The Stories of Eva Luna (6 page)

Tomás Vargas never bet, but he liked to watch the players; he could spend hours observing a game of dominoes; he was the first to pick a spot at the cockfights; and he listened to the announcement of the lottery winners over the radio, even though he never bought a ticket. The magnitude of his greed had protected him from temptation. Nevertheless, when the steely complicity of Antonia Sierra and Concha Díaz nipped his manly impulses in the bud, he turned toward gambling. At first he made miserable little bets, and only the most down-and-out drunks would sit at the table with him, but he had more luck with cards than with his women, and before long he was bitten by the bug for easy money and began to change down to the marrow of his miserly bones. With the hope of getting rich at one lucky stroke and, in the process—using the illusory projection of that triumph—of mending his damaged reputation as a rake, he began to take bigger risks. Soon the boldest players were taking their measure against him, while the rest formed a circle around them to follow the turns of each encounter. Tomás Vargas did not spread his money on the table, as was the tradition, but he paid up when he lost. At home, things went from bad to worse, and Concha also had to go out and work. The children stayed home by themselves, and the schoolteacher Inés fed them to keep them from going into town to beg.

Tomás Vargas's real troubles began the day he accepted a challenge from the Lieutenant and after six hours of playing won two hundred pesos. The officer confiscated his subordinates' salaries to pay his debt. He was a stocky, dark-skinned man with a walrus mustache, who always left his jacket unbuttoned so the girls could appreciate his hairy chest and collection of gold chains. No one in Agua Santa liked him, because he was a man of unpredictable character and he granted himself authority to invent laws according to his whim and convenience. Before his arrival, the jail had been a couple of rooms where you spent the night after a brawl—there were never any serious crimes in Agua Santa and the only wrongdoers were prisoners being transported to Santa María Prison—but the Lieutenant made sure that no one left his jail without a sound beating first. Thanks to him, people learned to fear the law. He was furious about losing the two hundred pesos, but he handed over the money without a word, even with a certain elegant detachment, because not even he, with all the weight of his power, would have left the table without paying.

Tomás Vargas spent two days bragging about his triumph, until the Lieutenant advised him he would be waiting for his revenge the following Saturday. This time the bet would be a thousand pesos, he announced in such a peremptory tone that Vargas was reminded of the officer's boot in his rear and did not dare refuse. On Saturday afternoon the tavern was filled. It was so crowded and hot that no one could catch a breath, and they carried the table outside so that everyone could witness the game. Never had so much money been bet in Agua Santa, and Riad Halabí was appointed to ensure the fairness of the proceedings. He began by directing the public to stand two steps away, to prevent any cheating, and the Lieutenant and other policemen to leave their weapons at the jail.

“Before we begin, both players must place their money on the table,” the arbiter declared.

“My word is good, Turk,” replied the Lieutenant.

“In that case, my word's enough, too,” added Tomás Vargas.

“How will you pay if you lose?” Riad Halabí wanted to know.

“I have a house in the capital; if I lose, Vargas will have the title tomorrow.”

“Good. And you?”

“I will pay with my buried gold.”

The game was the most exciting thing that had happened in the town in many years. Everyone in Agua Santa, from ancients to young children, gathered in the street to watch. Only Antonia Sierra and Concha Díaz were absent. Neither the Lieutenant nor Tomás Vargas inspired any sympathy, so no one cared who won; the entertainment consisted of speculating on the agonies of the two players and of the people wagering on one or the other. Tomás Vargas had on his side his string of good luck with cards, but the Lieutenant had the advantage of a cool head and his reputation as a hard man.

The game ended at seven and, according to the agreed terms, Riad Halabí declared the Lieutenant the winner. In his triumph, the policeman maintained the same calm he had shown the preceding week in defeat—no mocking smile, no sarcastic word—he merely sat in his chair picking his teeth with his little fingernail.

“All right, Vargas; the time has come to dig up your treasure,” he said when the spectators' excitement had died down.

Tomás Vargas's skin was ashen, his shirt was soaked with sweat, and he gasped for air, which seemed to have stuck in his throat. Twice he tried to stand, but each time his knees buckled. Riad Halabí had to support him. Finally he gathered enough strength to start off in the direction of the highway, followed by the Lieutenant, the police, the Turk, the school-teacher Inés, and, behind them, the whole town in a boisterous procession. They had walked a couple of miles when Vargas veered to the right, diving into the riot of gluttonous vegetation that surrounded Agua Santa. There was no path, but with little hesitation he made his way among gigantic trees and huge ferns until he came to the edge of a ravine barely visible through the impenetrable screen of the jungle. The crowd stopped there, while Vargas and the Lieutenant scrambled down the bank. The heat was humid and oppressive, even though it was almost sunset. Tomás Vargas signaled them not to come any farther; he got down on all fours, and crawled beneath some philodendrons with great fleshy leaves. A long minute went by before they heard his howl. The Lieutenant plunged into the foliage, grabbed him by the ankles, and jerked him out.

“What's the matter?”

“It isn't there, it isn't there!”

“What do you mean, ‘it isn't there'?”

“I swear, Lieutenant, I don't know anything about this; they stole it, they stole my treasure!” and he burst out crying like a widow woman, so overcome he was oblivious to the Lieutenant's repeated kicks.

“Pig! I'll get my money. On your mother's grave, I'll get my money!”

Riad Halabí hurled himself down the slope of the ravine and removed Vargas from the Lieutenant's clutches before he kicked him to a pulp. He calmed the Lieutenant, arguing that blows would not resolve anything, and then helped the old man back up the ravine. Tomás Vargas was racked with fear; he was blubbering and staggering and swooning so that the Turk almost had to carry him to get him home. Antonia Sierra and Concha Díaz were sitting in the doorway in rush chairs, drinking coffee and watching it grow dark. They showed no sign of dismay when they learned what had happened, but continued sipping their coffee, unmoved.

For more than a week Tomás Vargas had a high temperature, during which he raved about gold nuggets and marked cards, but he was robust by nature, and instead of dying of grief as everyone expected, he regained his health. When he could get out of his hammock, he did not venture out for several days, but finally his habit of dissipation was stronger than his prudence, so he took his Panama hat and, still shaky and frightened, went down to the tavern. He did not return that night, and two days later someone brought the news that his mutilated body had been found in the very ravine where he had hidden his treasure. He had been quartered with a machete like a steer, the end everyone had known would be his sooner or later.

Antonia Sierra and Concha Díaz buried him without grief and with no funeral procession except Riad Halabí and the schoolteacher Inés, who had come to accompany them, not to pay posthumous tribute to a man they had never respected in life. The two women lived on together, happy to help each other in bringing up their children and in the many vicissitudes of life. Not long after the burial they bought hens, rabbits, and pigs; they rode the bus to the city and returned with clothes for all the family. That year they repaired the house with new lumber, they added two rooms, they painted the house blue, they installed a gas stove, and then began a cookery business in their home. Every noon they went out with all the children to deliver meals to the jail, the school, and the post office; and if there was any extra, they left it on the store counter for Riad Halabí to offer to the truckdrivers. And so they made their way out of poverty and started off down the road to prosperity.

IF YOU TOUCHED MY HEART

A
madeo Peralta was raised in the midst of his father's gang and, like all the men of his family, grew up to be a ruffian. His father believed that school was for sissies; you don't need books to get ahead in life, he always said, just balls and quick wits, and that was why he trained his boys to be rough and ready. With time, nevertheless, he realized that the world was changing very rapidly and that his business affairs needed to be more firmly anchored. The era of undisguised plunder had been replaced by one of corruption and bribery; it was time to administer his wealth by using modern criteria, and to improve his image. He called his sons together and assigned them the task of establishing friendships with influential persons and of learning the legal tricks that would allow them to continue to prosper without danger of losing their impunity. He also encouraged them to find sweethearts among the old-line families and in this way see whether they could cleanse the Peralta name of all its stains of mud and blood. By then Amadeo was thirty-two years old; the habit of seducing girls and then abandoning them was deeply ingrained; the idea of marriage was not at all to his liking but he did not dare disobey his father. He began to court the daughter of a wealthy landowner whose family had lived in the same place for six generations. Despite her suitor's murky reputation, the girl accepted, for she was not very attractive and was afraid of ending up an old maid. Then began one of those tedious provincial engagements. Wretched in a white linen suit and polished boots, Amadeo came every day to visit his fiancée beneath the hawklike eye of his future mother-in-law or some aunt, and while the young lady served coffee and guava sweets he would peek at his watch, calculating the earliest moment to make his departure.

A few weeks before the wedding, Amadeo Peralta had to make a business trip through the provinces and found himself in Agua Santa, one of those towns where nobody stays and whose name travelers rarely recall. He was walking down a narrow street at the hour of the siesta, cursing the heat and the oppressive, cloying odor of mango marmalade in the air, when he heard a crystalline sound like water purling between stones; it was coming from a modest house with paint flaked by the sun and rain like most of the houses in that town. Through the ornamental iron grille he glimpsed an entryway of dark paving stones and whitewashed walls, then a patio and, beyond, the surprising vision of a young girl sitting cross-legged on the ground and cradling a blond wood psaltery on her knees. For a while he stood and watched her.

“Come here, sweet thing,” he called finally. She looked up, and despite the distance he could see the startled eyes and uncertain smile in a still childish face. “Come with me,” Amadeo asked—implored—in a hoarse voice.

She hesitated. The last notes lingered like a question in the air of the patio. Peralta called again. The girl stood up and walked toward him; he slipped his hand through the iron grille, shot the bolt, opened the gate, and seized her hand, all the while reciting his entire repertoire of seduction: he swore that he had seen her in his dreams, that he had been looking for her all his life, that he could not let her go, and that she was the woman fate had meant for him—all of which he could have omitted because the girl was simple and even though she may have been enchanted by the tone of his voice she did not understand the meaning of his words. Hortensia was her name, and she had just turned fifteen; her body was tuned for its first embrace, though she was unable to put a name to the restlessness and temblors that shook it. It was so easy for Peralta to lead her to his car and drive to a nearby clearing that an hour later he had completely forgotten her. He did not recognize her even when a week later she suddenly appeared at his house, one hundred and forty kilometers away, wearing a simple yellow cotton dress and canvas espadrilles, her psaltery under her arm, and inflamed with the fever of love.

Forty-seven years later, when Hortensia was rescued from the pit in which she had been entombed, and newspapermen traveled from every corner of the nation to photograph her, not even she could remember her name or how she had got there.

The reporters accosted Amadeo Peralta: “Why did you keep her locked up like a miserable beast?”

“Because I felt like it,” he replied calmly. By then he was eighty, and as lucid as ever; he could not understand this belated outcry over something that had happened so long ago.

He was not inclined to offer explanations. He was a man of authority, a patriarch, a great-grandfather; no one dared look him in the eye; even priests greeted him with bowed head. During the course of his long life he had multiplied the fortune he inherited from his father; he had become owner of all the land from the ruins of the Spanish fort to the state line, and then had launched himself on a political career that made him the most powerful cacique in the territory. He had married the landowner's ugly daughter and sired nine legitimate descendants with her and an indefinite number of bastards with other women, none of whom he remembered since he had a heart hardened to love. The only woman he could not entirely discard was Hortensia; she stuck in his consciousness like a persistent nightmare. After the brief encounter in the tall grass of an empty lot, he had returned to his home, his work, and his insipid, well-bred fiancée. It was Hortensia who had searched until she found
him
; it was she who had planted herself before him and clung to his shirt with the terrifying submission of a slave. This is a fine kettle of fish, he had thought; here I am about to get married with all this hoopla and to-do, and now this idiot girl turns up on my doorstep. He wanted to be rid of her, and yet when he saw her in her yellow dress, with those entreating eyes, it seemed a waste not to take advantage of the opportunity, and he decided to hide her while he found a solution.

And so, by carelessness, really, Hortensia ended up in the cellar of an old sugar mill that belonged to the Peraltas, where she was to remain for a lifetime. It was a large room, dank and dark, suffocating in summer and in the dry season often cold at night, furnished with a few sticks of furniture and a straw pallet. Amadeo Peralta never took time to make her more comfortable, despite his occasionally feeding a fantasy of making the girl a concubine from an Oriental tale, clad in gauzy robes and surrounded with peacock feathers, brocade tented ceilings, stained-glass lamps, gilded furniture with spiral feet, and thick rugs where he could walk barefoot. He might actually have done it had Hortensia reminded him of his promises, but she was like a wild bird, one of those blind guacharos that live in the depths of caves: all she needed was a little food and water. The yellow dress rotted away and she was left naked.

“He loves me; he has always loved me,” she declared when she was rescued by neighbors. After being locked up for so many years she had lost the use of words and her voice came out in spurts like the croak of a woman on her deathbed.

For a few weeks Amadeo had spent a lot of time in the cellar with her, satisfying an appetite he thought insatiable. Fearing that she would be discovered, and jealous even of his own eyes, he did not want to expose her to daylight and allowed only a pale ray to enter through the tiny hole that provided ventilation. In the darkness, they coupled frenziedly, their skin burning and their hearts impatient as carnivorous crabs. In that cavern all odors and tastes were heightened to the extreme. When they touched, each entered the other's being and sank into the other's most secret desires. There, voices resounded in repeated echoes; the walls returned amplified murmurs and kisses. The cellar became a sealed flask in which they wallowed like playful twins swimming in amniotic fluid, two swollen, stupefied fetuses. For days they were lost in an absolute intimacy they confused with love.

When Hortensia fell asleep, her lover went out to look for food and before she awakened returned with renewed energy to resume the cycle of caresses. They should have made love to each other until they died of desire; they should have devoured one another or flamed like mirrored torches, but that was not to be. What happened instead was more predictable and ordinary, much less grandiose. Before a month had passed, Amadeo Peralta tired of the games, which they were beginning to repeat; he sensed the dampness eating into his joints, and he began to feel the attraction of things outside the walls of that grotto. It was time to return to the world of the living and to pick up the reins of his destiny.

“You wait for me here. I'm going out and get very rich. I'll bring you gifts and dresses and jewels fit for a queen,” he told her as he said goodbye.

“I want children,” said Hortensia.

“Children, no; but you shall have dolls.”

In the months that followed, Peralta forgot about the dresses, the jewels, and the dolls. He visited Hortensia when he thought of her, not always to make love, sometimes merely to hear her play some old melody on her psaltery; he liked to watch her bent over the instrument, strumming chords. Sometimes he was in such a rush that he did not even speak; he filled her water jugs, left her a sack filled with provisions, and departed. Once he forgot about her for nine days, and found her on the verge of death; he realized then the need to find someone to help care for his prisoner, because his family, his travels, his business, and his social engagements occupied all his time. He chose a tight-mouthed Indian woman to fill that role. She kept the key to the padlock, and regularly came to clean the cell and scrape away the lichens growing on Hortensia's body like pale delicate flowers almost invisible to the naked eye and redolent of tilled soil and neglected things.

“Weren't you ever sorry for that poor woman?” they asked when they arrested her as well, charging her with complicity in the kidnapping. She refused to answer but stared straight ahead with expressionless eyes and spat a black stream of tobacco.

No, she had felt no pity for her; she believed the woman had a calling to be a slave and was happy being one, or else had been born an idiot and like others in her situation was better locked up than exposed to the jeers and perils of the street. Hortensia had done nothing to change her jailer's opinion; she never exhibited any curiosity about the world, she made no attempt to go outside for fresh air, and she complained about nothing. She never seemed bored; her mind had stopped at some moment in her childhood, and solitude in no way disturbed her. She was, in fact, turning into a subterranean creature. There in her tomb her senses grew sharp and she learned to see the invisible; she was surrounded by hallucinatory spirits who led her by the hand to other universes. She left behind a body huddled in a corner and traveled through starry space like a messenger particle, living in a dark land beyond reason. Had she had a mirror, she would have been terrified by her appearance; as she could not see herself, however, she was not witness to her deterioration: she was unaware of the scales sprouting from her skin, or the silkworms that had spun a nest in her long, tangled hair, or the lead-colored clouds covering eyes already dead from peering into shadows. She did not feel her ears growing to capture external sounds, even the faintest and most distant, like the laughter of children at school recess, the ice-cream vendor's bell, birds in flight, or the murmuring river. Nor did she realize that her legs, once graceful and firm, were growing twisted as they adjusted to moving in that confined space, to crawling, nor that her toenails were thickening like an animal's hooves, her bones changing into tubes of glass, her belly caving in, and a hump forming on her back. Only her hands, forever occupied with the psaltery, maintained their shape and size, although her fingers had forgotten the melodies they had once known and now extracted from the instrument the unvoiced sob trapped in her breast. From a distance, Hortensia resembled a tragic circus monkey; on closer view, she inspired infinite pity. She was totally ignorant of the malignant transformations taking place; in her mind she held intact the image of herself as the young girl she had last seen reflected in the window of Amadeo Peralta's automobile the day he had driven her to this lair. She believed she was as pretty as ever, and continued to act as if she were; the memory of beauty crouched deep inside her and only if someone approached very close would he have glimpsed it beneath the external façade of a prehistoric dwarf.

All the while, Amadeo Peralta, rich and feared, cast the net of his power across the region. Every Sunday he sat at the head of a long table occupied by his sons and nephews, cronies and accomplices, and special guests such as politicians and generals whom he treated with a hearty cordiality tinged with sufficient arrogance to remind everyone who was master here. Behind his back, people whispered about his victims, about how many he had ruined or caused to disappear, about bribes to authorities; there was talk that he had made half his fortune from smuggling, but no one was disposed to seek the proof of his transgressions. It was also rumored that Peralta kept a woman prisoner in a cellar. That aspect of his black deeds was repeated with more conviction even than stories of his crooked dealings; in fact, many people knew about it, and with time it became an open secret.

One afternoon on a very hot day, three young boys played hooky from school to swim in the river. They spent a couple of hours splashing around on the muddy bank and then wandered off toward the old Peralta sugar mill that had been closed two generations earlier when cane ceased to be a profitable crop. The mill had the reputation of being haunted; people said you could hear sounds of devils, and many had seen a disheveled old witch invoking the spirits of dead slaves. Excited by their adventure, the boys crept onto the property and approached the mill. Soon they were daring enough to enter the ruins; they ran through large rooms with thick adobe walls and termite-riddled beams; they picked their way through weeds growing from the floor, mounds of rubbish and dog shit, rotted roof tiles, and snake nests. Making jokes to work up their courage, egging each other on, they came to the huge roofless room that contained the ruined sugar presses; here rain and sun had created an impossible garden, and the boys thought they could detect a lingering scent of sugar and sweat. Just as they were growing bolder they heard, clear as a bell, the notes of a monstrous song. Trembling, they almost retreated, but the lure of horror was stronger than their fear, and they huddled there, listening, as the last note drilled into their foreheads. Gradually, they were released from their paralysis; their fear evaporated and they began looking for the source of those weird sounds so different from any music they had ever known. They discovered a small trapdoor in the floor, closed with a lock they could not open. They rattled the wood planks that sealed the entrance and were struck in the face by an indescribable odor that reminded them of a caged beast. They called but no one answered; they heard only a hoarse panting on the other side. Finally they ran home to shout the news that they had discovered the door to hell.