“I have a hunch it isn’t going to take off,” said Clara without looking up from her knitting.
And she was right. At the last minute a truckful of policemen drove up beside the public park that Nicolás had chosen as his airfield. They demanded a city permit, which, of course, he did not have. Nor was he able to obtain one. He spent four days rushing from one office to the next, in a series of desperate maneuvers that all ran up against the same wall of bureaucratic incomprehension. He never found out that behind the police truck and the interminable paperwork was his father’s influence, because his father was damned if he was going to permit such an adventure. Weary of fighting the timidity of the soda company and the aerial bureaucracy, Nicolás became convinced that the balloon would never rise, unless he did it surreptitiously, which was impossible given the dimensions of his ship. He suffered an anxiety attack, from which his mother rescued him by suggesting that in order not to lose his investment he try to think of some practical use for the material he had used to build his balloon. It was then that Nicolás had the idea of the sandwich factory. His plan was to make chicken sandwiches, wrap them in the pieces of the balloon’s skin, and sell them to office workers. The large kitchen of his house seemed to him ideal for this purpose. The gardens soon filled with birds whose legs had been laced together, waiting their turn to be decapitated by the two butchers specially hired for that purpose. The courtyard filled with feathers and the Olympian statues were splattered with blood. The smell of consommé had made everyone nauseated, and the table used to gut the birds had begun to fill the whole neighborhood with flies when Clara brought an end to the slaughter with an attack of nerves that almost thrust her back to her days of muteness. This second commercial failure was less important to Nicolás, whose stomach and conscience had also been upset by the slaughter. He resigned himself to losing whatever he had invested in these schemes and locked himself in his room to plan new ways to make money and amuse himself.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen Amanda around here,” Jaime said when he could no longer stand the impatience of his heart.
Then Nicolás remembered Amanda and realized that he had not seen her in the house for at least three weeks and that she had not been present at either the failed balloon attempt or the inauguration of the domestic production of bread with chicken. He went to ask Clara, but his mother also knew nothing of the girl and had begun to forget her. She had been forced to accept the fact that her house was now a way station and, as she put it, she did not have soul enough to worry about all the people who were absent. Nicolás decided to go look for her, because he realized that he missed the anxious butterfly of her presence and her silent, suffocating embraces in the empty rooms of the big house on the corner, where they thrashed about like puppies every time Clara let her guard down and Miguel was off playing or asleep in some corner.
The pension where Amanda lived with her little brother turned out to be a moldering old house that fifty years earlier had probably boasted some ostentatious splendor but had lost it as the city gradually expanded to the foothills of the cordillera. At first it had been occupied by Arab merchants who encrusted it with pink friezes; later, when the Arabs moved their business to the Turkish Quarter, the owner had turned it into a boardinghouse, subdividing it into poorly lit, sad, uncomfortable, and awkwardly constructed rooms for tenants of little means. It had an impossible labyrinth of dark, narrow halls, in which the stink of cauliflower soup and cabbage stew reigned eternally. The owner of the place came out to open the door in person. She was an immense mountain of a woman endowed with a majestic triple chin and tiny Oriental eyes sunk in folds congealed with grease; she wore rings on all her fingers, and used the affected gestures of a novice.
“We don’t accept visitors of the opposite sex,” she told Nicolás.
But Nicolás unfurled his irresistible seducer’s smile, kissed her on the hand without jumping back at the sight of her filthy chipped vermilion fingernails, went into ecstasies over her rings, and passed himself off as a first cousin of Amanda’s until the woman, defeated and twisting her mouth into flirtatious smiles and elephantine contortions, led him up the dusty stairs to the third floor and pointed to Amanda’s door. Nicolás found the young girl in her bed, wrapped in a discolored shawl, playing checkers with her brother Miguel. She was so green and slight that it was hard for him to recognize her. Amanda stared at him without smiling and made no sign of welcome. Miguel, however, stood in front of him with his hands on his hips.
“You finally came,” the child said.
Nicolás walked to the bed and tried to recall the dark, supple Amanda, the fruity, sinuous Amanda of their encounters in the darkness of the locked rooms, but between the caked wool of the shawl and the gray sheets there was a strange woman with huge, lost eyes who was staring at him with inexplicable harshness. “Amanda,” he murmured, taking her by the hand. Without its silver rings and bracelets, the hand looked as weak as the leg of a dying bird. Amanda called her brother. Miguel went to the bed and she whispered something in his ear. The boy walked slowly toward the door. From the threshold he shot Nicolás a furious departing look and walked out, shutting the door noiselessly behind him.
“Forgive me, Amanda,” Nicolás said. “I was very busy. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”
“I’m not sick,” she replied. “I’m pregnant.”
That word hit Nicolás like a slap. He stepped back until he felt the glass of the window behind his shoulders. From the very first time he had undressed Amanda, fumbling his way in the darkness, tangled in the rags of her existentialist disguise, trembling with anticipation as he felt the protuberances and interstices that he had so often imagined without ever knowing them in all their splendid nakedness, he had assumed that she had sufficient experience to avoid making him a father at twenty-one and herself an unwed mother at twenty-five. Amanda had had other loves before, and had been the first person to speak to him of free love. She insisted on her unequivocal determination for them to remain together only so long as they were friends, without constraints or promises for the future, just like Sartre and Beauvoir. This agreement, which to Nicolás had first seemed like a shocking sign of coldness and distance, turned out to be to his advantage. Relaxed and happy as he was about everything in life, he let himself fall in love without thinking of the consequences.
“Now what are we going to do!” he exclaimed.
“An abortion, of course,” she replied.
A wave of relief broke over Nicolás. He had sidestepped the abyss yet one more time. As always happened when he was playing alongside a precipice, someone stronger than himself had risen up beside him to take charge of things—just like the times at school when he would taunt the other boys until they jumped on top of him and then, at the very last possible minute, when he was paralyzed with terror, Jaime would appear and stand in front of him, changing his panic to euphoria and allowing him to run for cover behind the pillars of the courtyard and shout insults from his refuge, while his brother bled from his nose and delivered punches with the silent tenacity of a machine. Now Amanda was taking responsibility for him.
“We can get married, Amanda—if—you want,” he stammered to save face.
“No!” she answered without hesitation. “I don’t love you enough for that, Nicolás.”
His feelings immediately swerved, for that possibility had not occurred to him. Up until that point he had never felt rejected or abandoned, and in each of his affairs he had had to resort to all his tact to disengage himself without hurting the girl. He thought about the difficult situation Amanda now faced—poor, alone, and expecting a child. One word from him could change her fate, converting her into the respectable wife of a Trueba. These calculations flashed through his mind in a fraction of a second, but he immediately felt ashamed, and blushed at catching himself in such thoughts. Suddenly, Amanda looked magnificent to him. He remembered all the wonderful moments they had
shared, the times they had lain on the floor smoking the same pipe to get high together, laughing at that grass that tasted like dry dung and had hardly any hallucinogenic effect but did activate the power of suggestion; the yoga exercises and meditations they had performed as a couple, seated face to face in complete relaxation, staring into each other’s eyes and murmuring Sanskrit words that could send them all the way to nirvana but that generally had the opposite effect, and they would wind up slipping out of other people’s sight, stretched out beneath the tall reeds in the garden, desperately making love; the books they had read by candlelight, drowning in passion and smoke; the interminable gatherings during which they discussed the pessimistic postwar philosophers or concentrated on trying to move the three-legged table—two taps for yes, three for no—while Clara laughed at them. He fell to his knees beside the bed, begging Amanda not to leave him, to forgive him, to let them go on as if nothing had happened, because this was simply an unfortunate accident that could not affect the untouchable essence of their relationship. But she seemed not to listen. She was caressing his hair with a maternal, distracted air.
“It’s no use, Nicolás,” she said. “Can’t you see my soul is very old and you’re still a child? You’ll always be a child.”
They continued to caress each other without desire, torturing themselves with pleas and memories. They were savoring the bitterness of a parting that they could already sense but could still confuse with a reconciliation. She got up from bed to prepare them both some tea, and Nicolás saw that she was using an old slip as a nightgown. She had lost weight, and her skinny calves invited his pity. She walked barefoot in the room, with the shawl over her shoulders and her hair unkempt, hovering over the little kerosene stove she kept perched on the single table that served as her diningroom table, her desk, and her kitchen table. He saw the disorder Amanda lived in and realized that until then he had known almost nothing about her. He had assumed that she had no other family besides her brother, and that she lived on a small salary, but he had never imagined her actual situation. Poverty to him was an abstract, distant concept, applicable to the tenants at Tres Marías and the indigent patients his brother Jaime helped; he had never had any direct contact with it himself. Amanda, his Amanda so close and so well known, suddenly became a stranger. He glanced at her clothes, which looked like the garments of a queen when she had them on, but now, hanging from their nails on the wall, seemed like the sad rags of a beggar. He looked at her toothbrush in a glass above the rusty sink, Miguel’s school shoes that had been blackened and reblackened so many times they had lost their shape, at the old typewriter beside the stove, the books lying among the coffee cups, the broken window patched with newspaper. It was another world. A world whose existence he had not even suspected. Until that moment there had been a dividing line on one side of which stood the solemn poor and on the other people like himself, among whom he had classed Amanda. He knew nothing of that silent middle class that struggled between genteel poverty and the impossible desire of emulating the golden canaille to which he himself belonged. He felt confused and embarrassed, thinking of the many occasions in the past when she must have had to use witchcraft to keep her poverty from being noticed at the Truebas’ and he, in his complete innocence, hadn’t helped her. He remembered his father’s stories about his poor childhood and how at Nicolás’s age he was already out working to support his mother and sister. For the first time in his life, he managed to link those didactic anecdotes with a reality he could see. He thought Amanda’s life must be like that.
They shared a cup of tea sitting on the bed, because there was only one chair. Amanda told him about her past, her family, her alcoholic father who had been a teacher in one of the northern provinces, her sad, overworked mother who had to support six children and how, as soon as she was able to stand on her own two feet, she had run away from home. She had reached the capital when she was only fifteen, arriving at the house of a generous godmother who helped her for a while. Later, when her mother died, she had gone to bury her and bring back Miguel, who was still in diapers. She had been his mother ever since. She had no idea what had become of her father and her other brothers and sisters. Nicolás felt a rising desire to protect her and take care of her, to make up for everything. He had never loved her more.
At dusk Miguel arrived with ruddy cheeks, squirming in silent amusement to hide the present he was holding behind his back. It was a paper sack of bread for his sister. He put it on the bed, kissed her tenderly, smoothed her hair with his tiny hand, and straightened the pillows. Nicolás shuddered. There was more tenderness and love in the gestures of that little boy than in all the caresses he had showered on any woman in his life. Only then did he understand what Amanda had meant. “I have a lot to learn,” he murmured. He leaned his forehead against the greasy pane of the window, wondering whether he would ever be able to give as much as he hoped to receive.
“How are we going to do it?” he asked, not daring to pronounce the terrible word.
“Ask your brother Jaime for help,” Amanda suggested.
* * *
Jaime received his brother in his tunnel of books, lying on his cot in the light of the solitary bulb that hung directly above him from the ceiling. He was reading the love sonnets of the Poet, who was by now a world-renowed figure, as Clara had predicted the first time she heard him recite in his telluric voice at one of her literary soirées. He wondered whether the sonnets might not have been inspired by Amanda’s presence in the Trueba garden, where the Poet liked to sit at teatime and talk about songs of despair, during the period when he had been an assiduous visitor at the big house on the corner. He was surprised to see Nicolás, because since they had finished school, he and his brother had daily grown further apart. Most recently they had had nothing to say to each other, and on the rare occasions when they met on the doorstep, they had merely exchanged nods. Jaime had given up on his idea of drawing Nicolás into transcendental matters of existence.
He still took his brother’s frivolous activities as a personal affront, for he could not accept the fact that Nicolás could waste his time and energy on balloon rides and the slaughter of chickens when there was so much work to be done in the Misericordia District. But he no longer tried to drag him to the hospital to make him look at suffering up close, hoping against hope that the pain of others might move his bird-of-passage heart, and he had stopped inviting him to the Socialist meetings at Pedro Tercero García’s house, on the last street of the working-class district, where they all gathered every Thursday under the eye of the police. Nicolás made fun of his social concerns, arguing that only a fool with the calling of an apostle would go out into the world seeking misery and ugliness with the stump of a candle. Now Jaime’s brother stood before him, staring at him with the guilty, pleading look he had used so many times to enlist his affection.
“Amanda’s pregnant,” Nicolás said without preamble.
He had to repeat himself, because Jaime did not move, remaining as unresponsive as ever, without the slightest gesture to show that he had heard his brother’s words. But inside his frustration was choking him. Silently, he called Amanda’s name, clutching the sweet echo of the word in order not to lose control. So fierce was his need to hold on to his illusions that he had managed to convince himself that the love between Amanda and his brother was completely juvenile and limited to innocent strolls on which they walked hand in hand, to discussions over a bottle of absinthe, and to the few fleeting kisses he had glimpsed over the years.
He had refused to admit the painful truth that was now confronting him.
“Don’t tell me about it. It’s no business of mine,” he replied as soon as he was able to speak.
Nicolás collapsed onto the end of the bed, burying his face in his hands.
“Please, you’ve got to help her!” he begged.
Jaime closed his eyes and inhaled with difficulty, forcing himself to contain the wild feelings t
hat made him want to kill his brother, to run and marry Amanda himself, to weep in impotence and disappointment. He had an image of her in his mind, the same image that appeared to him whenever he was racked by feelings of love. He saw her entering and leaving the house like a gust of fresh air, leading her little brother by the hand. He heard her laughter on the terrace and smelled the sweet, subtle aroma of her skin and hair when she walked past him in the midday sun. He saw her as he imagined her in all the idle hours he spent dreaming of her. Above all, he thought of her at the precise moment when she entered his bedroom and they were alone together in the intimacy of his refuge. She entered without knocking, while he was reading in bed, filling his burrow with the flutter of her long hair and her undulating arms. She touched his books without the slightest sign of reverence, and even dared to take them from their sacred shelves; she blew the dust off their covers without the least respect and tossed them onto the bed, chatting all the while as he trembled with desire and surprise, unable to extract from his whole encyclopedic vocabulary a single word to hold her there, until she finally took leave of him with a kiss on the cheek that continued to burn: a single, terrible kiss on which he built a labyrinth of dreams where the two of them were a prince and princess hopelessly in love.
“You know about medicine, Jaime,” Nicolás pleaded. “You’ve got to do something.”
“I’m only a student. I have a long way to go before I’m a doctor. I don’t know anything about all that. And I’ve seen a lot of women die because some ignoramus got his hands on them.”