In the mid-nineteenth century, an illustrious South American who owned these fertile lands nestled in the mountains a short distance from the sea and not too far from civilization had dreamed of populating them with colonists of good stock. He went to Europe, chartered a ship, and spread the word among farmers impoverished by wars and plagues that a utopia was awaiting them on the other side of the Atlantic. There they would construct a perfect society in which peace and prosperity reigned, a society regulated by sound Christian principles, far from the vices, ambitions, and mysteries that had assailed humanity since the beginnings of civilization. Eighty families were selected on the basis of merit and good intentions, among whom were representatives of various trades, a schoolmaster, a doctor, and a priest, along with their tools and instruments and a background of several centuries of tradition and learning. When they stepped onto that tropical soil, some were frightened, convinced that they would never get used to such a place, but their ideas changed as they ascended a path toward mountain peaks and found themselves in the promised paradise, a cool, mild region where they could cultivate the fruits and vegetables of both Europe and America. There they erected a replica of the villages of their homeland: wood-trimmed houses, Gothic-lettered signs, window boxes filled with flowers, and a small church where they hung the bronze bell they had carried with them on the ship. They closed the entrance to La Colonia and blocked the road, making it impossible to enter or leave, and for a hundred years they fulfilled the dream of the man who had brought them to that land, living in accord with the precepts of God. But the secret of such a utopia could not be hidden indefinitely, and when the press published the story it created a sensation. The government, little inclined to allow within its sovereign territory a foreign colony with its own laws and customs, forced them to open their doors and welcome national authorities, tourism, and commerce. Visitors found a village where no one spoke Spanish, where everyone was blond and blue-eyed, and where a significant proportion of the children had some defect resulting from inbreeding. A highway was constructed to link the village with the capital, making La Colonia a favorite site for outings; families with cars drove there to buy seasonal fruit, honey, sausage, home-baked bread, and embroidered linens. The colonists turned their homes into restaurants and inns for the visitors, and a few hostels accepted lovers, which may not have precisely corresponded to the ideas of the community’s founder, but times change and it was necessary to modernize. Rupert had arrived when the village was still closed but, after establishing his European blood and demonstrating his good will, had managed to be accepted. When communications were opened with the outside world, he was one of the first to understand the advantages of the new arrangement. He stopped building furniture, now that it was possible to buy better and more varied furnishings in the capital, and began producing cuckoo clocks and reproducing hand-painted antique toys to sell to the tourists. He also began breeding dogs, and set up a school for training them, an idea that had never occurred to anyone in the country; until then, animals had been born and bred haphazardly, without papers, clubs, shows, grooming, or special handling. But Rupert had quickly learned that German shepherds were the fashion in some quarters, and wealthy owners wanted dogs with the proper papers. Those who could afford them bought their animals, then left them for a while in Rupert’s school. When the dogs graduated, they had been trained to walk on their hind feet, salute with a front paw, carry the master’s newspaper or slippers in their mouth, and play dead when given a command in a foreign tongue.
Uncle Rupert was the owner of a sizable piece of land and a large, many-roomed house that he had converted into an inn; he had built and furnished it with his own hands in the light wood of the Heidelberg style, in spite of the fact that he had never set eyes on that city but had copied everything from a magazine. His wife raised strawberries and flowers and kept chickens that supplied eggs for the whole village. They made a good living from dog-breeding, cuckoo clocks, and tourists.
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Rolf Carlé’s life underwent a great change. He had finished school, and there was no place for further study in La Colonia; besides, his uncle had plans to teach him his own trades, hoping Rolf would help him and perhaps take over his business. He had high hopes of seeing one of his daughters married to Rolf, whom he had liked from the moment he saw him. He had always wanted a male heir, and Rolf was exactly the son he had dreamed of: strong, of high character, good with his hands, and red-haired like the men in his family. Rolf learned quickly to master the tools of the carpentry shop, to assemble the clocks, to harvest the strawberries, and to wait on the guests in the inn. His aunt and uncle, in turn, learned that he would do anything they wanted as long as he believed it was his own idea, and if they appealed to his emotions.
“What do you think we should do about that henhouse roof, Rolf?” Burgel would ask, with a sigh of helplessness.
“It needs some tar.”
“I’m afraid I’ll lose all my hens when the rains begin.”
“Leave it to me, Aunt, it won’t take any time at all to fix it.” And for the next three days the youth would be stirring a kettle of hot tar, doing a balancing act on the roof, and explaining his theories on waterproofing to anyone passing by, before the admiring gaze of his cousins and the veiled smile of his aunt.
Rolf was determined to learn the language of the country and was not satisfied until he found someone to teach him in a methodical way. He was gifted with a good ear for music, and that talent was evident when he played the church organ, entertained visitors with his accordion, and absorbed Spanish—with a good supply of forbidden words that he used only rarely, but treasured as part of his culture. In his free moments, he read, and in less than a year had consumed all the books in the village, which he borrowed, then returned with obsessive punctuality. He had a good memory and he stored information—almost always useless and impossible to dispute—to impress his family and neighbors. Without a moment’s hesitation he could state the population of Mauritania, or the width of the English Channel in nautical miles, usually because he remembered, but occasionally invented by him on the spot, and spoken with such arrogance that no one dared question him. He learned several Latin phrases to spice his conversation and, even though he did not always use them correctly, earned a solid reputation in that small community. He had inherited his mother’s courteous and somewhat old-fashioned manners, which helped him capture everyone’s heart, particularly the ladies’, who had little exposure to finesse in that rather rough society. He was particularly attentive to his Aunt Burgel, not out of affectation but because he was truly fond of her. She had a way of dispelling his despair with such simplicity that afterward he would ask himself why he had not thought of the solution. Whenever he fell into the vice of nostalgia or tortured himself thinking about the evils of mankind, she restored him with her magnificent desserts and steady stream of little jokes. She was the first person, apart from Katharina, to hug him without needing a reason or permission. Each morning she greeted him with resounding kisses, and before he fell asleep she came in to tuck him in—affection his mother had been too shy to bestow. At first, Rolf himself seemed timid; he blushed easily and spoke in a low voice. In fact, he was vain and even at an age to see himself as the center of the universe. He was much quicker than most of the people around him and he knew it, but he was intelligent enough to affect a certain modesty.
Every Sunday morning, people from the city drove out for the show in his Uncle Rupert’s school for dogs. Rolf would lead them to a large courtyard with tracks and jumps where the dogs performed their feats amid enthusiastic applause. Sunday was the day the dogs were sold, and the youth always watched them go with a heavy heart, because nothing was more dear to him than those animals he had cared for since birth. He would throw himself down on the bitches’ matting and let the pups nuzzle him and chew his ears and fall asleep in his arms. He knew each one by name and spoke with them as if they were equals. Rolf had a hunger
for love, but as he had never been coddled or babied he felt free to demonstrate affection only with the pups; it took much longer to learn to accept human contact—first Burgel’s and then that of others. His memories of Katharina formed a secret source of tenderness, and sometimes, thinking of her in the darkness of his room, he hid his head beneath the sheet and wept.
He never spoke of his past, for fear of evoking sympathy and also because he had not yet come to grips with it in his mind. The unhappy years with his father were a broken mirror in his memory. He prided himself on his coldness and pragmatism, two qualities he considered particularly manly, but in truth he was an incorrigible dreamer. He was disarmed by the slightest gesture of sympathy and outraged by injustice, and he suffered the ingenuous idealism of youth that never withstands confrontation with reality. His childhood of privation and terror had given him the ability to sense intuitively the dark side of situations and people, with a clairvoyance that flared before him like a powder flash, but his pretense of rationalism kept him from giving credence to those mysterious warnings or following his impulses. He denied his emotions, but at any unguarded moment was demolished by them. He also refused to respond to the demands of his senses, and tried to control the part of his nature inclined toward voluptuousness and pleasure. He understood from the beginning that La Colonia was a naïve dreamworld he had stumbled into by accident, and believed that life was filled with harshness that would require strong armor if he was to survive. Nevertheless, those who knew him could see that his shell was nothing but smoke and that it would dissipate in the slightest breeze. Rolf went through life with his emotions bared, tripping over his pride, falling, and struggling to his feet again.
Rupert, Burgel, and their daughters were simple, lively folk with large appetites. Food was central: their lives turned around the labors of the kitchen and the ceremony of the table. They were all plump, and could not get used to seeing Rolf so thin in spite of their constant efforts to nourish him. Aunt Burgel had created an aphrodisiac dish that attracted the tourists and kept her husband inflamed. Look at him, she would say with the contagious laughter of a contented matron; he’s steaming like a tractor. The recipe was simple: in a huge pot she browned onion, bacon, and tomato seasoned with salt, peppercorns, garlic, and coriander. To this she added, in layers, chunks of pork and beef, boned chicken, broad beans, corn, cabbage, pimiento, fish, clams, and lobster; then she sprinkled in a little raw sugar and added four steins of beer. Before putting on the lid and simmering the stew over a slow fire, she threw in a handful of herbs grown in her kitchen flowerpots. That was the crucial moment, because no one else knew the combination of spices, and she meant to carry her secret to the grave. The result was a dark rich stew that was spooned from the pot and served in reverse order to its preparation. The grand finale was the broth, served in cups, and the effect was a formidable heat in the bones and a lustful passion in the soul. Rolf’s aunt and uncle slaughtered several hogs a year and turned out the best pork products in the village: smoked hams, pork sausage, salami, and enormous tins of lard. They bought fresh milk by the can in order to have cream and churn butter and make cheese. From dawn to dusk delicious odors drifted from that kitchen. In the patio, copper kettles simmered over open wood fires, filled with conserves of plum, apricot, and strawberry for the guests’ breakfasts. From spending so much time around the aromatic pots, Rolf’s two cousins smelled of cinnamon, clove, vanilla, and lemon. At night Rolf slipped like a shadow into their room to bury his nose in their clothes and breathe in a sweet fragrance that filled his head with sin.
On the weekends the routine changed. Thursday they aired the rooms, decorated them with fresh flowers, and brought wood for the fireplaces—at night there was a cool breeze and the guests liked to sit before the fire and imagine they were in the Alps. From Friday to Sunday the house was filled with guests, and from early dawn the family worked to make them happy. Burgel never left the kitchen, while the girls, with the embroidered felt vests and skirts, white stockings, starched aprons, and ribbon-braided hair of village girls in German folktales, served the tables and cleaned the rooms.
It took four months for Frau Carlé’s letters to arrive. They were all very brief, and almost identical: Dear son, I am fine. Katharina is in the hospital. Take good care of yourself and remember everything I taught you so you will grow up to be a good man. Your Mama sends kisses. Rolf, in contrast, wrote his mother frequently, filling both sides of page after page, telling her about what he had read, because after describing the village and his uncle’s family there was little more to say; he felt that nothing ever happened to him that was worth reporting in a letter, and he preferred to astound his mother with long philosophical ideas based on his reading. He also sent her photographs he took with his uncle’s ancient camera, immortalizing the moods of nature, people’s expressions, and minor events, the kinds of details that ordinarily pass unnoticed. That correspondence meant a great deal to him, not only because it kept his mother alive for him, but also because he discovered how much he enjoyed observing the world and preserving it in images.
* * *
Rolf Carlé’s cousins were being wooed by a pair of suitors who were direct descendants of La Colonia’s founders, the owners of a unique industry, elegant candles sold throughout the country and beyond. The factory still exists, and its fame is so widespread that on the occasion of the Pope’s visit, the government ordered a candle seven meters tall and two meters in diameter, to be kept burning in the Cathedral; not only was it molded to perfection, decorated with scenes of the Passion, and perfumed with the scent of pine, but beneath a burning sun it was transported by truck from the mountain to the capital without loss of its obelisk shape, scent of Christmas, or antique ivory tone. The young men’s conversation tended to center on candle molds, colors, and perfumes. At times they were rather boring, but both were handsome, quite prosperous, and permeated inside and out with the aroma of beeswax and scents. They were the best catch in La Colonia, and all the girls looked for excuses to go and buy candles wearing their filmiest dresses. Rupert, however, had sowed the seed of doubt in his daughters’ minds that those youths, bred through generations of interrelated families, had watered-down blood and might produce defective offspring. In candid opposition to theories of purity of race, he believed that crossbreeding gave the best progeny, and to prove it he liked to breed his registered dogs with mongrels. He obtained regrettable-looking mutts with unpredictable coats and configuration that no one wanted to buy, but also were much more intelligent than their pedigreed kindred, as was apparent when they learned to walk a tightrope and waltz on their hind legs. Better to look for sweethearts outside, Rupert used to say, defying his beloved Burgel, who wanted to hear nothing of such a possibility. The idea of seeing her girls married to dark men with the rhythm of the rumba in their hips seemed disgraceful to her. Don’t be dense, Burgel. You’re the one who’s dense—do you want mulatto grandchildren? The people of this country may not be blond, wife, but not all of them are black, either. To avoid further argument, both would sigh, with the name of Rolf Carlé on their lips, lamenting they did not have two nephews like him, one for each daughter, because despite the blood relationship and the precedent of Katharina’s mental retardation, they would swear that Rolf was not the bearer of deficient genes. In their minds he was the perfect son-in-law: hardworking, educated, cultivated, good-mannered—what more could they ask? For the moment, his youth was the only stumbling block, but everyone is cured of that.
The girls were slow to sympathize with their parents’ aspirations; they were true innocents, but once awakened to the idea, they left far behind the norms of modesty and discretion they had been raised by. They saw the fire in Rolf Carlé’s eyes; they watched him steal into their room like a wraith to paw furtively through their clothes, and they interpreted those actions as signs of love. They talked the matter over, contemplating the possibility of a platonic relationship between the youth and the two sisters, but whe
n they saw Rolf naked to the waist, his coppery hair tousled by the wind, sweating over the farm machinery or the carpentry tools, they began to change their minds, coming to the blissful conclusion that God had something obvious in mind when He created two sexes. The girls were cheerful by nature, and accustomed to sharing a bedroom, bathroom, clothes, and almost everything else, so they saw nothing wicked in sharing a lover. Besides, it was easy to see the excellent physical condition of the youth, who had, they were sure, sufficient strength and good will to carry out the heavy chores their father demanded of him and still have energy left over for a good romp with them. The matter was not that simple, however. The villagers were not sufficiently sophisticated to understand a triangular relationship, and even their father, though he might boast of modernity, would never tolerate such an arrangement. Not to speak of their mother: she would be quite capable of picking up a kitchen knife and sinking it into her nephew’s most vulnerable parts.