garden chores, she placed in the bag her younger son’s clothing, a photograph taken on her wedding day, a silk-lined cardboard box containing one of Katharina’s curls, and a packet of oatmeal cookies she had baked the day before.
“Get dressed, son, you are going to South America,” she announced with unshakable determination.
That was how Rolf Carlé found himself on the Norwegian ship that carried him to the other side of the world, far away from his nightmares. His mother traveled with him by train to the nearest port; she bought him a third-class ticket, wrapped the remaining money and his Uncle Rupert’s address in a handkerchief, and sewed the handkerchief inside his trousers, instructing him not to remove them for any reason. She did all this without any sign of emotion and, when she said goodbye, gave him a quick kiss on the forehead, just as she did every morning when he left for school.
“How long shall I be far away, Mama?”
“I do not know, Rolf.”
“I shouldn’t go. I’m the only man in the family now and I have to take care of you.”
“I will be fine. I will write you.”
“Katharina is sick, I can’t leave her like this.”
“Your sister will not live much longer—we always knew it would be that way, there’s no use in worrying about her. What is this? Are you crying? You’re no son of mine, Rolf—you’re too big to act l
ike a little boy. Wipe your nose and get on board before people begin staring at us.”
“I don’t feel good, Mama. I want to throw up.”
“I forbid you! Don’t shame me. Go on now, up the gangway. Walk forward to the bow and stay there. Don’t look back. Goodbye, Rolf.”
But the boy hid at the stern where he could see the dock, and so learned that his mother did not move until the ship was out of sight. He never forgot that vision of her, dressed in black, with her felt hat and imitation-crocodile pocketbook, standing, like a solitary statue, facing the sea.
Rolf Carlé spent almost a month deep in the bowels of the ship among refugees, émigrés, and other impecunious passengers without—both from shyness and pride—exchanging so much as a word with any of them. He scanned the sea, however, with such determination that he plumbed the depths of his sadness and finally depleted it. He never again suffered the affliction that brought him to the brink of jumping overboard. Twelve days in the salt air restored his appetite and ended his bad dreams; his nausea passed and he was enchanted by the smiling dolphins that accompanied the ship for long stretches. By the time they reached the coast of South America, the color had returned to his cheeks. He examined himself in the tiny mirror of the bathroom he shared with the other passengers in steerage, and saw that his face was that of a man, not a tortured adolescent. He liked what he saw; he took a deep breath and, for the first time in a long while, he smiled.
When the ship docked, the passengers debarked down an open gangway. Feeling like a freebooter from an old adventure novel, his hair ruffled by a warm breeze and his eyes filled with wonderment, Rolf Carlé was one of the first to step ashore. An incredible sight was revealed in the morning light. He saw dwellings of all colors hanging from the hillsides around the port, twisting streets, lines of drying clothes, and an exuberant vegetation in every possible shade of green. The air was vibrant with sound—hawkers’ cries, women singing, children’s laughter, parrots’ squawking—and steamy with sensuality and odors warm from the food stalls. Amid the hubbub of stevedores, sailors, and passengers, the bundles, suitcases, onlookers, and peddlers, waited his Uncle Rupert, his Aunt Burgel, and their daughters, two sturdy, red-cheeked girls Rolf immediately fell in love with. Rupert was a distant cousin of his mother, a carpenter by trade, a great beer drinker and dog lover. With his family he had come to these far reaches of the world fleeing the war. He had no taste for soldiering; it seemed stupid to him to be killed for a flag that in his estimation was nothing more than a piece of cloth tied to a pole. He had not the slightest patriotic inclination, and when he became certain that war was inevitable, he remembered some remote ancestors who had long ago embarked for America to found a colony, and he decided to follow in their footsteps. From the ship Rupert drove Rolf Carlé directly to a fairy-tale village preserved in a bubble where time had stopped and geography was illusory. Life went on there as it had in the nineteenth century in the Alps. For Rolf, it was like walking into a movie. He knew nothing of the rest of the country, and for months he believed there was little difference between the Caribbean and the shores of the Danube.