Frau Carlé succeeded in maintaining her serenity and her faith in God until the day her husband returned from the Ukraine to claim his rightful place in the household. Then her courage deserted her. She seemed to shrivel up, and she withdrew, engaged in an unending dialogue with herself. The fear that had always been present finally crippled her; she had no outlet for her hatred, and it destroyed her. Unshirking, she continued to carry out all her responsibilities, slaving from dawn to nightfall, tending to Katharina, serving the rest of her family, but she stopped smiling or speaking—and she did not return to church, because she was not willing to get down on her knees to a merciless God who had ignored her just prayers that Lukas Carlé burn in hell. She also gave up trying to protect Jochen and Rolf from their father’s excesses. The yellings, the beatings, the quarrels, all came to seem normal to her, and evoked no response. She sat and stared out the window with vacant eyes, escaping into a past where there was no Lukas Carlé and she was still a young girl untouched by affliction.
Carlé held the theory that human beings are divided into anvils and hammers: some are born to beat, others to be beaten. Naturally, he wanted his male children to be hammers. He would tolerate no weakness in them, especially in Jochen, on whom he experimented with his theories on teaching. He was infuriated when the boy’s stuttering only grew worse and he began to chew his fingernails. Desperate, Jochen would lie awake at night inventing ways to free himself once and for all from that torment, but with the light of day he would bow to reality, hang his head, and obey his father, never daring to stand up to him, even though he was twenty centimeters taller and as strong as a workhorse. His submissiveness lasted until one winter night when Lukas Carlé felt the mood coming over him to use the red boots. The boys were old enough to guess what that oppressive atmosphere meant, those strained looks, the silence heavy with portents. As he always did, Carlé ordered the children to leave them, to take Katharina and go to their room and not come out for any reason. Before they left, Jochen and Rolf glimpsed the terror in their mother’s eyes, and saw her shivering. Soon afterward, lying rigid in their beds, they heard the Victrola blaring at full volume.
“I’m going to go see what he’s doing to Mama,” Rolf announced when he could no longer bear the knowledge that just across the hall a nightmare was being enacted that had existed in this house for as long as he could remember.
“You stay there,” Jochen replied. “I’ll go. I’m the oldest.”
And, instead of huddling deeper under the covers as he had done all his life, he got out of bed, his mind a blank. With precise movements he pulled on his trousers, his jacket, and his wool cap, and laced up his heavy boots. Then he unlocked their door, crossed the hall, and tried to open the door to the living room, but the bolt was shot. With the same slow and deliberate motions he used when setting his traps or splitting wood, he drew back his leg and with one strong kick burst the metal bolt from the door. Rolf, barefoot and still in his pajamas, had followed his brother, and when the door flew open he saw his mother, totally naked, teetering in a pair of ridiculous red high-heeled boots. Enraged, Lukas Carlé roared at them to get out, but Jochen continued forward; he walked past the table, brushed aside the woman attempting to stop him, and approached his father with such purpose that the man took a hesitant step backward. Jochen’s fist struck his father’s chin with the strength of a hammer blow, slamming him onto the sideboard, which collapsed with a sound of splintering wood and shattering china. Rolf looked at the inert body on the floor, gulped, ran to his room, pulled a blanket from his bed, and brought it back to cover his mother’s nakedness.
“Goodbye, Mama,” said Jochen from the front door, not daring to look at her.
“Goodbye, Son,” she murmured, relieved that at least one of her sons would be safe.
The next morning, Rolf rolled up the legs of his brother’s long trousers and wore them to take his father to the hospital, where a doctor reset his jaw. For weeks Carlé could not speak and had to be fed liquid through a straw. With the departure of her elder son, Frau Carlé sank into depression, and Rolf had to face his detested and feared father alone.
Katharina had a face like a little squirrel and a soul innocent of memory. She was able to feed herself, ask when she needed to go to the bathroom, and run and hide under the table when her father arrived—but that was the extent of her capacity. Rolf used to look for little treasures to bring her: a beetle, a polished stone, a nut she opened carefully to extract the meat. She repaid him with absolute devotion. She waited for him all day, and when she heard his footsteps and saw his upside-down face peering between the table legs, she murmured like a sea gull. She spent hours beneath the huge table, protected by the rough wood, until her father left or fell asleep and someone rescued her. She became adjusted to life in her shelter, attuned to approaching or receding footsteps. Sometimes she did not want to come out even though there was no danger, and then her mother would pass her a bowl of food, and Rolf would get a coverlet and slip under the table with her to curl up for the night. Often when Lukas Carlé sat down to eat, his feet nudged his children—mute, motionless, hands tightly clasped—beneath the table, isolated in their refuge where sounds, odors, and alien presences were muffled by the illusion of being underwater. The brother and sister spent so much time there that Rolf Carlé never forgot the milky light beneath the tablecloth, and many years later, on the other side of the world, he awakened one morning weeping under the white mosquito netting where he slept with the woman he loved.
THREE
One night at Christmas when I was six years old, my mother swallowed a chicken bone. The Professor, eternally absorbed in his insatiable thirst for knowledge, never observed that holiday—or any other—but the household servants always celebrated Christmas Eve. They set up a crèche with crude clay figures in the kitchen; then everyone would sing Christmas carols and give me a present. Several days in advance they prepared a dish that had originally been concocted by slaves. In colonial times, the prosperous families gathered on December 24 around a great table. The remains of the masters’ banquet made their way into the bowls of the servants, who chopped all the leftovers, rolled them in cornmeal dough and banana leaves, and boiled them in great kettles, with such delicious results that the recipe was handed down through the centuries and is still repeated every year. Today, however, the dish is not made from the table scraps of the masters; each ingredient must be cooked separately in a tedious and time-consuming process. In the back patio, Professor Jones’s servants raised chickens, turkeys, and a pig they fattened all year for that one occasion of gluttony. A week before the event, they began forcing nuts and rum down the gullets of the fowls and feeding the pig liters of milk with brown sugar and spices so the animals would be juicy and tender. While the women steamed the banana leaves and readied the pots and braziers, the men slaughtered the fowls and the pig in an orgy of blood, feathers, and squeals, until everyone was drunk from liquor and death, and sated from tasting the meat, swigging the thick broth in the kettles, and singing lively tunes to the Baby Jesus until they were hoarse. Meanwhile, in the other wing of the house, the Professor lived a day like any other, not even realizing it was Christmas. The fateful bone passed undetected in a morsel of dough, and my mother did not feel it until it lodged in her throat. After a few hours she began to spit blood, and three days later she slipped away without any fuss, just as she had lived. I was at her side, and I have never forgotten that moment, because from that day I have had to sharpen my perception in order not to lose her among the shadows-of-no-return where disembodied spirits go to rest.
She did not want to frighten me, so she died without fear. Perhaps the chicken bone severed something vital and she bled internally, I do not know. When she realized that her life was draining away, she took me with her to our room off the patio, to be together until the end. Slowly, not to hasten death, she washed herself with soap and water to get rid of the odor of musk that was beginning to disturb he
r. She combed her long hair, put on a white petticoat she had sewn during the hours of siesta, and lay down on the same straw mattress where she and a snakebitten Indian had conceived me. Although I did not understand then the significance of that ritual, I watched with such attention that I still remember her every move.
“There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,” my mother explained shortly before she left me. “If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”
“I will remember you,” I promised.
“Now go call your godmother.”
I went to look for the cook, the enormous mulatto woman who had helped me into the world and who at the proper time had carried me to be christened.
“Take good care of my girl, madrina. I’m leaving her in your hands,” my mother said, discreetly wiping away the thread of blood trickling down her chin. Then she took my hand and, with her eyes, kept telling me how much she loved me, until a fog clouded her gaze and life faded from her body without a sound. For a few seconds I thought I saw something translucent floating in the motionless air of the room, flooding it with blue radiance and perfuming it with a breath of musk, but then everything was normal again, the air merely air, the light yellow, the smell the simple smell of every day. I took my mother’s face in my hands and moved it back and forth, calling “Mama, Mama,” stricken by the silence that had settled between us.
“Everyone dies, it’s not so important,” my madrina said, cutting off my mother’s long hair with three clicks of the scissors, planning to sell it later in a wig shop. “We need to get her out of here before the patrón discovers her and makes me bring her to the laboratory.”
I picked up the braid of hair, wrapped it around my neck, and huddled in a corner with my head between my knees; I did not cry, because I still did not realize the magnitude of my loss. I stayed there for hours, perhaps all night, until two men came in, wrapped the body in the bed’s only cover, and carried it away without a word. Then the room was pervaded by unremitting emptiness.
After the modest funeral coach had left, my madrina came to look for me. She had to strike a match to see me because the room was in shadows; the light bulb had burned out and dawn seemed to have stopped at the threshold. She found me in a little bundle on the floor. She called me twice by name, to bring me back to reality: Eva Luna . . . Eva Luna. In the flickering flame of the match, I saw large feet in house slippers and the hem of a cotton dress. I looked up and met her moist eyes. She smiled in the instant the uncertain spark died out; then I felt her bend over in the darkness. She picked me up in her stout arms, settled me on her lap, and began to rock me, humming some soft African lament to put me to sleep.
* * *
“If you were a boy, you could go to school and then study to be a lawyer and provide for me in my old age. Those sticky-fingered lawyers are the ones who make the money. They sure know how to keep things in a muddle. Muddy waters,” she used to say, “means money in their pockets.”
She believed that men had it best; even the lowest good-for-nothing had a wife to boss around. And years later I reached the conclusion that she may have been right, although I still cannot imagine myself in a man’s body, with hair on my face, a tendency to order people around, and something unmanageable below my navel that, to be perfectly frank, I would not know exactly where to put. In her way, my madrina was fond of me, and if she never showed it, it was because she thought she had to be strict, and because she lost her sanity at an early age. In those days she was not the ruin she is today. She was an arrogant dark-skinned woman with generous breasts, a well-defined waist, and hips that bulged like a tabletop under her skirts. When she went out on the street, men turned to stare; they shouted indecent propositions at her, and tried to pinch her bottom. She did not shy away, but rewarded them with a smack of her pocketbook—What you think you’re doin’, you black devil, you?—and then she would laugh and show her gold tooth. She bathed every night standing in a tub splashing water over herself from a pitcher and scrubbing with a soapy rag. She changed her blouse twice a day, sprinkled herself with rose water, washed her hair with egg, and brushed her teeth with salt to make them shine. She had a strong sweetish odor that all her rose water and soap could not subdue, an odor I loved because it made me think of warm custard. I used to help her with her bath, splashing water on her back, enraptured at the sight of that dark body with the mulberry teats, the pubis shadowed by kinky fuzz, the buttocks as stout as the overstuffed armchair that cushioned Professor Jones. She would stroke her body with the rag, and smile, proud of her voluminous flesh. She walked with defiant grace, head high, to the rhythm of the secret music she carried inside. Everything else about her was coarse, even her laughter and her tears. She became angry at the drop of a pin, and would shake her fist in the air and swing at anything in reach; if one of those swipes landed on me, it sounded like cannon shot. Once, not meaning to, she burst one of my eardrums. In spite of the mummies, which she did not like at all, she worked as the Professor’s cook for many years, earning a miserable wage and spending most of it on tobacco and rum. She looked after me because she had accepted a responsibility more sacred than blood ties. Anyone who neglects a godchild is damned to hell, she used to say. It’s worse than abandoning your own child. It’s my obligation to raise you to be good and clean and hardworking, because I will have to answer for you on Judgment Day. My mother had not believed in original sin, and had not thought it necessary to baptize me, but my godmother had insisted with unyielding stubbornness. All right, comadre, Consuelo had finally agreed. You do whatever you want. Just don’t change the name I chose for her. For three months my madrina went without smoking or drinking, saving every coin, and on the designated day she bought me a strawberry-colored organdy dress, tied a ribbon on the four straggly hairs that crowned my head, sprinkled me with her rose water, and bore me off to church. I have a photograph from the day of my baptism; I was done up like a happy little birthday present. She did not have enough money, so she paid for the service with a thorough cleaning of the church—from sweeping the floors and waxing the wooden benches to polishing the altar ornaments with lime. That is how I came to have a little rich girl’s baptism, with all the proper pomp and ceremony.
“If it weren’t for me, you’d still be a pagan. Children who die without the sacraments go to limbo and stay there forever,” my madrina always reminded me. “In my place, anyone else would have sold you. It’s easy to place girls with light eyes. I’ve heard the gringos buy them and take them to their country. But I made a promise to your mother, and if I don’t fulfill it, I’ll stew in hell!”
For her, the boundaries between good and evil were very precise, and she was ready to save me from sin if she had to beat me to do it. That was the only way she knew, because that was how she had learned. The idea that play and tenderness are good for children is a modern discovery: it never entered her mind. She tried to teach me to be quick about my work and not waste time in daydreams. She hated wandering minds and slow feet; she wanted to see me run when she gave an order. Your head’s full of smoke and your legs are full of sand, she used to say, and she would rub my legs with Scott’s Emulsion, a cheap but famous liniment made from cod-liver oil, which, according to the advertisement, when it came to tonics was equal to the philosopher’s stone.
My madrina’s brain was slightly addled from rum. She believed in all the Catholic saints, some saints of African origin, and still others of her own invention. Before a small altar in her room she had aligned holy water, voodoo fetishes, a photograph of her dead father, and a bust she thought was St. Christopher but was, I later discovered, Beethoven—although I have never told her because he is the most miraculous figure on her altar. She carried on a continuous conversation with her deities in a colloquial yet proud tone, asking them for insignificant favors; later, when she became a fan of the telephone, she would call them in heaven, interpreting the hum of the receiver as parables from her divine
respondents. She believed that was how she received instructions from the heavenly court concerning even the most trivial matters. She was devoted to St. Benedict, a handsome blond high-living man women could not leave alone, who stood in the fire until he crackled like firewood and only then could adore God and work his miracles in peace, without a passel of panting women clinging to his robes. He was the one she prayed to for relief from a hangover. She was an expert on the subject of torture and gruesome deaths; she knew how every martyr and virgin in the book of Catholic saints had died, and was always eager to tell me about them. I listened with morbid terror, begging in each telling for new particulars. The martyrdom of Santa Lucia was my favorite. I wanted to hear it over and over, in minute detail: why Lucia rejected the emperor who loved her; how they tore out her eyes; whether it was true that her eyeballs had shot a beam of light that blinded the emperor, and that she grew two splendid new blue eyes much more beautiful than the ones she had lost.