The Stories of Eva Luna (17 page)

THE PROPER RESPECT

T
hey were a pair of scoundrels. He had the face of a pirate, and he dyed his hair and mustache jet black; with time, he changed his style and left the gray, which softened his expression and lent him a more circumspect air. She was fleshy, with the milky skin of reddish blondes, the kind of skin that in youth reflects light with opalescent brush strokes, but with age becomes crinkled paper. The years she had spent in the oil workers' camps and tiny towns on the frontier had not drained her vigor, the heritage of her Scots ancestors. Neither mosquitoes nor heat nor abuse had spoiled her body or diminished her desire for dominance. At fourteen she had run away from her father, a Protestant pastor who preached the Bible deep in the jungle; his was a totally futile labor, since no one understood his English palaver and, furthermore, in those latitudes words, even the word of God, were lost in the jabbering of the birds. At fourteen the girl had reached her full growth and was in absolute command of her person. She was not sentimental. She rejected one after another of the men who, attracted by the incandescent flame of her hair, so rare in the tropics, had offered her their protection. She had never heard love spoken of, and it was not in her nature to invent it; on the other hand, she knew how to make the most of the only commodity she possessed, and by the time she was twenty-five she had a handful of diamonds sewed into the hem of her petticoat. She handed them over without hesitation to Domingo Toro, the bull of a man who had managed to tame her, an adventurer who trekked through the region hunting alligators and trafficked in arms and bootleg whiskey. He was an unscrupulous rogue, the perfect companion for Abigail McGovern.

In their first years together, the couple had fabricated bizarre schemes for accumulating capital. With her diamonds, his alligator hides, funds he had obtained dealing contraband, and chicanery at the gaming tables, Domingo had purchased chips at the casino he knew were identical to those used on the other side of the border where the value of the currency was much stronger. He filled a suitcase with chips, made a brief trip, and traded them for good hard cash. He was able to repeat the operation twice more before the authorities became suspicious, and even when they did they could not accuse him of anything illegal. In the meantime, Abigail had been selling clay pots and bowls she bought from the Goajiros and sold as archeological treasures to the gringos who worked with National Petroleum—with such success that soon she branched out into fake Colonial paintings produced by a student in his cubbyhole behind the cathedral and preternaturally aged with sea water, soot, and cat urine. By then Abigail, who had outgrown her roughneck manners and speech, had cut her hair and now dressed in expensive clothes. Although her taste was a little extreme and her effort to appear elegant a little too obvious, she could pass as a lady, which facilitated social relationships and contributed to the success of her business affairs. She entertained clients in the drawing rooms of the Hotel Inglés and, as she served them tea with the measured gestures she had learned by imitation, she would natter on about big-game hunting and tennis tournaments in hypothetical places with British-sounding names that no one could locate on a map. After the third cup she would broach in a confidential tone the subject of the meeting. She would show her guests photographs of the purported antiquities, making it clear that her proposal was to save those treasures from local neglect. The government did not have the resources to preserve these extraordinary objects, she would say, and to slip them out of the country, even though it was against the law, constituted an act of archeological conscience.

Once the Toros had laid the foundations for a small fortune, Abigail's next plan was to found a dynasty, and she tried to convince Domingo of the need to have a good name.

“What's wrong with ours?”

“No one is called Toro, that's a barroom name,” Abigail argued.

“It was my father's name, and I don't intend to change it.”

“In that case, we will have to convince the world that we are wealthy.”

She suggested that they buy land and plant bananas or coffee, as social snobs had done before them; but he did not like the idea of moving to the interior, a wild land fraught with the danger of bands of thieves, the army, guerrillas, snakes, and all the diseases known to man. To him it seemed insane to head off into the jungle in search of a future when a fortune was theirs for the taking right in the capital; it would be less risky to dedicate themselves to commerce, like the thousands of Syrians and Jews who had debarked with nothing but misery in the packs slung over their backs, but who within a few years were living in the lap of luxury.

“No small-time stuff!” objected Abigail. “What I want is a respectable family; I want them to call us
don
and
doña
and not dare speak to us without removing their hats.”

But Domingo was adamant, and finally she accepted his decision. She nearly always did, because anytime she opposed her husband, he punished her by withdrawing communication and sexual favors. He would disappear from the house for days at a time, return hollow-eyed from his clandestine mischief, change his clothes, and go out again, leaving Abigail at first furious and then terrified at the idea of losing him. She was a practical person totally devoid of romantic notions, and if once there had been a seed of tenderness in her, the years she had spent on her back had destroyed it. Domingo, nevertheless, was the only man she could bear to live with, and she was not about to let him get away. The minute Abigail gave in, Domingo would come home and sleep in his own bed. There were no noisy reconciliations; they merely resumed the rhythm of their routines and returned to the complicity of their questionable dealings. Domingo Toro set up a chain of shops in poor neighborhoods, where he sold goods at low prices but in huge quantities. The stores served as a screen for other, less legal, activities. Money continued to pile up, and they could afford the extravagances of the very wealthy, but Abigail was not satisfied: she had learned that it is one thing to have all the comforts but something very different to be accepted in society.

“If you had paid attention to me, they wouldn't be thinking of us as Arab shopkeepers. Why did you have to act like a ragpicker?” she protested to her husband.

“I don't know why you're complaining; we have everything.”

“Go ahead and sell that trash, if that's what you want, but I'm going to buy racehorses.”

“Horses? What do you know about horses, woman?”

“I know that they're classy. Everyone who is anyone has horses.”

“You'll be the ruin of us.”

For once Abigail had her way, and in a very short time had proved that her idea was not a bad one. Their stallions gave them an excuse to mingle with the old horse-breeding families and, in addition, were extremely profitable, but although the Toros appeared frequently in the racing section, their names were never in the society pages. Disheartened, Abigail compensated with even more vulgar ostentation. She bought a china service with her hand-painted portrait on every piece, cut-glass goblets, and furniture with raging gargoyles carved on the feet. Her prize, however, was a threadbare armchair she passed off as a Colonial relic, telling everyone it had belonged to El Libertador, which was why she had tied a red cord across the arms, so no one would place his unworthy buttocks where the Father of the Nation had sat. She hired a German governess for her children, and a Dutch vagabond who affected an admiral's uniform as custodian of the family yacht. The only vestiges of their past life were Domingo's buccaneer's tattoos and an old injury to Abigail's back, a consequence of spread-legged contortions during her oil-field days; but long sleeves covered his tattoos, and she had a silk-padded iron corset made to prevent pain from infringing upon her dignity. By then she was obese, laden with jewels, the spit and image of Nero. Greed had wrought the physical havoc her jungle adventures had not imposed upon her.

For the purpose of attracting the most select members of society, every year the Toros hosted a masked ball at Carnival time: the Court of Baghdad with the elephant and camels from the zoo and an army of waiters dressed as Bedouins; a Bal de Versailles at which guests in brocade gowns and powdered wigs danced the minuet amid beveled mirrors; and other scandalous revels that became a part of local legend and gave rise to violent diatribes in leftist newspapers. The Toros had to post guards before the house to prevent students—outraged by such extravagance—from painting slogans on the columns and throwing excrement through the windows, alleging that the newly rich filled their bathtubs with champagne, while to eat, the newly poor hunted cats on the rooftops. Such lavish displays had afforded the Toros a degree of respectability, because by then the line that divided the social classes was vanishing; people were flocking into the country from every corner of the globe, drawn by the miasma of petroleum. Growth in the capital was uncontrolled, fortunes were made and lost in the blink of an eye, and it was no longer possible to ascertain the ancestry of every individual. Even so, the old families kept their distance from the Toros, despite the fact they themselves had descended from other immigrants whose only merit was to have reached these shores a half-century sooner. They attended Domingo and Abigail's banquets and sometimes sailed around the Caribbean in the yacht piloted by the firm hand of the Dutch captain, but they did not return the invitations. Abigail might have been forced to resign herself to second-class status had an unforeseen event not changed their luck.

On a late August afternoon Abigail had awakened unrefreshed from her siesta; it was unbearably hot and the air was heavy with presages of a coming storm. She had slipped a silk dress over her corset and ordered her chauffeur to drive her to the beauty salon. They drove through the heavy traffic with the windows closed, to forestall any malcontent who might spit at the
señora
through an open window—something that happened more and more frequently. They stopped before the salon at exactly five o'clock, which Abigail entered after instructing the chauffeur to come for her one hour later. When he returned to pick her up, Abigail was not there. The hairdresser said that about five minutes after she had arrived, the
señora
had said she had a brief errand to run, and had not returned. Meanwhile, in his office Domingo Toro had received a call from the Red Pumas, an extremist group no one had heard of until then, announcing that they had kidnapped his wife.

That was the beginning of the scandal that was to assure the Toro's reputation. The police had taken the chauffeur and the hairdressers into custody, searched entire barrios, and cordoned off the Toros' mansion, to the subsequent annoyance of their neighbors. During the day a television van blocked the street, and a throng of newspaper reporters, detectives, and curiosity seekers trampled the lawns. Domingo Toro appeared on television, seated in a leather chair in his library between a globe of the world and a stuffed mare, imploring the kidnappers to release the mother of his children. The cheapgoods magnate, as the press had labeled him, was offering a million in local currency in exchange for his wife—an inflated amount considering that a different guerrilla group had obtained only half that much for a Middle East ambassador. The Red Pumas, however, had not considered the sum sufficient, and had doubled the ransom. After seeing Abigail's photograph in the newspaper, many believed that Domingo Toro's best move would be to pay the ransom—not for the return of his wife, but to reward the kidnappers for keeping her. Incredulity swept the nation when the husband, after consultations with bankers and lawyers, accepted the deal despite warnings by police. Hours before delivering the stipulated sum, he had received a lock of red hair through the mail, with a note indicating that the price had gone up another quarter of a million. By then, the Toro children had also appeared on television, sending desperate filial messages to their mother. The macabre auction was daily rising in pitch, and given full coverage by the media.

The suspense ended five days later, just as public curiosity was beginning to be diverted by other events. Abigail was found, bound and gagged, in a car parked in the city center, a little nervous and bedraggled but without visible signs of harm and, if anything, slightly more plump. The afternoon that she returned home, a small crowd gathered in the street to applaud the husband who had given such strong proof of his love. In the face of harassment from reporters and demands from the police, Domingo Toro had assumed an attitude of discreet gallantry, refusing to reveal how much he had paid, with the comment that his wife was beyond price. People wildly exaggerated the figure, crediting to him a payment much greater than any man would have given for a wife, least of all his. But all this speculation had established the Toros as the ultimate symbol of opulence; it was said they were as rich as the President, who for years had profited from the proceeds of the nation's oil and whose fortune was calculated to be one of the five largest in the world. Domingo and Abigail were raised to the peak of high society, the inner sanctum from which they had previously been excluded. Nothing clouded their triumph, not even public protests by students, who hung banners at the University accusing Abigail of arranging her own kidnapping, the magnate of withdrawing millions from one pocket and putting them into another without penalty of taxes, and the police of swallowing the story of the Red Pumas in order to frighten the populace and justify purges against opposition parties. But no evil tongue could destroy the glorious result of the kidnapping, and a decade later the Toro-McGoverns were known as one of the nation's most respectable families.

INTERMINABLE LIFE

T
here are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling; their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of an emotion, a caprice of mind, an image, or an intangible recollection. Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated infinitely without risk of altering their meaning. Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration, while others rise up from an instant of inspiration and become real after being told. And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind; they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story.

Ana and Roberto Blaum had grown old together. They were so close that over the years they had come to look like brother and sister; they had the same expression of benevolent surprise, the same wrinkles, the same hand gestures, the same slope of the shoulders; they had been shaped by similar habits and desires. For the greater part of their lives they had shared each day, and from having walked so far hand in hand, and having slept so long in each other's arms, they could agree to rendezvous in the same dream. They had never been apart since their meeting a half-century before. At that time, Roberto had been studying medicine, and already exhibited the passion that ruled his life: to purify the world and serve his fellowman. Ana was one of those virginal young girls whose innocence makes everything about her more beautiful. They discovered each other through music. Ana was a violinist in a chamber orchestra and he—who came from a family of virtuosos and himself enjoyed playing the piano—never missed a concert. One night he had seen on the stage a girl dressed in black velvet with a white lace collar; she was playing with her eyes closed, and he had fallen in love at first sight. Months passed before he dared speak to her, but when he did, a few words were enough for them both to realize they were destined to form a perfect bond. The war interrupted their lives before they could marry and, like thousands of Jews suffering the specter of persecution, they had to flee Europe. They sailed from a Dutch port with no luggage but the clothing on their backs, a few of Roberto's books, and Ana's violin. The ship wandered the seas for two years, denied permission to dock in any port because none of the hemisphere's nations wanted to accept its cargo of refugees. After sailing in circles, the ship finally reached the coasts of the Caribbean. By then her hull was a cauliflower of shells and lichens; dampness oozed from her as from a great cheese; her engines had turned green, and all the crew and passengers—with the exception of Ana and Roberto, whose love had sheltered them from despair—had aged two hundred years. The captain, resigned to the idea of roaming aimlessly for all eternity, had anchored his transatlantic inner tube in the inlet of a bay facing a beach of phosphorescent sands and svelte, feather-crowned palm trees to allow some of the crew to go ashore by night and load on fresh water. That was as far as they got. At dawn the following day they were unable to start the engines, which were corroded from the wear and tear of running on a blend of salt water and gunpowder, for want of better fuels. About midmorning, authorities from the nearest port motored up in their launch, a handful of cheerful mulatto men with unbuttoned uniform jackets and the best will in the world, who in accord with regulations ordered them to leave their territorial waters. When they learned the unhappy fate of the voyagers, however, and saw the deplorable state of the ship, they suggested to the captain that they ride at anchor for a few days enjoying the sun, and see whether by giving free rein to their difficulties things might right themselves, as they usually do. That night all the occupants of that ill-starred ship slipped ashore in lifeboats, stepped onto the warm sands of a country whose name they could scarcely pronounce, and headed inland through voluptuous vegetation, eager to shave off their beards, divest themselves of their moldy clothing, and leave behind them the oceanic winds that had tanned their souls to shoe leather.

That was how Ana and Roberto Blaum had begun their destinies as immigrants: first working as laborers in order to survive, and later, once they had learned the ways of that easygoing society, putting down roots, enabling Roberto to complete the medical studies interrupted by the war. They subsisted on bananas and coffee and lived in a small boardinghouse in a tiny room whose window framed a streetlamp. Roberto used that light to study at night; Ana, to sew. When their day's work was over, Roberto would sit and gaze at the stars above the neighboring rooftops while Ana played familiar melodies on her violin, a custom they retained as long as they lived. Years later, when the name of Blaum was famous, those days of severe poverty became the basis of romantic references in prologues to his books, or in newspaper interviews. Their luck changed, but they never lost their humility; they could not erase the memories of what they had suffered, or escape the feeling of insecurity so common among exiles. They were both the same height, with pale eyes and strong bones. Roberto looked like a scholar: an unruly mane formed a halo above his ears, he wore thick eyeglasses with round tortoiseshell frames, he always dressed in a gray suit that he replaced with an identical one when Ana refused to keep mending the cuffs, and he carried a bamboo cane a friend had brought him from India. He was a man of few words, as precise in speaking as in all his other habits, but with a delicate sense of humor that took the edge off the weight of his learning. His students would remember him as the most generous of their professors. Ana was merry and trusting; she was incapable of imagining evil of anyone, and thus was herself immune to it. Roberto recognized that his wife was endowed with an admirable practical sense and from the beginning delegated to her the major decisions and administration of their finances. Ana cared for her husband the way a mother babies her child: she cut his hair and fingernails, worried over his health, his food, and his sleep, and was always at his beck and call. Each found the other's company so indispensable that Ana gave up her musical career because it would have obliged her to travel, and played the violin only in the privacy of their home. She developed the habit of accompanying Roberto at night to the morgue or university library where his research kept him for hours. Both cherished the solitude and silence of deserted buildings. Later they would walk home through the empty streets to the poor barrio where they lived. With the uncontrolled growth of the city, that sector had become a nest of drug traffickers, prostitutes, and thieves, where not even police cars patrolled after sunset, but the Blaums walked there at all hours of the night with impunity. Everyone knew them. There was no illness or problem that had not been brought to Roberto, and no child who had grown up without tasting Ana's cookies. Someone always warned strangers in the barrio that for sentimental reasons the old couple was not to be touched. They would add that the Blaums were a source of national pride, that the President in person had decorated Roberto, and that they were so highly regarded that not even the
guardia
disturbed them when they roared into the sector with their military vehicles, searching houses one by one.

I met the Blaums in the late sixties, when in a mad fit my poor
madrina
had slit her own throat. We had taken her to the hospital with blood bubbling from her wound, with no real hope of saving her. By good fortune, Roberto Blaum was there and proceeded calmly to sew her head back in place. To the amazement of the other doctors, my
madrina
recovered. I spent many hours beside her bed during the weeks of her convalescence, and had many occasions to talk with Roberto. Gradually we developed a solid friendship. The Blaums had no children, and I think they must have longed for them, because with time they came to treat me as if I were their daughter. I often visited them—rarely at night, because I did not dare venture alone into that neighborhood—and they always surprised me with some special dish for lunch. I liked helping Roberto in the garden and Ana in the kitchen. Sometimes she took up her violin and played for me for an hour or two. They gave me the key to their house, and when they were away I looked after their dog and watered their plants.

Even though the war had delayed his studies, Roberto Blaum's successes had begun early in his career. When another physician might just have begun practicing, Roberto had published several respected articles. His true reputation, however, was the result of his book on the right to a peaceful death. He was not tempted by private practice, except in the case of some friend or neighbor, but preferred to pursue his profession in public hospitals where he could attend a greater number of sick and every day learn something new. Long hours in the wards of terminal patients had instilled in him a great compassion for those fragile bodies chained to life-support machines, with all the torture of their needles and tubes, patients whom science had denied their final dignity under the pretext that they must be kept breathing at any cost. It troubled him not to be able to help such people depart this world but to be forced, instead, to hold them against their will on their deathbeds. On occasion, the suffering imposed on his patients became so intolerable that he could think of nothing else. At night, when he slept, Ana would have to wake him when he cried out. In the refuge of their bed, he would embrace his wife, burying his face in her breasts, despairing.

“Why don't you disconnect the tubes and relieve that poor man's suffering? It is the most merciful thing you can do. He's going to die anyway, sooner or later . . .”

“I can't do it, Ana. The law is very clear; no one has the right to take another's life, although in my mind, this is a matter of conscience.”

“We've been through this before, and every time you suffer the same remorse. No one will know; it will take only a minute or two.”

Whether Roberto ever did, only Ana knew. In his view, death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spirit is reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stage in a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span, and the physician's labor should be to ease our passing, rather than contribute to the objectionable bureaucracy of death. These decisions, however, should not be left solely to the judgment of professionals or the compassion of family members; the law must establish a set of criteria.

Blaum's proposal evoked an uproar from priests, lawyers, and doctors. Soon the matter transcended scientific circles and spilled over to public debate, sharply dividing opinions. For the first time someone had spoken out on the subject; until then, death had been a taboo topic. One wagered on immortality, with the secret hope of living forever. As long as the discussion was maintained at a philosophical level, Roberto Blaum participated in public forums to argue his thesis, but once the subject became a diversion of the masses, he took refuge in his work, offended by the shamelessness with which his theory was being exploited for commercial purposes. Death took center stage; stripped of all reality, it became
fashionable.

One element of the press accused Blaum of promoting euthanasia and compared his tenets to those of the Nazis, while another element acclaimed him as a saint. He ignored the tumult and continued his research and work at the hospital. His book was translated into several languages and published in other countries, where it provoked similarly impassioned reactions. His photograph appeared frequently in scientific journals. That year he was offered a Chair in the Medical School, and soon was the professor most sought after by students. There was not an ounce of arrogance in Roberto Blaum nor of the exultant fanaticism of mediums of divine revelation, only the scholar's placid conviction. The greater Roberto's fame, the more reclusive the Blaums' life became. The impact of that brief celebrity startled them, and they admitted fewer and fewer into their intimate circle.

Roberto's theory was forgotten by the public as quickly as it had become faddish. The law was not changed; the problem was not even debated in Congress, but in the academic and scientific worlds Blaum's prestige steadily grew. In the following thirty years, Blaum trained several generations of surgeons, developed new drugs and surgical techniques, and organized a system of mobile consultation facilities—vans, boats, and planes equipped for treating everything from childbirth to epidemics—that formed a network across the nation, bringing help to areas where previously only missionaries had chanced. He obtained numerous prizes, for a decade was Rector of the University, and for two weeks he was Minister of Health—the amount of time necessary to gather evidence of administrative corruption and misappropriation of funds and to present the facts to the President, who had no alternative but to destroy them: he could not shake the foundations of the government merely to please an idealist. Through all that time Blaum continued his research on the dying. He published various articles on the obligation to inform the terminal patient of his true condition, so he would have time to prepare his soul and not be stunned by the surprise of dying, and on respecting suicide and other forms of ending one's own life without undue pain and stridency.

Blaum's name again became a household word when he published his last book, which not only rocked traditional science but evoked an avalanche of hope across the nation. In his long hospital practice Roberto had treated innumerable cancer patients and had observed that while some were defeated by death, others given the same treatment survived. In his book Roberto attempted to demonstrate the relationship between cancer and state of mind: he argued that sorrow and loneliness facilitate the reproduction of the deadly cells, because when a patient is depressed, the body's defense system is weakened; if, on the other hand, he has good reason to live, his organism battles tirelessly against the disease. He reasoned that a cure for cancer, therefore, should not be limited to surgery, chemistry, or medical resources, which address only physical manifestations, but that state of mind must be given prime consideration. In the last chapter he suggested that the best results are to be found among those blessed with a loving partner, or some other source of affection, since love has a beneficial effect unsurpassed by even the most powerful drugs.