* * *
Desperate, Digna Ranquileo went to Mamita Encarnación who, after firmly establishing that her specialty was births and pregnancies and never fits provoked by other causes, agreed to examine the girl. She came to the house one morning, witnessed the lunatic trance, and proved with her own eyes that the trembling of the furniture and altered behavior of the animals were not idle talk but the God’s truth.
“The girl needs a man,” she pronounced.
The Ranquileos were insulted by such a statement. They could not accept that a decent girl they had raised like their own daughter and given special attention to and protected from even the slightest touch by her brothers would act like a bitch in heat. The midwife nodded emphatically, ignoring their arguments, repeating her diagnosis. She recommended giving her enough work to keep her busy at all times, to prevent worse maladies.
“Idleness and chastity make for a sad girl. I tell you, you’re going to have to marry that girl off because she won’t get free of this whirlwind until she has a man.”
Scandalized, the mother did not follow this counsel, but she did keep the girl busy with chores, which restored her happiness and sleep but did not diminish the intensity of the attacks.
Soon the neighbors learned of these odd goings-on and began to snoop around the house. The boldest marauders came early in order to be close enough to observe the phenomenon and try to find some practical application for it. Some suggested that during her trance Evangelina should communicate with souls in Purgatory, predict the future, or slacken the rains. Digna knew that once the matter became public knowledge, people would flock from miles around to tramp down her garden, litter her patio, and make fun of her daughter. Under such conditions Evangelina would never find a man with enough courage to marry her and give her the children she so badly needed. As she could expect no help from science, she visited her evangelical pastor in the blue-painted shed that served as temple to Jehovah’s faithful. She was an active member of that small Protestant congregation and the minister received her cordially. Without omitting any details, she told him of the misfortune that was oppressing their home, making it clear that she had seen to it that her daughter was not tainted by any sin, not so much as a look from her brothers or adoptive father.
The Reverend listened to her tale with great attention. He got down on both knees and for long minutes sank into meditation, seeking light from the Lord. Then he opened the Bible at random and read the first verse that met his eyes: “Holophernes took great delight in her, and drank much more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born” (Judith 12:20). Satisfied, he interpreted God’s answer to the problem of His servant Ranquileo.
“Has your husband given up alcohol, Sister?”
“You know that isn’t possible.”
“How many years have I been preaching abstinence to him?”
“He can’t leave it alone, he has wine in his blood.”
“Tell him to come to the True Evangelical Church; we can help him. Have you ever seen a drunkard among us?”
Digna listed the reasons she had often repeated to justify her husband’s weakness. The problem went back to her stillborn third son. Lacking money to buy an urn, Hipólito had put the little angel in a shoe box, tucked the box beneath his arm, and started out for the cemetery. Along the way he felt the need to drown his sorrow with a few swigs, and lost track of things. Some time later he recovered his senses, laid out in a bog. The box had disappeared, and though he searched for it everywhere, it was never found.
“Imagine his nightmares, Reverend. My poor Hipólito still dreams about it. He wakes up screaming because his little son is calling him from Limbo. Every time he remembers, he takes to the bottle. That’s why he gets drunk, not wickedness or meanness.”
“The alcoholic always has an excuse on the tip of his tongue. Evangelina is a trumpet of God. Through her infirmity, He is calling your husband to reform before it’s too late.”
“With all due respect, Reverend, if God left it up to me, I’d rather see Hipólito drunk as a lord than my daughter howling like a dog and speaking in a man’s voice.”
“The sin of pride, Sister! Who are you to tell Jehovah how to direct our miserable destinies?”
From that day, led by zeal, the pastor, in the company of a few devout members of his congregation, came often to the house of the Ranquileos to help the young girl with the power of communal prayer. But another week went by and Evangelina showed no signs of improvement. One of the interlopers wandering around nervously at the hour of the attack discovered a way to benefit from it. He tripped over a chair and accidentally leaned on the bed where the girl lay in her contortions. The following day, the warts spotting his hand had disappeared. Word of this marvel spread immediately and the number of visitors increased at an alarming rate, certain they would be cured during the trance. Someone dusted off the story of how the Evangelinas had been switched in the hospital, and that added to the prestige of the miracle. At this point the Reverend considered the matter outside the sphere of his knowledge and suggested taking the sick girl to the Catholic priest, whose Church, because it was older, had far more experience with saints and their works.
In the parish church Father Cirilo listened to the story from the lips of the Ranquileos and remembered Evangelina as the only one in her class who had not made her First Communion at school, because her mother belonged to the heretic ranks of Protestantism. She was a lamb from his flock who had been snatched away by the bombast and taradiddle of the evangelicals; he would not, nonetheless, withhold his counsel.
“I shall pray for the child. God’s mercy is infinite and He may come to our aid in spite of the fact that you have fallen so far from the Holy Church.”
“Thank you, Father, but besides your prayers, can’t you exorcise her for me?” Digna asked.
The priest crossed himself in alarm. That idea must have originated with his Protestant rival, for this poor countrywoman could not be versed in such matters. In recent times the Vatican had frowned on these rituals, avoiding even the mention of the Devil, as if it were better to ignore him. He himself had irrefutable proof of the existence of Satan, the devourer of souls, and for that very reason did not feel inclined to confront him in some slapdash ceremony. Beyond that, if such practices should reach the ears of his superior, the mantle of scandal would definitively darken his old age. Nevertheless, common sense told him that the power of suggestion often has inexplicable effects and that maybe a few “Our Fathers” and a sprinkle or two of holy water would calm the sick girl. He told her mother that this would be sufficient, discounting as highly unlikely that she was possessed by the Devil. Exorcism could not be performed in her case. Exorcism meant conquering the Devil himself, and an ailing and lonely parish priest buried in a country village did not constitute a suitable rival for the powers of the Evil One, even supposing that was the cause of Evangelina’s suffering. He ordered the Ranquileos to seek reconciliation with the Holy Catholic Church, because such misfortunes tended to happen to those who defied Our Lord with heretical sects. Digna, however, had seen the priest’s collusion with the patrones in the confessional, all their mea culpas and whisperings, spying on the country people and denouncing their petty pilfering, and that was why she mistrusted Catholicism, believing that the Church was the friend of the rich and the foe of the poor, in open rebellion to the mandates of Jesus Christ, who had preached exactly the opposite.
From that day on, Father Cirilo, too, came to the Ranquileo home whenever his many obligations and weary legs permitted. On the first occasion, his firm convictions were shaken before the spectacle of the young girl scourged by that strange malady. The holy water and the sacraments did not alleviate her symptoms, but since they did not aggravate them he naturally deduced that the Devil was somewhere behind the scenes. He joined forces with the Protestant Reverend in a common spiritual undertaking. They were in agreement in trea
ting it as a mental sickness and in no way an expression of the divine, because the crude miracles attributed to the girl were not worthy of the term. Together they combated superstition and, after studying the case, concluded that the disappearance of a few warts, which almost always cure themselves, the improvement in the weather, normal at this time of the year, and the dubious good fortune in games of chance were not enough to justify a halo of saintliness. But the lively arguments of the priest and the pastor did not halt the pilgrimages. Among the visitors who came asking for favors, opinions were divided. While some upheld the mystic origin of the crisis, others attributed it to a simple satanic curse. Hysteria! chorused the Protestant, the priest, the midwife, and the doctor from Los Riscos Hospital, but no one wanted to hear them, enraptured as they were by the carnival of insignificant wonders.
* * *
With her arms around Francisco’s waist, her face pressed against the rough texture of his jacket, and her hair whipped by the wind, Irene imagined she was flying on a winged dragon. Behind them lay the last houses of the city. The highway advanced between fields bordered by translucent poplars, and on the horizon she could glimpse hills enveloped in the blue mist of distance. Astride the croup of their steed, she was lost in fantasies recovered from her childhood, racing at a full gallop across the dunes of an Arabian fairy tale. She loved the speed, the seismic shuddering between her legs, the tremendous roar penetrating her skin. She thought of the saint they were going to visit, of the title of her article, of the four-page spread with color photographs. Ever since the apparition of El Iluminado, several years before, who had traveled from north to south healing sores and reviving the dead, there had been no talk of miracle workers. The possessed, yes, the spooked, the damned, the loonies, those there were in abundance, like the girl who spit tadpoles, the superannuated earthquake prognosticator, and the deaf-mute who paralyzed machines with his gaze, a fact she herself had corroborated when she interviewed him through sign language and afterward could never get her watch to work. But aside from that luminous personage, no one had bothered much with miracles that benefited mankind. Every day it was more difficult to find appealing stories for the magazine. It seemed that nothing interesting was happening in the country, and when it did occur, it was censored. Irene put her hands beneath Francisco’s jacket to warm her stiff fingers. She felt his lean chest, sinew and bones—so different from Gustavo, a compact mass of muscles exercised by fencing, judo, gymnastics, and the fifty push-ups he did every morning with his troops because he would never demand anything from his men that he himself was not capable of doing. “I am like a father for them, a severe father, but just,” he always said. When they made love in the semi-darkness of hotel rooms, he always stripped, proud of his physique, and walked naked around the room. She loved that body tanned by salt and wind, toughened by physical exercise, flexible, hard, harmonious. She observed him, contented, and caressed him somewhat absentmindedly, but with admiration. She wondered where he was at that moment. Maybe in the arms of another woman? Although he swore fidelity in his letters, Irene knew his physical needs and could visualize dark mulattoes disporting themselves with him. At the Pole, the situation was different; in the middle of that glacial cold and with no company but the penguins and seven men trained to forget love, celibacy was obligatory. Irene felt sure, however, that in the tropics the Captain lived his life differently. She smiled, knowing how little all that mattered to her, and tried, without success, to remember the last time she had felt jealous of her fiancé.
The roar of the motor brought to mind a song from the Spanish Legion that Gustavo Morante often sang:
I’m a man who has known fortune’s wrath,
Fended off fate’s cruel blows in my manner.
I am the Bridegroom of Death,
I have felt her cold breath,
But I hold her love high as my banner.
It had been a bad idea to sing that song in Francisco’s presence, because ever since he had called Gustavo “the Bridegroom of Death.” Irene was not offended. In fact, she seldom thought about love; she never questioned her long relationship, but accepted it as a natural condition inscribed in her fate from the time she was a little girl. She had heard so often that Gustavo Morante was her ideal mate that she had come to believe it, without ever examining her feelings. He was solid, stable, virile, a firmly established fact in her life. She thought of herself as a comet soaring on the wind, but at times, frightened by her own internal rebellion, she yielded to the temptation to dream of someone who might curb her impulses. But such states of mind lasted only briefly. When she pondered her future, she tended to become melancholy, and that was her reason for wanting to live her unfettered life as long as she could.
For Francisco, Irene’s relationship with her fiancé was nothing more than the sum of two solitudes and many partings. He said that once Irene and Gustavo had the opportunity to be together for a while, each would realize that the only thing keeping them together was the force of habit. There was no urgency in their love; their meetings were placid and their separations too long. Francisco believed that deep down Irene hoped to prolong the engagement to the end of her days, in order to live in conditional freedom, meeting Morante from time to time and romping around like panther cubs. It was clear that she was frightened by marriage and so invented pretexts to postpone it, as if she could foresee that once wed to that prince destined to become a general, she would have to renounce her swirling skirts, jangling bracelets, and exciting life.
That morning, as the motorcycle swallowed up fields and hills en route to Los Riscos, Francisco calculated the number of days remaining before the return of the Bridegroom of Death. With his arrival everything would change. The happiness of these last months when he had had Irene to himself would disappear; adiós to turbulent dreams, days filled with surprises, waiting with anticipation, laughing at her outlandish projects. He would have to be much more cautious, talk only of trivial things, and avoid any suspicious actions. Until then they had shared a serene complicity. Irene seemed to wander through the world in a state of innocence, oblivious—at least, she had never asked questions—to the small signs of his double life. With her he did not have to take precautions, but the arrival of Gustavo Morante would oblige him to be more circumspect. His relationship with Irene was so precious to him that he wanted to keep it intact. Though he did not want to sow their friendship with omissions and lies, he knew that soon lies would be inevitable. He wished they could prolong this journey to the ends of the earth, where the Captain’s long shadow could not touch them, that he could travel the country, the continent, the seas, with Irene’s arms around his waist. The trip seemed all too brief. As they turned up a narrow lane, they saw broad wheat fields glistening, in that season, like a fine green down on the land. He sighed with a certain sadness as they reached their destination. They had unerringly hit on the place where the saint lived, but were bewildered by the solitude and silence, since they had expected at the least a handful of gullible souls come to watch the phenomenon.
“Are you sure this is it?”
“Sure.”
“Then she must be a pretty shabby saint, because there’s no one here.”
Before them stood the typical house of poor country folk, whitewashed adobe walls, faded roof tiles, a single window, and a small gallery across the front of the house. There was a large patio bounded by a leafless grape arbor, an arabesque of dry and twisted branches where tiny buds announced the summer shade. They could see a well, a small wooden outbuilding that looked like a privy, and beyond that a simple square room that was obviously the kitchen. Several dogs of various sizes and coats rushed to receive the visitors, barking furiously. Irene, accustomed to animals, walked through the pack speaking to the beasts as if she had known them forever. Francisco, in contrast, found himself reciting the magic verses he had learned as a child to ward off such dangers: “Halt, ferocious beast/trail your tail on the ground/God in His H
eaven was born/long before you, vicious hound!” But it was obvious that her system was working better, because although she had calmly walked past them, they had surrounded him and were baring their teeth at him. He was preparing to deliver a few murderous kicks to fiery muzzles when a very young child armed with a stick appeared and yelled at the watchdogs, scaring them away. Following this uproar, other people emerged: a graceless, heavyset woman with an air of resignation, a man with a face as shriveled as a winter chestnut, and children of various ages.
“Is this where Evangelina Ranquileo lives?” Irene inquired.
“Yes, but the miracles are at noon.”
Irene explained that they were journalists who had been drawn there by the magnitude of the rumors. The family, overcoming their timidity, invited them inside, in accord with the unvarying tradition of hospitality of the inhabitants of that land.
* * *
Soon the first visitors began to arrive and made themselves comfortable on the Ranquileos’ patio. In the morning light, Francisco focused on Irene as she was talking with the family, to capture her unawares because she did not like to pose for the camera. Photographs deceive time, she said, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent. The clean air, and her enthusiasm, lent her the air of a woodland creature. She moved about the Ranquileo property with the freedom and confidence of someone born there, talking, laughing, helping serve the refreshments, threading through the dogs that were thumping their tails docilely. The children followed her, astounded by her strange hair, extravagant clothing, constant laughter, and the charm of her movements.