On the night of the queen’s election, there was a dance at Santa Teresa’s Mayoral Hall, and young men flocked from miles around to meet Dulce Rosa. She was so happy, and danced so gracefully, that many of them did not perceive that in truth she was not the most beautiful, and when they returned home they told everyone they had never seen a face like hers. And so she had won undeserved fame as a beauty, and no later assertion would ever disprove it. Exaggerated descriptions of her translucent skin and crystal-clear eyes circulated from mouth to mouth, and every teller added some bit from his own fancy. Poets in remote towns composed sonnets to a hypothetical maiden by the name of Dulce Rosa.
The rumor of the beauty flowering in the home of Senator Orellano eventually reached the ears of Tadeo Céspedes, who never dreamed he would meet her, because at no time in his life had he had time to learn verses or look at women. His sole preoccupation was the civil war. From the time he had first shaved his mustache, he had carried a weapon in his hand, and for years now he had lived amid the roar of gunpowder. He had forgotten his mother’s kisses, even the music of the mass. He did not always have cause to fight, because during brief periods of truce there were no adversaries within reach of his troops; even in those times of forced peace, however, he lived the life of a corsair. He was a man habituated to violence. He crisscrossed the country fighting visible enemies, when there were such, and shadows, when he had to invent them, and he would have continued forever had his party not won the presidential election. Overnight he passed from hiding out to prominence, and lost all pretexts for shooting up the countryside.
Tadeo Céspedes’s last mission was a punitive raid against Santa Teresa. With a hundred and twenty men he rode into town by night to make an example of the town and to wipe out the leaders of enemy factions. His troops shot out the windows of public buildings; they battered down the church door and rode right up to the high altar, in the process running down Padre Clemente, who stood in their way, then clattered on toward Senator Orellano’s villa rising proudly on the crown of the hill.
After unleashing the dogs and locking his daughter in the farthest room of the farthest patio, the Senator, backed by a dozen loyal servants, prepared to make his stand against Tadeo Céspedes. In that moment, as at so many other times of his life, he lamented not having male descendants who could take up weapons with him and defend the honor of his house. He felt very old, but he had no time to dwell on such thoughts, because on the slopes of the hill he saw the awesome glimmer of a hundred and twenty torches spreading fear in the night. In silence he handed out the last store of ammunition. Everything had been said, and each man knew that before the dawn he must die like a man at his post.
“The last person will take the key to the room where my daughter is hidden and do what must be done,” the Senator said at the sound of the first shots.
All those men had been with him when Dulce Rosa was born; they had held her on their knees when she could barely walk; they had told her ghost stories on winter afternoons, listened to her practice the piano, and wildly applauded on the day of her coronation as Queen of Carnival. Her father could die in peace, because the girl would never be taken alive by Tadeo Céspedes. The only possibility Senator Orellano had not considered was that despite his fierceness in the fighting he would be the last to die. He watched his friends fall one after another and recognized when it was futile to continue to resist. He had a bullet in his belly and his sight was clouding over; he could barely make out the shadows climbing the high walls of his property, but he was conscious enough to drag himself to the third patio. The dogs recognized his scent through layers of sweat, blood, and sorrow and opened a path to let him pass. He put the key in the lock, pushed open the heavy door, and through the mist blurring his eyes saw Dulce Rosa waiting for him. She was wearing the organza dress she had worn at Carnival, and the flowers of her crown adorned her hair.
“It’s time, daughter,” the Senator said, cocking his pistol as a pool of blood formed about his feet.
“Don’t kill me, Father,” Dulce Rosa replied in a firm voice. “Let me live to avenge you, and myself.”
Senator Anselmo Orellano studied the face of his fifteen-year-old daughter and imagined what Tadeo Céspedes would do to her, but there was unflinching fortitude in Dulce Rosa’s clear eyes, and he knew she would survive and punish his executioner. The girl sat back down on the bed, and he sat beside her, gun pointed toward the door.
With the last howls of the dying dogs, the wooden bar yielded, the bolt flew off the door, and the first men burst into the room. The Senator managed to fire off six shots before he lost consciousness. Tadeo Céspedes thought he must be dreaming when he saw the angel in a jasmine crown holding a dying old man in her arms while her white dress slowly turned red, but he could not summon enough pity for a second glance: he was drunk with violence and bone weary from hours of fighting. “The woman is mine,” he said, before his men set hands on her.
* * *
Friday dawned to a leaden sky stained by the glare of fire. Silence lay heavy on the hilltop. The last moans had faded when Dulce Rosa struggled to her feet and walked to the garden fountain; the day before it had been surrounded by magnolia blossoms, but now it was a bubbling pool in the midst of rubble. Her dress hung in shreds; she removed it slowly and stood naked. She sank into the cold water. The sun appeared through the birch trees and Dulce Rosa watched the water turn pink as she washed away the blood from between her legs and that of her father, crusted in her long hair. Once she was clean and calm and had dried her tears, she returned to the ruined house, looked for something to cover her nakedness, pulled a linen sheet from the clothespress, and went outside to look for her father’s remains. The marauders had tied him by the feet and then galloped up and down the hill, dragging his body until it was nothing but pitiable, battered flesh, but guided by love his daughter unerringly recognized him. She wrapped his remains in the sheet and sat beside him to watch the day brighten. That was how her neighbors from Santa Teresa had found her when they dared climb the hill to the Orellanos’ villa. They helped Dulce Rosa bury the dead and extinguished the last coals of the fires; then they begged her to go live with her godmother in another town where no one would know her story. When she refused, the townspeople formed crews to rebuild the house and gave her six fierce dogs to defend herself.
From the instant they had borne away her still-living father and Tadeo Céspedes closed the door and unbuckled his leather belt, Dulce Rosa had lived for revenge. That memory caused her sleepless nights and consumed her days, but it never completely stilled her laughter or diminished her good nature. Her reputation as a beauty continued to grow; musicians wandered the byways giving her magnified charms, until they had made of her a living legend. She rose every morning at four to oversee the work in the fields and the household; to ride over her property; to buy and sell, haggling like a Syrian; to breed stock and cultivate magnolias and jasmine in her gardens. When dusk fell, she would remove her riding trousers, boots, and pistol, and dress in exquisite gowns shipped from the capital in trunks perfumed with aromatic herbs. As night fell, her visitors would arrive to find her playing the piano, while servants prepared trays of pastries and glasses of cool drinks. At first, people wondered why she was not in the sanatorium in a straitjacket, or a novice with the Carmelite nuns, but as there were frequent parties in the Orellano villa, with time people stopped talking about the tragedy and erased the murdered Senator from their memories. A few gentlemen of good name and sizeable fortune were able to overlook the stigma of rape and, drawn by Dulce Rosa’s sensitivity and reputation as a beauty, propose marriage. She rejected them all, because her one mission in this world was revenge.
* * *
Neither could Tadeo Céspedes rid himself of the memory of that fatal night. The sweeping tide of the slaughter and the excitement of the rape evaporated as he was riding back to the capital to make his report of the havoc he had wrought on his foray. He th
ought of the girl in the ball gown and crown of sweet jasmine who had suffered him in silence in that dark room suffused with the smell of gunpowder. He saw her again, as he had left her, sprawled on the floor, half-naked in her bloodied rags, sunk in the compassionate sleep of unconsciousness; that was how he was to see her for the rest of his life at the moment of falling asleep. Peace, governing, and power turned Céspedes into a composed and hard-working man. With the passing of time, memories of the civil war faded, and people began to address him as don Tadeo. He bought a hacienda on the far side of the mountains, dedicated himself to administering justice, and was elected mayor. If it had not been for the tireless ghost of Dulce Rosa Orellano, he might have achieved a measure of happiness, but all the women he met along his path, all the women he took in his arms in search of consolation, all the loves he pursued through the years—all had the face of the Queen of Carnival. To add to his torment, from time to time he heard her name in the verses of wandering poets, making it impossible to eradicate her from his heart. The image of the young girl grew within him, filled him completely, until the day came when he could bear no more. He was sitting at the head of a long banquet table, celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday, surrounded by friends and colleagues, when he thought he saw a naked girl lying on the tablecloth among the jasmine blossoms, and he realized that this nightmare would not leave him in peace, not even after death. He pounded the table with a fist that made the china tremble, and asked for his hat and his cane.
“Where are you going, don Tadeo?” his Chief Administrator asked.
“To atone for an old injury,” he replied, and left without bidding anyone goodbye.
He did not have to go in search of Dulce Rosa, because he had always known he would find her in the house of her misfortune, and it was there he drove. By then, good highways had been built across the country, and distances seemed much shorter. The landscape had changed in twenty-five years, but as he turned the last corner of the hill, the Orellano villa appeared, just as he remembered seeing it before his band stormed the hill. There stood the solid walls of river rock he had destroyed with charges of dynamite; there were the dark wood beams he had set fire to; there the trees from which he had strung the bodies of the Senator’s men; there the patio where he had massacred the dogs. He stopped his car a hundred meters from the door; he could go no farther, he felt as if his heart was exploding in his chest. He was about to turn and drive back where he had come from, when from among the rosebushes emerged a figure enveloped in a swirl of skirts. He shivered, hoping with all his might that she would not recognize him. In the soft light of evening he watched Dulce Rosa Orellano float toward him along the garden path. He saw her hair, her bright face, the harmony of her movements, the fluttering dress, and he felt as if he were suspended in a dream he had been dreaming for twenty-five years.
“You’ve come at last, Tadeo Céspedes,” she said when she saw him. She was not deceived by the black mayor’s suit or the gray hair of a gentleman; his corsair’s hands were unchanged.
“You have pursued me relentlessly. I have never been able to love anyone but you,” he whispered in a voice hoarse with shame.
Dulce Rosa Orellano breathed a sigh of satisfaction. She had called him in her mind night and day all those years, and finally he had come. It was her hour. But she looked into his eyes and could not find any trace of the executioner, only welling tears. She searched deep in her own heart for the hatred she had nurtured and could not find it. She evoked the moment when she had asked her father to sacrifice her and let her live to collect a debt; she relived the rough embrace of the man she had so often cursed and the early morning when she had wrapped her father’s pitiful remains in a linen sheet. She reviewed the perfect plan of her revenge, but she did not find the expected happiness. To the contrary, she felt profoundly sad. Tadeo Céspedes took her hand and softly kissed her palm, wetting it with his tears. She realized then, to her horror, that from having thought of him so long, from having savored his punishment before the fact, her emotions had made a complete circle and she had come to love him.
In the days that followed, both lifted the floodgates on the love they had never released, and for the first time in their unhappy fates allowed another being close to them. They strolled through the gardens, talking about themselves, not avoiding the fatal night that had twisted the course of their lives. At dusk Dulce Rosa would play the piano as Tadeo Céspedes smoked, and as he listened he felt his bones grow weak and happiness enfold him like a blanket, erasing all his old nightmares. After dinner he would drive back to Santa Teresa, where no one remembered any longer the old horror story. He took rooms in the best hotel and there made plans for their wedding. He wanted a celebration with all possible fanfare, extravagance, and enthusiasm, a fiesta in which the whole town would participate. He had discovered love at an age when other men lose hope, and that discovery had restored the vigor of his youth. He wanted to surround Dulce Rosa with love and beauty, to lavish on her all the pleasures money could buy, to see whether in her later years he could compensate for the harm he had done her as a young girl. Occasionally he would be overcome by panic. He would search her face for signs of rancor, but found only the light of shared love and was reassured. A happy month went by in this way.
Two days before the wedding, when the tables for the wedding party were being set up in the garden, the fowls and hogs were being slaughtered for the feast, and the flowers being cut to decorate the house, Dulce Rosa Orellano tried on her wedding dress. She gazed at herself in the mirror, so like the day of her coronation as Queen of Carnival that she could not go on deceiving her own heart. She knew she would never be able to carry out the revenge she had planned, because she was in love with the assassin, but neither could she silence the Senator’s ghost. She dismissed the seamstress, picked up the scissors, and walked to the room in the third patio that had been empty so many years.
Tadeo Céspedes looked for her everywhere, calling her frantically. The barking of the dogs led him to the far end of the house. With the help of the gardeners he kicked down the bolted door and rushed into the room, where once he had seen an angel crowned with jasmine blossoms. He found Dulce Rosa just as she was in his dreams every night of his life, in the same bloody organza dress, and he knew he would live to be ninety and pay for his guilt with the memory of the only woman who had ever touched his heart.
LETTERS OF BETRAYED LOVE
The mother of Analía Torres had died of delirium following her delivery. Her father had not been able to endure the grief and two weeks later had shot himself in the chest. For several days he lay dying with his wife’s name on his lips. His brother Eugenio was left in charge of the family estate and arranged the fate of the tiny orphan according to his own standards. Until she was six, Analía had clung to the skirts of an Indian nursemaid in the servants’ quarters of the house of her guardian; later, as soon as she was old enough to go to school, she had been sent to the capital as a boarding student with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, where she spent the next twelve years of her life. She was a good student and she loved the discipline, the austerity of the stone convent, the chapel with its court of saints and aroma of wax and lilies, the bare corridors, the shaded patios. What she liked least was the noisiness of the pupils and the acrid odor of the classrooms. Every time she was able to escape the nuns’ vigilance, she hid in the attic among decapitated statues and broken-down furniture to tell herself stories. In those stolen moments she sank into silence with the sensation of indulging herself in a sin.
Every six months she received a brief note from her uncle Eugenio exhorting her to comport herself well and honor the memory of her parents, who had been good Christians in life and who would be proud that their only daughter was dedicating her life to the highest precepts of virtue, that is, preparing to enter the convent as a novice. At the first hint of this plan, however, Analía had informed her uncle that she was not inclined to follow it; out of pure contrariness, s
he adamantly maintained that position, because deep in her heart she enjoyed the religious life. Hidden behind the habit, in the ultimate solitude of total renunciation of pleasure, she might, she thought, find lasting peace; her instinct, nevertheless, warned her against her guardian’s counsel. She suspected that his actions were motivated more by greed than by family loyalty. She mistrusted any idea that originated with him: there was bound to be a trap hidden somewhere.
When Analía was sixteen, her uncle came for the first time to visit her at school. When the Mother Superior called the girl to her office she found it necessary to introduce them; each had changed so much from the days of the Indian nursemaid in the back patios that they did not recognize one another.
“I see that the Little Sisters have looked after you well, Analía,” her uncle commented, stirring his cup of chocolate. “You look healthy, you might even say pretty. In my last letter I notified you that beginning with this birthday, you will receive a monthly sum for your expenses, just as my brother, may he rest in peace, stipulated in his will.”
“How much?”
“A hundred pesos.”
“Is that all my parents left me?”
“No, of course not. You know that the hacienda belongs to you, but agriculture is no task for a woman, especially not in these times of strikes and revolutions. For the moment, I shall send you a monthly allowance that will increase every year until you reach your majority. Then we shall see.”
“We shall see what, Uncle?”
“We shall see what is best for you.”
“What choice do I have?”
“You will always need a man to oversee the hacienda, my girl. I have done that all these years; it has not been an easy task, but it was my duty. I promised my brother in his last hours, and I am prepared to continue doing it for you.”