“Sit down and let me tell you what it is,” Clara said.
“Don’t worry, Mama, I’ve already had it once a month for the past year,” her daughter said, laughing.
The relationship between them underwent no major changes with the girl’s development, because it was based on the solid principle of mutual acceptance and the ability to laugh together at almost everything.
That year summer arrived early, with a sultry heat that covered the city with its nightmare glare. The family decided to advance their departure for Tres Marías by two weeks. As always, Blanca eagerly awaited the moment of seeing Pedro Tercero again, and as she had every year, the first thing she did on climbing down from the coach was run to look for him with her eyes glued to where she knew he would be standing. She saw his hidden shadow in the doorway and jumped from the vehicle, hurtling toward him with the eagerness of all her months of anticipation, but to her surprise the boy turned on his heel and fled.
All that afternoon Blanca went to each of their special meeting spots, asking for him, shouting his name, even looking for him at the house of old Pedro García, his grandfather. Finally at sundown she went to bed defeated, without eating supper. In her huge brass bed, shocked and hurt, she buried her face in the pillow and cried inconsolably. Nana brought her a glass of milk and honey, understanding in a flash the reason for her grief.
“It’s about time!” she said with a twisted smile. “You’re too old to be playing with that flea-ridden brat.”
Half an hour later, her mother came in to kiss her good night and found her sobbing the last gasps of a melodramatic sorrow. For a moment Clara ceased to be a distracted angel and came to stand beside a simple mortal who suffered, at fourteen, the first torments of love. She wanted to inquire, but Blanca was very proud or already too much of a woman and would tell her nothing, so Clara just stood beside her bed and caressed her till she calmed down.
That night Blanca slept fitfully and woke at dawn surrounded by the shadows of her large bedroom. She lay in bed staring up at the coffered ceiling until she heard the first rooster crow. Then she got up, opened the curtains, and let the soft morning light and the first sounds of the world enter the room. She walked over to the mirror on the wardrobe and stared at herself for a long time. She took off her nightgown and, for the first time in her life looked at her body in detail, and as she did so she realized that it was because of all these changes that her friend had run away. She smiled a new, delicate smile, the smile of a woman. She put on her old clothes from the preceding summer, which were almost too small, wrapped herself in a shawl, and tiptoed out so as not to wake the rest of the family. Outside, the fields were shaking off their sleep and the first rays of sunlight were cutting the peaks of the cordillera like the thrusts of a saber, warming up the earth and evaporating the dew into a fine white foam that blurred the edges of things and turned the landscape into an enchanted dream. Blanca set off in the direction of the river. Everything was still quiet. Her footsteps crushed the fallen leaves and the dry branches, producing a light crunching sound, the only noise in that vast sleeping space. She felt that the shaggy meadows, the golden wheatfields, and the far-off purple mountains disappearing in the clear morning sky were part of some ancient memory, something she had seen before exactly like this, as if she had already lived this moment in some previous life. The delicate rain of the night had soaked the earth and trees, and her clothing felt slightly damp, her shoes cold. She inhaled the perfume of the drenched earth, the rotten leaves, and the humus, which awakened an unknown pleasure in all her senses.
Blanca arrived at the river and found her childhood friend sitting at the spot where they had met so many times. That year Pedro Tercero had not grown as much as she had; he was the same thin, dark child as always, with the same protruding belly and the old man’s expression in his black eyes. When he saw her he stood up, and she guessed that she was at least half a head taller than he. They looked at each other disconcertedly, feeling for the first time in their lives that they were practically strangers. For what seemed like an infinite time they stood immobile, adjusting to the changes and the new distances, but then a sparrow trilled and everything reverted to the way it had been the preceding summer. Once again, they were two children running, hugging, laughing, falling to the ground and rolling over and over, crashing against the pebbles, murmuring each other’s names, elated to be back together. Finally they calmed down. Her hair was full of dry leaves, which he removed one by one.
“Come here, I want to show you something,” said Pedro Tercero.
He took her by the hand. They walked along savoring that reawakening of the world, dragging their feet through the mud, picking tender green stalks to suck out their sap, looking at each other and smiling, without speaking, until they reached a distant field. The sun was just appearing over the volcano, but the day had not settled in yet and the earth was still yawning. Pedro told her to throw herself flat on the ground and be very quiet. They crawled along, coming close to some clumps of underbrush, made a short detour, and suddenly Blanca saw it. It was a beautiful bay mare in the process of giving birth alone on the hillside. The children did not move, trying to keep even their breath silent; they watched her pant and push until they saw the colt’s head appear and then, after a while, the rest of its body. The little animal fell to the ground and the mother began to lick it, leaving it as clean and shiny as waxed wood, coaxing it with her muzzle to stand up. The colt tried to get up on its feet, but its fragile newborn legs folded under it and it fell down, looking helplessly up at its mother who neighed a greeting to the morning sun. Blanca felt her breast shoot with joy, and tears came to her eyes.
“When I grow up, I’m going to marry you and we’re going to live here in Tres Marías,” she whispered.
Pedro stared at her with his sad old man’s look and shook his head. He was still much more of a child than she, but he already knew his place in the world. He also knew that he would love this girl as long as he lived, that this dawn would live in his memory, and that it would be the last thing he would see before he died.
They spent that summer oscillating between childhood, which still held them in its clasp, and their awakening as man and woman. There were times when they ran like little children, stirring up the chickens and exciting the cows, drinking their fill of fresh milk and winding up with foam mustaches, stealing fresh-baked bread straight from the oven and clambering up trees to build secret houses. At other times they hid in the forest’s thickest, most secret recesses, making beds of leaves and pretending they were married, caressing each other until they fell asleep exhausted. They were still innocent enough to remove their clothes without a trace of curiosity and swim naked in the river, as they always had, diving into the cold water and letting the current pull them down against the shiny stones. But there were certain things they could no longer share. They learned to feel shame in each other’s presence. They no longer competed to see who could make the biggest puddle when they urinated, and Blanca did not tell him of the dark matter that stained her underwear once a month. Without anyone telling them, they realized that they could not act so freely in front of others. When Blanca dressed up as a young lady and sat on the terrace sipping lemonade with her family each afternoon, Pedro Tercero would watch her from afar, without coming closer. They began to hide when they wanted to play. They stopped walking hand in hand within sight of the adults, and they ignored each other so as not to attract attention. Nana gave a sigh of relief, but Clara started watching them more carefully.
The vacation was over and the Truebas returned to the city laden with jars of candy, preserves, boxes of fruit, cheese, pickled chicken and rabbit, and baskets full of eggs. While everything was being packed away in the cars that would take them to the train, Blanca and Pedro Tercero hid in the granary to say their goodbyes. In those three months they had come to love each other with the ecstatic passion that would torment them for the rest of their liv
es. With time their love became more persistent and invulnerable, but it already had the depth and certainty that characterized it later on. Atop a pile of grain, breathing in the pungent dust of the granary in the diffuse, golden morning light that filtered through the chinks, they kissed, licked, bit, and sucked each other, sobbed and drank each other’s tears, swore eternal love and drew up a secret code that would allow them to communicate during the coming months of separation.
* * *
Everyone who witnessed the moment agrees that it was almost eight o’clock at night when Férula appeared without the slightest warning. They all saw her in her starched blouse, with her ring of keys at her waist and her old maid’s bun, exactly as they had always seen her in the house. She entered the dining room just as Esteban was beginning to carve the roast, and they recognized her immediately, even though it had been six years since they last saw her and she looked very pale and a great deal older. It was a Saturday and the twins, Jaime and Nicolás, had come home from school for the weekend, so they too were at the table. Their testimony is very important, because they were the only members of the family who lived completely removed from the three-legged table, protected from magic and spiritualism by their rigid English boarding school. First they felt a sudden draft in the dining room and Clara ordered the windows shut because she thought it was the wind. Then they heard the tinkling of the keys and the door burst open and Férula appeared, silent and with a distant expression on her face, at the exact same moment that Nana came in from the kitchen carrying the salad platter. Esteban Trueba stopped with the carving knife and fork suspended in midair, paralyzed with surprise, and the three children cried, “Aunt Férula!” almost in unison. Blanca managed to rise to her feet to greet her, but Clara, who was seated beside her, reached out her hand and held her back. Clara was actually the only one to realize on first glance what was going on, despite the fact that nothing in her sister-in-law’s appearance in any way betrayed her state. Férula stopped three feet from the table, looked at everyone with her empty, indifferent eyes, and advanced toward Clara, who stood up but made no effort to go any closer, and only closing her eyes and breathing rapidly as if she were about to have one of her asthma attacks. Férula approached her, put a hand on each shoulder, and kissed her on the forehead. All that could be heard in the dining room was Clara’s labored breathing and the metallic clang of the keys at Férula’s waist. After kissing her sister-in-law, Férula walked around her and went out the way she had come in, closing the door gently behind her. The family sat frozen in the dining room, as if they were in the middle of a nightmare. Suddenly Nana began to shake so hard that the salad spoons fell off the platter. The sound of the silver as it hit the floor made everybody jump. Clara opened her eyes. She was still having difficulty breathing, and tears were running down her cheeks and neck, staining her blouse.
“Férula is dead,” she announced.
Esteban Trueba dropped the carving implements on the tablecloth and ran out of the room and into the street, calling his sister’s name into the night, but there was no trace of her. Meanwhile Clara ordered one of the servants to fetch their coats, and by the time her husband returned, she was halfway into hers and holding the car keys in her hand.
“Let’s go to Father Antonio,” she said.
They rode in silence. Esteban was at the wheel, his heart contracted, as they searched for Father Antonio’s old church in the poor quarters of the city where he hadn’t been in years. The priest was sewing a button on his threadbare cassock when they arrived with the news of Férula’s death.
“But that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. “I was with her two days ago and she was in good spirits.”
“Please, Father, take us to her house,” Clara begged. “I know what I’m saying. She’s dead.”
At Clara’s insistence, Father Antonio accompanied them. He led Esteban down one narrow street after another until they came to where Férula lived. Through all those years of solitude she had lived in one of the tenements where she used to say the rosary against the wishes of its intended beneficiaries in the days of her youth. Esteban had to park the car several blocks away, because the streets had got narrower and narrower until they were only for bicycles and people on foot. They walked deeper into the neighborhood, avoiding the puddles of dirty water that overflowed from the gutters and dodging the piles of garbage in which cats were digging like silent shadows. The tenement was a long passageway of ruined houses, all exactly the same: small, impoverished dwellings built of cement, each with a single door and two windows. They were painted in drab colors and their peeling walls, half eaten by the damp, were linked across the narrow passageway by wires hung from side to side, which by day were used for laundry but this late at night swung empty in the dark. In the center of the little alley there was a single fountain, which was the only source of water for all the families who lived there, and only two lanterns lit the way between the houses. Father Antonio greeted an old woman who was standing by the fountain waiting for her pail to fill with the pathetic output of the faucet.
“Have you seen Señorita Férula?” he asked her.
“She should be in her house, Father. I haven’t seen her these past few days,” the old woman replied.
Father Antonio pointed to one of the houses. It was just like all the others, sad, flayed, and dirty, but there were two pots hanging by the door in which grew a few small tufts of geraniums, the flower of the poor. The priest knocked at the door.
“Go on in!” the old woman shouted from the fountain. “The señorita never locks her door. There’s nothing to steal in there anyway!”
Esteban Trueba called his sister’s name, but he didn’t dare go in. Clara was the first one across the threshold. It was dark inside and they were immediately met by the unmistakable aroma of lavender and lemon. Father Antonio lit a match. The weak flame cut a circle of light in the shadows, but before they could take a single step the match went out.
“Wait here,” he said. “I know the house.”
He groped his way, and a moment later lit a candle. His figure stood out grotesquely and his face, deformed by the light from below, floated halfway to the ceiling, while his giant shadow danced against the walls. Clara described this scene in her notebooks that bore witness to life in minute detail: the two dark rooms, their walls stained with damp, the small dirty bathroom without running water, the kitchen in which there were only a few dry crusts of bread and a jar with a little tea in it. The rest of Férula’s quarters seemed to Clara to fit precisely with the nightmare that had begun when her sister-in-law appeared in the dining room of the big house on the corner to say goodbye. It reminded her of a used-clothing store or the dressing room of a struggling theater company. Hanging from a few nails on the wall were old dresses, feather boas, squalid bits of fur, imitation rhinestone necklaces, hats that had gone out of style fifty years before, stained petticoats with threadbare lace, dresses that were once flashy and whose sheen had long since disappeared, inexplicable admirals’ jackets and bishops’ chasubles, all thrown together in grotesque fraternity, in which the dust of years had made its nest. On the floor there was a jumble of satin shoes, debutante’s handbags, belts studded with fake stones, suspenders, and even the shining sword of a military cadet. She saw dreary wigs, pots of rouge, empty flasks, and an unruly collection of impossible objects scattered everywhere.
A narrow door divided the only two rooms of the house. In the other room, Férula lay on the bed. Festooned like an Austrian queen, she wore a moth-eaten velvet dress and petticoats of yellow taffeta. On her head, firmly jammed down around her ears, shone the incredible curly wig of an opera star. No one was with her, no one had known she was dying, and they calculated that she must have been dead for many hours, because the mice were already beginning to nibble her feet and eat her fingers. She was magnificent in her queenly desolation, and on her face was an expression of sweetness and serenity she never had in her grievous l
ife.
“She liked to wear used clothing that she bought in secondhand shops or picked from the garbage,” explained Father Antonio. “She would make herself up and put on these wigs, but she never hurt a fly. On the contrary, until her last she always said the rosary for the salvation of sinners.”
“Leave me alone with her,” Clara said firmly.
The two men went out into the alleyway, where neighbors were beginning to gather. Clara took off her white wool coat and rolled up her sleeves. She went up to her sister-in-law, gently removed the wig, and saw that she was nearly bald: aged and helpless. She kissed her on the forehead, just as Férula had kissed her only a few hours earlier in her own dining room, and then she calmly proceeded to improvise the rites of the dead. She undressed her, washed her, meticulously soaping her without missing a single crevice, rubbed her with cologne, dusted her with powder, lovingly brushed her four remaining strands of hair, dressed her in the most eccentric and elegant rags that she could find, and put back her soprano’s wig, returning to her in death the infinite attentions that Férula had given her in life. While she worked, fighting off her asthma, she told her about Blanca, who was a young lady now, about the twins, about the big house on the corner, and about the country, “and if you only knew how much we missed you, Férula, how I’ve needed your help to look after the family, you know I’m no good at domestic matters, the boys are terrible but Blanca is a lovely child, and the hydrangeas that you planted with your own two hands in Tres Marías turned out beautiful, some are blue because I put some copper coins in the fertilizer, it’s a secret of nature, and every time I arrange them in a vase I think of you, but I also think of you when there aren’t any hydrangeas, I always think of you, Férula, because the truth is that since you left me no one has ever loved me as you did.”