“Yes, you can tell me all about it, but not now,” he agreed. “When this storm dies down a little. What bad luck, Armida, to come to hide here, where all the reporters in Piura have congregated on account of this scandal. Those cameras and tape recorders make me feel like a prisoner in my own house.”
Gertrudis’s sister nodded with an understanding half smile.
“I’ve already gone through that and know what it means,” he heard her say. He didn’t understand what she was referring to but didn’t ask her to explain.
Finally, at dusk, after a good amount of brooding, Felícito decided the moment had come. He asked Gertrudis to come into the television room. “You and I have to talk alone,” he said. Armida withdrew immediately to her bedroom. Gertrudis docilely followed her husband into the next room. Now she was in an armchair facing him in the semidarkness, unmoving, shapeless, silent. She looked at him but didn’t seem to see him.
“I didn’t think the time would ever come when we’d talk about what we’re going to talk about now,” Felícito began, very quietly. He noticed in surprise that his voice was trembling.
Gertrudis didn’t move. She wore the colorless dress that resembled a cross between a robe and a tunic, and looked at him as if he weren’t there, her eyes flashing with a tranquil fire in her plump-cheeked face with its large but inexpressive mouth. Her hands were on her lap, tightly clasped, as if she were suffering from a terrible stomachache.
“I suspected something from the beginning,” the trucker continued, making an effort to control the nervousness that had taken possession of him, “but I didn’t say anything so as not to embarrass you. I would’ve carried it to the grave if this thing that happened hadn’t happened.”
He took a breath, sighing deeply. His wife hadn’t moved a millimeter and hadn’t blinked even once. She seemed petrified. An invisible fly began to buzz somewhere in the room, flying into the ceiling and walls. Saturnina was watering the garden and he could hear the spatter of water on the plants from the watering can.
“I mean,” he continued, stressing each syllable, “that you and your mother deceived me. That time, in El Algarrobo. Now, it doesn’t matter anymore. A lot of years have gone by, and I promise you that today it doesn’t matter if I discover that you and the Boss Lady told me a fairy tale. The only thing I need to die easy is for you to confirm it, Gertrudis.”
He stopped speaking and waited. She remained in the same posture, unyielding, but Felícito noticed that one of the bedroom slippers his wife was wearing had moved slightly to the side. There was some life there, at least. After a while, Gertrudis parted her lips and uttered a phrase that resembled a growl: “To confirm what, Felícito?”
“That Miguel isn’t and never was my son,” he said, raising his voice a little. “That you were pregnant by some other man when you and the Boss Lady came to talk to me one morning in El Algarrobo and made me believe I was the father. After denouncing me to the police to force me to marry you.”
When he finished he felt troubled and upset, as if he’d eaten something indigestible or drunk a glass of overly fermented chicha.
“I thought you were the father,” said Gertrudis, with absolute serenity. She spoke without getting angry, reluctantly, as she always spoke about everything except religious matters. And after a long pause, she added in the same neutral, disinterested manner: “My mama and I had no intention to deceive you. I was sure then that you were the father of the baby I had in my belly.”
“And when did you realize he wasn’t mine?” Felícito asked with an energy that was becoming rage.
“Only when Miguelito was born,” Gertrudis acknowledged, without her voice changing in the least. “When I saw how white he was, with those light eyes and that dark blond hair. He couldn’t be the son of a Chulucanas cholo like you.”
She fell silent and continued looking into her husband’s eyes with the same impassivity. Gertrudis seemed to be talking to him from under water, Felícito thought, or from inside an urn of thick glass. He felt as if something insurmountable and invisible divided them, even though she was only a meter away.
“A real son of a whore, it isn’t surprising you did what you did to me,” he muttered. “And did you find out then who Miguel’s real father was?”
His wife sighed and shrugged with a gesture that might have been lack of interest or weariness. She shook her head two or three times as she raised her shoulders.
“So how many men at El Algarrobo did you go to bed with, hey waddya think?” Felícito felt a lump in his throat and wanted this to be over immediately.
“All the ones my mama brought to my bed,” Gertrudis growled, slowly and concisely. And sighing again with an air of infinite fatigue, she clarified: “A lot. Not all of them from the boardinghouse. Sometimes guys from the street too.”
“The Boss Lady brought them all to you?” It was hard for him to speak, and his head was buzzing.
Gertrudis remained motionless, indistinct, a silhouette with no edges, her hands clasped. She looked at him with an absent, luminous, tranquil fixity that troubled Felícito more and more.
“She picked them and charged them, I didn’t,” his wife added with a slight change in the color of her voice. Now she seemed not only to inform but to defy him too. “Who was Miguel’s father? I don’t know. Some white guy, one of those gringos who came through El Algarrobo. Maybe one of the Yugoslavs who came to work on the Chira River irrigation. They came to Piura on weekends to get drunk and stayed at the boardinghouse.”
Felícito regretted their conversation. Had he made a mistake by bringing up the subject that had followed him like a shadow all his life? Now it was there, between them, and he didn’t know how to get rid of it. He felt it as a tremendous obstacle, an intruder who’d never leave this house again.
“How many did the Boss Lady bring to your bed?” he bellowed. He was sure at any moment he’d faint again or vomit. “All of Piura?”
“I didn’t count them,” said Gertrudis, calmly, making a deprecatory face. “But, since you’re interested in knowing, I’ll say it again: a lot. I took care of myself the best I could. I didn’t know much about it, back then. The douches I had every day helped, I thought, that’s what my mama told me. Something happened with Miguel. Maybe I got careless. I wanted to have an abortion with a midwife in the neighborhood who was part witch. They called her Mariposa, maybe you knew her. But the Boss Lady wouldn’t let me. She came up with the idea of getting married. I didn’t want to marry you either, Felícito. I always knew I’d never be happy with you. It was my mama who forced me to.”
The trucker didn’t know what to say. He sat motionless across from his wife, thinking. What a ridiculous situation, sitting there facing each other, paralyzed, silenced by a past so ugly it suddenly revived dishonor, shame, pain, and sorrow, bitter truths that added to the misfortune they were already suffering because of his false son and Mabel.
“I’ve been paying for my faults all these years, Felícito,” he heard Gertrudis say, almost without moving her full lips or taking her eyes off him for a second, though she didn’t appear to see him and spoke as if he weren’t there. “Bearing my cross in silence. Knowing very well that the sins one commits have to be paid for. Not only in the next life, in this one too. I’ve accepted it. I’ve repented for myself and for the Boss Lady. I’ve paid for myself and my mama. I don’t feel the rancor toward her that I did when I was young. I keep paying and hope that with so much suffering, Our Lord Jesus Christ will forgive so many sins.”
Felícito wanted her to be quiet right now and leave. But he didn’t have the strength to stand and walk out of the room. His legs were trembling. “I wish I were that buzzing fly and not me,” he thought.
“You helped me pay for them, Felícito,” his wife continued, lowering her voice a little. “And I’m grateful. That’s why I never said anything. That’s why I never made a jealous scene or asked questions that might have bothered you. That’s why I never let on that I knew you’d fal
len in love with another woman, that you had a mistress who wasn’t old and ugly like me, but young and pretty. That’s why I never complained about Mabel and never blamed you. Because Mabel also helped me pay for my sins.”
She fell silent, waiting for the trucker to say something, but since he didn’t open his mouth, she added: “I never thought we’d have this conversation either, Felícito. You wanted it, not me.”
Again she paused for a long time and murmured, making the sign of the cross in the air with her gnarled fingers. “Now this thing Miguel did to you is the penance you have to pay for yourself. And for me too.”
After her last words, Gertrudis stood with an agility Felícito didn’t remember her possessing and shuffled out of the room. He remained seated in the television room, not hearing the noises, the voices, the horns, the bustle of Calle Arequipa, or the mototaxi engines, sunk in a dense lethargy, a despair and sadness that didn’t let him think and deprived him of even the energy needed to get to his feet. He wanted to, he wanted to leave this house even though as soon as he walked outside the reporters would be all over him with their relentless questions, each one stupider than the last, he wanted to go to the Eguiguren Seawalk and sit down to watch the brown-and-gray river water, watch the clouds in the sky, breathe in the warm afternoon, listen to the birds calling. But he didn’t try to move because his legs weren’t going to obey him, or vertigo would knock him to the carpet. It horrified him to think that his father, from the next life, might have heard the conversation he’d just had with his wife.
He didn’t know how long he was in that state of viscous somnolence, feeling time pass, ashamed and sorry for himself, Gertrudis, Mabel, Miguel, everybody. From time to time, like a ray of clear light, his father’s face would appear in his mind, and that fleeting image would relieve him for an instant. “If you’d been alive and found out about all this, you’d have died again,” he thought.
Suddenly he realized that Tiburcio had come into the room without his having noticed. He was kneeling beside him, holding his arms, looking at him in fright.
“I’m fine, don’t worry,” he reassured his son. “I just dozed off for a minute.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor?” He was in the blue coveralls and cap that were the company’s drivers’ uniform; on the visor was written “Narihualá Transport.” In one hand he held the untanned leather gloves he wore to drive the buses. “You look very pale, Father.”
“Did you just get back from Tumbes?” he replied. “A good trip?”
“Almost full and a lot of cargo,” Tiburcio said. His face still looked frightened, and he was studying Felícito, as if trying to pull out a secret. He clearly would have liked to ask endless questions but didn’t dare. Felícito pitied him too.
“I heard the news about Miguel on the radio in Tumbes,” said Tiburcio, clearly confused. “I couldn’t believe it. I called the house a thousand times but nobody answered the phone. I don’t know how I managed to drive here. Do you think what the police say about my brother is true?”
Felícito was about to interrupt to say, “He isn’t your brother,” but stopped himself. Weren’t Miguel and Tiburcio brothers? Half brothers, maybe, but brothers.
“It might be a lie, I think they’re lies,” Tiburcio was saying now, upset, still on the floor, still holding his father’s arms. “The police might have forced a false confession out of him, beat him, tortured him. Everybody knows they do those things.”
“No, Tiburcio. It’s true,” said Felícito. “He was the spider. He planned all of it. He confessed because that woman, his accomplice, accused him. Now I’m going to ask you for a big favor, son. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Not ever again. Not about Miguel or the spider. For me, it’s as if your brother has ceased to exist. I mean, as if he’d never existed. I don’t want him mentioned in this house. Never again. You can do whatever you like. Go to see him, if you want. Bring him food, find him a lawyer, whatever. I don’t care. I don’t know what your mother will want to do. Just don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. He’ll never be mentioned in my presence. I curse his name and that’s it. Now, help me up, Tiburcio. I don’t know why, but it’s as if my legs were suddenly rebelling.”
Tiburcio stood, and holding him by both arms, lifted him effortlessly.
“I’m going to ask you to come with me to the office,” said Felícito. “Life must go on. We have to get back to work and straighten out the company: It’s been through a rough time. The family’s not the only one suffering over this, son. Narihualá Transport is too. We have to get it moving again.”
“The street’s full of reporters,” Tiburcio cautioned him. “They were all over me when I arrived and wouldn’t let me pass. I almost got into a fight with one of them.”
“You’ll help keep those savages away from me, Tiburcio.” He looked into his son’s eyes and, giving his face a clumsy caress, sweetened his voice: “I’m grateful to you for not mentioning Mabel, son, or asking about that woman. You’re a good son, you know.”
He grasped the boy’s arm and walked with him toward the door. A clamor broke out as soon as he opened it, and the flashbulbs made him blink. “I have nothing to say, gentlemen, thank you very much,” he repeated two, three, ten times while, clutching Tiburcio’s arm, he struggled to make his way along Calle Arequipa, pursued, shoved, jostled by the swarm of reporters who kept interrupting one another and pushing microphones, cameras, notebooks, and pencils in his face. They asked questions he couldn’t understand. He kept repeating periodically, as if it were a refrain: “I have nothing to say, ladies, gentlemen, thank you very much.” They followed him to Narihualá Transport but couldn’t go in because the watchman slammed the heavy door in their faces. When he sat down at the board placed over two barrels that still served as his desk, Tiburcio handed him a glass of water.
“And that elegant lady named Armida, did you know her, Father?” his son asked. “Did you know my mama had a sister in Lima? She never told us about her.”
He shook his head and lifted a finger to his mouth. “A big mystery, Tiburcio. She came to hide here because it seems they’re hounding her in Lima and even want to kill her. You’d better forget about her and not tell anybody you saw her. We have enough problems without inheriting my sister-in-law’s too.”
It required a huge effort, but he began to work. To look over accounts, drafts, due dates, current expenditures, income, bills, payments to providers, collections. At the same time, at the back of his mind, he was formulating a plan of action for the days that followed. And after a while he began to feel better, to suspect that it was possible to win this extremely difficult battle. Suddenly he felt a powerful desire to listen to the warm, tender voice of Cecilia Barraza. Too bad he didn’t have any of her CDs at the office—songs like “Thistle or Ash,” “Innocent Love,” “Sweet Affection,” or “The Bull Kills”—or a machine to play them on. As soon as things improved, he’d buy one. After the fire damage had been repaired, on afternoons or nights when he stayed to work in the office, he’d put on a series of CDs by his favorite singer. He’d forget about everything and feel happy, or sad, always moved by the voice that could bring out in waltzes, handkerchief dances, polkas, vendors’ cries, all Peruvian music, the most delicate feelings hidden deep inside him.
When he left Narihualá Transport, it was late at night. No reporters were on the avenue; the watchman told him they’d grown tired of waiting and left a while back. Tiburcio had gone too, at Felícito’s insistence, more than an hour ago. He walked up Calle Arequipa; there were few people now, and he couldn’t look at anyone, keeping to the shadows so he wouldn’t be recognized. Fortunately, no one stopped him or started a conversation with him on the way. In the house, Armida and Gertrudis were already asleep, or at least he didn’t hear them. He went to the television room and put on some CDs, keeping the volume very low. And he stayed there for a couple of hours, sitting in the dark, distracted and moved; his worries didn’t leave him, but certainly they were some
what alleviated by the songs intimately interpreted for him by Cecilia Barraza. Her voice was a balm, cool, limpid water into which he sank, body and soul, became clean and calm, felt joy; something sound, sweet, and optimistic rose from the deepest part of him. He tried not to think about Mabel, not to remember the intense, happy moments he’d spent with her over the past eight years, tried to recall only that she’d betrayed him, gone to bed with Miguel and conspired with him, sending the spider letters, faking a kidnapping, setting fire to his office. That was what he had to remember so the idea of never seeing her again wouldn’t be so bitter.
He got up very early next day, did qigong exercises, thinking of Lau the storekeeper as he usually did during this obligatory morning routine, ate breakfast, and left for the office before the late-rising reporters had arrived at the door of his house to continue the hunt. Josefita was already there and very happy to see him.
“It’s so good that you’ve come back to the office, Don Felícito,” she said, flattering him. “We were missing you around here.”
“I couldn’t keep taking a vacation,” he replied, removing his hat and jacket and sitting down at the board. “I’ve had enough scandals and foolishness, Josefita. Starting today, it’s back to work. That’s what I like, it’s what I’ve done all my life, and it’s what I’ll do from now on.”
He guessed that his secretary wanted to tell him something but hadn’t quite decided to yet. What had happened to Josefita? She looked different. More fixed up and made-up than usual, wearing eye-catching, flirtatious clothes. Little smiles and suspicious blushes passed over her face from time to time, and he thought she moved her hips a little more now when she walked.
“If you want to tell me a secret, I promise you I’m like the tomb, Josefita. And if it’s a romantic problem, you know you can cry on my shoulder.”