The Stories of Eva Luna (7 page)

The children's uproar could not be stilled, and thus the neighbors finally proved what they had suspected for decades. First the boys' mothers came to peer through the cracks in the trapdoor; they, too, heard the terrible notes of the psaltery, so different from the banal melody that had attracted Amadeo Peralta the day he had paused in a small alley in Agua Santa to dry the sweat from his forehead. The mothers were followed by throngs of curious and, last of all, after a crowd had already gathered, came the police and firemen, who chopped open the door and descended into the hole with their lamps and equipment. In the cave they found a naked creature with flaccid skin hanging in pallid folds; this apparition had tangled gray hair that dragged the floor, and moaned in terror of the noise and light. It was Hortensia, glowing with a mother-of-pearl phosphorescence under the steady beams of the fire fighters' lanterns; she was nearly blind, her teeth had rotted away, and her legs were so weak she could barely stand. The only sign of her human origins was the ancient psaltery clasped to her breast.

The news stirred indignation throughout the country. Television screens and newspapers displayed pictures of the woman rescued from the hole where she had spent her life, now, at least, half clothed in a cloak someone had tossed around her shoulders. In only a few hours, the indifference that had surrounded the prisoner for almost half a century was converted into a passion to avenge and succor her. Neighbors improvised lynch parties for Amadeo Peralta; they stormed his house, dragged him out, and had the
guardia
not arrived in time, would have torn him limb from limb in the plaza. To assuage their guilt for having ignored Hortensia for so many years, everyone wanted to do something for her. They collected money to provide her a pension, they gathered tons of clothing and medicine she did not need, and several welfare organizations were given the task of scraping the filth from her body, cutting her hair, and outfitting her from head to toe, so she looked like an ordinary old lady. The nuns offered her a bed in a shelter for indigents, and for several months kept her tied up to prevent her from running back to her cellar, until finally she grew accustomed to daylight and resigned to living with other human beings.

Taking advantage of the public furor fanned by the press, Amadeo Peralta's numerous enemies finally gathered courage to launch an attack against him. Authorities who for years had overlooked his abuses fell upon him with the full fury of the law. The story occupied everyone's attention long enough to see the former caudillo in prison, and then faded and died away. Rejected by family and friends, a symbol of all that is abominable and abject, harassed by both jailers and companions-in-misfortune, Peralta spent the rest of his days in prison. He remained in his cell, never venturing into the courtyard with the other inmates. From there, he could hear the sounds from the street.

Every day at ten in the morning, Hortensia, with the faltering step of a madwoman, tottered down to the prison where she handed the guard at the gate a warm saucepan for the prisoner.

“He almost never left me hungry,” she would tell the guard in an apologetic tone. Then she would sit in the street to play her psaltery, wresting from it moans of agony impossible to bear. In the hope of distracting her or silencing her, some passersby gave her money.

Crouched on the other side of the wall, Amadeo Peralta heard those sounds that seemed to issue from the depths of the earth and course through every nerve in his body. This daily castigation must mean something, but he could not remember what. From time to time he felt something like a stab of guilt, but immediately his memory failed and images of the past evaporated in a dense mist. He did not know why he was in that tomb, and gradually he forgot the world of light and lost himself in his misfortune.

GIFT FOR A SWEETHEART

H
oracio Fortunato was forty-six when the languid Jewish woman who was to change his roguish ways and deflate his fanfaronade entered his life. Fortunato came from a long line of circus people, the kind who are born with rubber bones and a natural gift for somersaults, people who at an age when other infants are crawling around like worms are hanging upside down from a trapeze and brushing the lion's teeth. Before his father made it into a serious enterprise, rather than the idle fancy it had been, the Fortunato Circus experienced more difficulty than glory. At different times of catastrophe and turmoil the company was reduced to two or three members of the clan who wandered the byways in a broken-down gypsy wagon with a threadbare tent they set up in godforsaken little towns. For years Horacio's grandfather bore the sole responsibility for the spectacle: he walked the tightrope, juggled with lighted torches, swallowed Toledo swords, extracted oranges and serpents from a top hat, and danced a graceful minuet with his only companion, a female monkey decked out in ruffles and a plumed hat. His grandfather, however, managed somehow to survive bad times, and while many other circuses succumbed, obliterated by more modern diversions, he saved his circus and, at the end of his life, was able to retire to the south of the continent and cultivate his garden of asparagus and strawberries, leaving a debt-free enterprise to his son Fortunato II. The scion lacked his father's humility, nor was he disposed to perform a balancing act on a tightrope or do pirouettes with a chimpanzee; on the other hand, he was gifted with the unshakable prudence of a born businessman. Under his direction the circus grew in size and prestige until it was the largest in the nation. Three colossal striped tents replaced the modest tarp of the earlier hard times; various cages sheltered a traveling zoo of tamed wild animals; and other fanciful vehicles transported the artists, who included the only hermaphroditic and ventriloquist dwarf in history. An exact, wheeled replica of Christopher Columbus's caravel completed the Fortunato Family Famous International Circus. This enormous caravan no longer drifted aimlessly, as it had in his father's day, but steamed purposefully along the principal highways from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, stopping only in major cities, where it made an entrance with such a clamor of drums, elephants, and clowns—the caravel at the lead, like a miraculous reenactment of the Conquest—that no man, woman, or child could escape knowing the circus had come to town.

Fortunato II married a trapeze artist, and they had a son they named Horacio. But one day wife-and-mother stayed behind, determined to be independent of her husband and support herself through her somewhat precarious calling, leaving the boy in his father's care. Her son held a rather dim picture of her in his memory, never completely separating the image of his mother from that of the many acrobats he had known. When he was ten, his father married another circus artist, this time an equestrienne able to stand on her head on a galloping steed or leap from one croup to another with eyes blindfolded. She was very beautiful. No matter how much soap, water, and perfume she used, she could not erase the last trace of the essence of horse, a sharp aroma of sweat and effort. In her magnificent bosom the young Horacio, enveloped in that unique odor, found consolation for his mother's absence. But with time the horsewoman also decamped without a farewell. In the ripeness of his years, Fortunato II entered into matrimony, for the third and final time, with a Swiss woman he met on a tour bus in America. He was weary of his Bedouin-like existence and felt too old for new alarms, so when his Swiss bride requested it, he had not the slightest difficulty in giving up the circus for a sedentary life, and ended his days on a small farm in the Alps amid bucolic hills and woods. His son Horacio, who was a little over twenty, took charge of the family business.

Horacio had grown up with the instability of moving every few days, of sleeping on wheels and living beneath a canvas roof, but he was very content with his fate. He had never envied other little boys who wore gray uniforms to school and who had their destinies mapped out before they were born. By contrast, he felt powerful and free. He knew all the secrets of the circus, and with the same confidence and ease he mucked out the animal cages or balanced fifty meters above the ground dressed as a hussar and charming the audience with his dolphin smile. If at any moment he longed for stability, he did not admit it, even in his sleep. The experience of having been abandoned first by his mother and then by his stepmother had left him slightly insecure, especially with women, but it had not made him a cynic, because he had inherited his grandfather's sentimental heart. He had an enormous flair for the circus, but he was fascinated by the commercial aspect of the business even more than by the art. He had intended to be rich from the time he was a young boy, with the naïve conviction that money would bring the security he had not received from his family. He increased the number of tentacles spreading from the family enterprise by buying a chain of boxing arenas in several capital cities. From boxing he moved naturally to wrestling, and as he was a man of inventive imagination he transformed that gross sport into a dramatic spectacle. Among his initiatives were the Mummy, who appeared at ringside in an Egyptian sarcophagus; Tarzan, who covered his privates with a tiger skin so tiny that with every lunge the audience held its breath, expecting some major revelation; and the Angel, who every night bet his golden hair and lost it to the scissors of the ferocious Kuramoto—a Mapuche Indian disguised as a Samurai—but then appeared the following day with curls intact, irrefutable proof of his divine condition. These and other commercial ventures, along with public appearances with a pair of bodyguards whose role it was to intimidate his competitors and pique the ladies' curiosity, had earned him a reputation of being a shady character, a distinction he reveled in. He lived a good life, traveled through the world closing deals and looking for monsters, frequented clubs and casinos, owned a glass mansion in California and a retreat in the Yucatán, but lived most of the year in luxury hotels. He bought the temporary company of a series of blondes. He liked them soft, with ample bosoms, in homage to the memory of his stepmother, but he wasted very little energy on amorous affairs, and when his grandfather urged him to marry and bring sons into the world so the Fortunato name would not vanish without an heir, he replied that not even out of his mind would he ascend the matrimonial gallows. He was a dark-skinned, hefty man with thick hair slicked back with brilliantine, shrewd eyes, and an authoritative voice that accentuated his self-satisfied vulgarity. He was obsessed with elegance and he bought clothes befitting a duke—but his suits were a little too shiny, his ties verging on the audacious, the ruby in his ring too ostentatious, his cologne too penetrating. He had the heart of a lion tamer, and no English tailor alive would ever disguise that fact.

This man, who had spent a good part of his existence cutting a wide swath with his lavish life-style, met Patricia Zimmerman on a Tuesday in March, and on the spot lost both unpredictability of spirit and clarity of thought. He was sitting in the only restaurant in the city that still refused to serve blacks, with four cohorts and a diva whom he was planning to take to the Bahamas for a week, when Patricia entered the room on her husband's arm, dressed in silk and adorned with some of the diamonds that had made the Zimmerman firm famous. Nothing could have been further from the unforgettable stepmother smelling of horses, or the complacent blondes, than this woman. He watched her advance, small, refined, her chest bones bared by her décolletage and her chestnut-colored hair drawn back into a severe bun, and he felt his knees grow heavy and an insufferable burning in his breast. He preferred uncomplicated women ready for a good time, whereas this was a woman who would have to be studied carefully if her worth was to be known, and even then her virtues would be visible only to an eye trained in appreciating subtleties—which had never been the case with Horacio Fortunato. If the fortune-teller in his circus had consulted her crystal ball and predicted that Fortunato would fall in love at first sight with a fortyish and haughty aristocrat, he would have had a good laugh. But that is exactly what happened as he watched Patricia walk toward him like the shade of a nineteenth-century widow-empress in her dark gown with the glitter of all those diamonds shooting fire at her neck. As Patricia walked past, she paused for an instant before that giant with the napkin tucked into his waistcoat and a trace of gravy at the corner of his mouth. Horacio Fortunato caught a whiff of her perfume and the full impact of her aquiline profile and completely forgot the diva, the bodyguards, his business affairs, everything that interested him in life, and decided with absolute seriousness to steal this woman from her jeweler and love her to the best of his ability. He turned his chair to one side and, ignoring his guests, measured the distance that separated her from him, while Patricia Zimmerman wondered whether that stranger was examining her jewels with some evil design.

That same night an extravagant bouquet of orchids was delivered to the Zimmerman residence. Patricia looked at the card, a sepia-colored rectangle with a name from a novel written in golden arabesques. What ghastly taste, she muttered, divining immediately it had come from the man with the plastered-down hair she had seen in the restaurant, and she ordered the gift to be tossed into the street, with the hope that the sender would be circling the house and thus learn the fate of his flowers. The following day a crystal box arrived bearing a single perfect rose, without a card. The majordomo also placed this offering in the trash. Different bouquets followed for the rest of the week: a basket of wild flowers on a bed of lavender, a pyramid of white carnations in a silver goblet, a dozen black tulips imported from Holland, and other varieties impossible to find in this hot climate. Each suffered the fate of the first, but this did not discourage the gallant, whose siege was becoming so unbearable that Patricia Zimmerman did not dare answer the telephone for fear of hearing his voice whispering indecent proposals, as had happened the previous Tuesday at two in the morning. She returned his letters unopened. She stopped going out, because she ran into Fortunato in the most unexpected places: observing her from the adjoining box at the opera; in the street, waiting to open the door of her car before the chauffeur could reach it; materializing like an illusion in an elevator or on some stairway. She was a prisoner in her own home, and frightened. He'll get over it, he'll get over it, she kept telling herself, but Fortunato did not evaporate like a bad dream; he was always there, on the other side of the wall, breathing heavily. She thought of calling the police, or telling her husband, but her horror of scandal prevented her. One morning she was attending to her correspondence when the majordomo announced the visit of the president of Fortunato and Sons.

“In my own house, how dare he!” Patricia muttered, her heart racing. She had to call on the implacable discipline she had acquired in years of small dramas played in salons to disguise the trembling of her hands and voice. For an instant she was tempted to confront this madman once and for all, but she realized that her strength would fail her; she felt defeated even before she saw him.

“Tell him I'm not in. Show him the door, and inform the servants that the gentleman is not welcome in this house,” she ordered.

The next day there were no exotic flowers at breakfast, and Patricia thought with a sigh of relief, or dejection, that the man must finally have understood her message. That morning she felt free for the first time in a week, and she went out for a game of tennis and a trip to the beauty salon. She returned home at two in the afternoon with a new haircut and a bad headache. On the hall table she saw a royal purple velvet jewel box with the name Zimmerman printed in gold letters. She opened it rather absently, thinking that her husband had left it there, but found a necklace of emeralds accompanied by one of those pretentious sepia cards she had come to know and detest. Her headache turned to panic. This adventurer seemed prepared to ruin her life; as if it wasn't enough to buy a necklace from her own husband, he then had the gall to send it to her house. She could not throw this gift into the trash, as she had done with the flowers. With the case clutched to her bosom, she locked herself in her writing room. A half-hour later, she called the chauffeur and ordered him to deliver a package to the same address to which he had returned several letters. As she handed him the jewels she felt no relief; to the contrary, she had the impression that she was sinking into a quagmire.

At the same time, Fortunato was slogging through his own swamp, getting nowhere, feeling his way blindly. He had never spent so much money and time to court a woman, although it was true, he admitted, that all his women had been quite different from this one. For the first time in his life as a showman, he felt ridiculous. He could not go on this way; always strong as an ox, his health was suffering, he slept only a few hours at a time, he was short of breath, he had heart palpitations, he felt fire in his stomach and ringing in his temples. His business was similarly suffering the impact of his love fever; he was making hasty decisions, and losing money. Good Christ, I don't know who I am or what I'm doing here; damn it all, he grumbled, sweating, but not for a minute did he consider abandoning the chase.

Slumped in an armchair in the hotel where he was staying, the purple jewel box back in his hands, Fortunato remembered his grandfather. He rarely thought of his father, but his memory often dwelt on that formidable ancestor who at ninety-some years was still cultivating his garden. He picked up the telephone and asked for long distance.

The elder Fortunato was nearly deaf and, in addition, unable to adapt to the mechanism of that devilish apparatus that carried voices halfway around the planet, but the years had not affected his lucidity. He listened carefully to his grandson's sorrowful tale, speaking only at the end.