The Day of the Moon (6 page)

He walked slowly up the stairs and into the entrance hall. Everything seemed in place and clean here; the interior of the house belied its exterior. He stood for a few moments waiting for his eyes to adjust to the shadows of the hall, when his attention was caught by a child sitting at the bottom of the staircase. It was a girl. She had golden curls, blue eyes and she appeared to be about three
years old. Flavio recognized himself in her features. He moved toward her and sat down beside her. They looked at each other for a long while.

“What is your name?”

“Isadora Betancourt. What is your name?”

“Flavio Betancourt. I'm your father.”

He felt a stirring inside of him, a strange, new feeling. Flavio had thought of the child who would have been born after he left, but his despair had dispelled any curiosity about it during those years. But now, as he looked at Isadora, he wondered why he had not returned earlier.

Taking the girl by the hand, Flavio walked through the house. It was clean and orderly but empty; he felt the hollowness. He went to the kitchen, where he found two workers, a woman preparing something at the stove and a man grinding corn on a stone slab. Both were strangers to Flavio. They, too, looked at him, startled.

“I'm Don Flavio Betancourt.
El patrón.”

Mouths open, the servants stared at him. He turned away, still holding Isadora by the hand. He walked through the gloomy corridors of the house, through the lower and upper levels. As he moved from one place to the other, he wondered about Velia Carmelita and Brígida. He decided not to check the bedrooms. He went out in search of someone who would recognize him.

“Allí está Don Celestino.”

The girl's voice took Flavio by surprise. She was pointing. Walking toward him was Celestino. He was the same, unchanged by the years of the Revolution. He approached Flavio, shook his hand, nodded his head.

“
Bienvenido, patrón
.”

As Celestino looked at him, he saw that Don Flavio's face and features had grown hard, almost coarse. He was heavier, and he smelled of tobacco and alcohol.

“I'm back.”

Flavio knew that his words were flat, obvious, but he did not know how else or where to begin. He looked around and smiled artificially.

“This is where you and I parted a few years ago.”

These, too, were empty words. He waited a while before he forced himself to bring up what he had been evading.

“Where is my wife?”

Celestino frowned. The wrinkle that cut downward from his hairline to his nose deepened; it was almost a crevice. He looked away for a moment, then returned his gaze to look at Flavio.

“She's dead,
patrón
. She died when the child was born.”

He whispered so that Isadora could not hear him, and instead of pointing at the girl he used his eyes. Flavio felt strange, a coldness seemed to grip his stomach. It was not sadness; that emotion had long ago left him. Perhaps it was emptiness, he told himself. He stared at Celestino realizing that his glare was that of a fool; his look was wordlessly returned by Celestino. He waited, knowing that Flavio was in turmoil.

“It was better,
patrón.
Things weren't good.”

Flavio did not ask Celestino what he meant, because he feared the response.

“What about my sister?”

“The women say she roams the house like a soul cast out of Purgatory. She never speaks. She only moans and weeps. Everyone knows, because when she cries out, her wailing fills the night. It frightens most of the women, and even some of us.”

Celestino was still whispering, letting Flavio know that he did not want Isadora to hear. Then he put his face closer.

“Patrón, la señora Brígida está un poco tocada.”

Hearing that something had gone wrong with his sister's mind made Flavio shudder, and he cursed himself for not returning sooner. He decided that he did not want to hear more about Brígida.

“Have we lost everything?”

“The livestock is gone but the lands are intact. We were lucky. The armies came from all sides, but all they took was what they could eat and what they could carry. We lost several girls.”

Celestino waited patiently as Flavio kept silent for a time. By that time, Isadora was squatting on the ground, playing with a handful of pebbles.

“What about the child? Who takes care of her?”

“Different people. Some times it's the women in the kitchen, but most of the time she's with me, my wife Narcisa, and my boys. She lives on the mountain and sleeps in the cave with us.”

Flavio frowned, imagining his daughter sleeping in a cave in the heights of the sierra. He looked down at the blond curls and found it almost impossible to see his daughter eating, playing, living with the brown tribe. But then his shock began to fade, and instead he felt thankful. He sucked in a deep breath of air, took Isadora's hand and turned toward the house.

“Gracias,
Celestino. We'll start right away to put things together again. Tell Narcisa that I'm grateful for what she's done for my daughter. I'll talk with you in a while.”

He turned away, taking Isadora to the house. There he left her in the kitchen, telling her to wait for him. Then he climbed the stairs to look for Brígida; he found her in what had been Velia Carmelita's bedroom. The curtains were drawn in, letting in just a little light. It took Flavio's eyes a few seconds to adjust to the gloom, but he soon saw his sister. She was crouching on the floor, her back against a corner, knees folded under her chin. Her face was buried in her lap, arms wrapped around her head. She wore a long black dress with sleeves that concealed her arms and most of her hands; it had a collar that wrapped itself up to her ears. Only Brígida's bare feet were visible.

The sight startled him for a moment, but then he moved toward the windows and flung one of the drapes aside. Light flooded in, jolting Brígida into rigid attention as her head jerked up to look at him. The declining sunlight washed over her face and body. She was emaciated, pale, dried out. Her hair, blond before, was
disheveled and already streaked with faded gray strands. In that light, her eyes appeared transparent, nearly white, as if their pupils had been scrubbed of all color. Recognition, however, let Flavio know that Brígida had not lost her mind.

“You've come back.”

“Yes.”

“She died.”

Brígida raised an arm and pointed at the bed. Flavio looked from the corner of his eye as he reached out to lift his sister from the floor. She refused his gesture and dropped her head back onto her knees.

“You've got to get up. People are saying that you're crazy.”

“I
am
crazy.”

“No, you're not.”

“I said that I am insane! Leave me alone!”

“You must help me care for the child. There's only you and I. And you're a woman …”

“Get someone from the tribe.”

Flavio stood looking down at her, uncertain of what to do. He tried to sound firm but to himself his own voice was weak, unconvincing.

“I'll throw you out if you don't do as I order. Now get on your feet, bathe, and dress yourself. We have much to do.”

Brígida, curled and hunched in on herself, did not answer her brother, but he could hear that she was breathing heavily through her mouth. At last she spoke without raising her head; her voice was soft, but firm.

“You won't throw me out. I'm your sister, and it's my right to stay here.”

Flavio closed his eyes in frustration. He was tired and he could not find the energy to fight. He left the room after a moment, in search of his daughter.

When she heard the door close, Brígida leaned her head against the wall. She was not insane, but her spirit had shattered. She inhabited two worlds, and she knew it. In one, she was with Velia
Carmelita whose memory was so vivid for her that she could still taste her lips, smell the fragrance of her skin. The rooms and corridors of the hacienda echoed with her laughter and talk. When Brígida looked out of a window, she saw herself and her lover in a slow-moving carriage. If she listened carefully, she could hear the soft notes of the duets they sang. She felt Velia Carmelita: sitting next to her, lying in bed with her, caressing her face. She spoke to her.

The other side of her existence was empty. Velia Carmelita had vanished from it, and there was nothing in her place. At those times Brígida tasted the bitterness of unbearable solitude and the horror of facing a lifetime of loneliness. When she lived in this world Brígida wept, often moaning so loud that the servants heard, and they gossiped about it.

When her brother confronted her that morning, his presence only deepened the emptiness tormenting her. When he left the room, Brígida stood and walked to the window that opened to the sierras. Looking down, she saw Flavio approach Celestino.

The next day Brígida overheard a maid say that Celestino had brought back his sister, Ursula Santiago, who was seventeen years old, to care for Isadora Betancourt.

Old man Flavio remembered that day as he sat glaring at the Los Angeles night sky. He had wanted to rid himself of his sister Brígida, as he wanted to erase the memory of her relationship with his wife, but it was beyond his power. He snorted, chiding himself for having been a coward for so long.

As the years dragged on, Brígida was seen only at table for meals, or during the night, when she wandered the corridors of the big house. She hardly spoke to anyone, which convinced the workers of the hacienda that she was a soul out of Purgatory—
como alma del purgatorio.

During those years, Flavio concentrated his energies on reconstructing his holdings. It took years, but he did recoup almost all that had been lost during the Revolution. Many of the political ties that he had made during the Madero days survived. His allies had not forgotten that it had been Betancourt who had shown them how to weather the bad times.

Flavio was able to get his hands on added resources from the Urrutia family. Don Plutarco and Doña Domitila had died without any other heirs. The old man was killed when he was thrown from a horse. Doña Domitila's death happened shortly after. It was considered a mystery because she was not stricken by an illness her doctors could identify. In the kitchens and stables, it was said that sadness took her life.
Fue de tristeza
because it was sadness that overcame her inexplicably, little by little. Even though the Urrutia holdings had been dismantled by the Revolution, there was still some land left, much of it wooded. When Doña Domitila died, what was left of the family's wealth was passed on to Flavio Betancourt.

Flavio threw himself into work and business, but whenever he returned from his trips, he spent as much time as he could with Isadora. He had his daughter ride with him so that she would learn the routine of inspecting the livestock and of dealing with the men charged with their care, using every opportunity to instruct her on
running the hacienda. Flavio was happy to see her confidence grow and her beauty increase each time he saw her. He loved her temperament, which was sunny, always ready to make him laugh.

However, his daughter was not receiving the education proper for a woman of her position, and this gnawed at Don Flavio. He had seen to it that she learned to read and write, but not much more. He took every opportunity to plant certain ideas in her, hoping that they would take root and guard her against making mistakes.

One morning as they rode, they came upon a bull mounting a heifer. Flavio, embarrassed, took the bridle of Isadora's horse to avoid the sight.

“Papá! Stop! Why are we going in the wrong direction?”

Flavio halted the horses and, knowing that he should take the occasion to teach Isadora a lesson, decided to touch on a delicate subject.

“Hija,
what those animals were doing is natural; there's nothing wrong.”

“Then why did we run away?”

“We did not run away. I want to speak to you about something. It's this: Unlike that bull and heifer, men and women are governed by rules that they must obey.”

He looked at Isadora and saw that her head was cocked; she was listening intently. But Flavio did not know what else to say.

“Listen to me, Isadora. We humans beings, and women especially, are governed by barriers that they must never trespass. If they do, then there is trouble.”

Flavio took in her expression and realized that Isadora had not understood his meaning. The girl's eyes told him that in her mind his words about women had little relation to what they had just witnessed with the bull and cow.

“Women especially? Why not men, Papá?”

“Because … Because God said it should be that way.”

“God?”

Isadora's intelligence usually pleased Flavio, except in moments like these, when she seemed dissatisfied with a simple explanation. He decided to invent a parable.

“Let me tell you about the woman who decided that she wanted to be like a man …”

“Like a man?”

“What I mean is that she wanted to have authority like her husband. Well, one day she thought that she could do what he did, and she crossed over the forbidden line.”

“The forbidden line?”

“Yes, yes, Isadora!”

Flavio's voice betrayed the irritation he was feeling. He paused for a moment; his horse snorted as it flicked flies from its rump with its tail.

“There is a boundary that a woman should never trespass; only her husband has that right. At any rate, as I was saying, that woman, the disobedient wife, was condemned to wander the Earth for all eternity, weeping and howling, because she went against her husband's commands.”

There were other similar lessons later on, lessons in which he was careful to emphasize the differences in races: A white person, especially a white woman, should never mix her blood with a man of another race. When Isadora asked why not, he told her of the deformed child, half-animal, half-human that resulted from such a union, and how it was doomed to travel in a circus as a living example of what happens when men and women fall into such depravity. (When she asked him to explain what a man and a woman do to mix their blood, Flavio changed the subject.)