“Thank you, Jean!” she exclaimed.
“You’re welcome,” he replied courteously.
They settled into the large Empire-style bed, talking about the wedding party and making plans for their future life.
“Don’t you want to know who the father of my child is?” Blanca asked.
“I am,” Jean replied, kissing her on the forehead.
They each slept on their own side of the bed, back to back. At five o’clock in the morning, Blanca awoke with an upset stomach from the cloyingly sweet smell of the flowers with which her father had adorned the nuptial chamber. Jean de Satigny helped her to the bathroom, supported her while she leaned over the toilet, led her back to bed, and put the flowers out in the hall. Afterward he was unable to fall back to sleep, and spent the rest of the night reading La Philosophie dans le boudoir, of the Marquis de Sade, while Blanca sighed through her dreams that it was marvelous to be married to an intellectual.
The next day, Jean went to the bank to cash a check from his father-in-law and spent nearly the whole day going from one store to another buying the attire he considered appropriate to his new economic position. Meanwhile, bored with waiting for him in the hotel lobby, Blanca decided to pay a visit to her mother. She put on her best morning hat and took a cab to the big house on the corner, where the rest of her family was eating in silence, still irritable and tired from the upheaval of the wedding and the aftereffects of their recent fights. When he saw her enter the dining room, her father gave a shout of horror.
“What are you doing here!” he roared.
“Nothing . . . I’ve come to see you,” Blanca murmured, terrified.
“You’re out of your mind! Don’t you realize that if anybody sees you they’re going to say that your husband sent you home in the middle of your honeymoon? They’ll think you weren’t a virgin!”
“But I wasn’t, Papa.”
Esteban was about to strike her in the face, but Jaime stood between them with such firmness that Esteban resigned himself to insulting her for her stupidity. Clara, unshakable, led Blanca to a chair and served her a plate of cold fish with caper sauce. While Esteban continued screaming and Nicolás went to get the car to return her to her husband, the two women whispered just like in old times.
That same afternoon Blanca and Jean took the train to the port, where they boarded an English ocean liner. He was wearing white linen trousers with a blue jacket styled like a sailor’s, which went beautifully with the blue skirt and white jacket of his wife’s tailored suit. Four days later, the vessel deposited them in the farthest province of the North, where their elegant travel attire and crocodile bags went unnoticed in the dry, suffocating heat of the siesta. Jean de Satigny settled his wife provisionally in a hotel and turned his attention to the task of finding them lodgings worthy of his new status. Within twenty-four hours the small provincial society world knew that an authentic count had arrived in their midst. This did much to advance Jean’s cause. He was able to rent an ancient mansion that had belonged to one of the great saltpeter fortunes before they invented the synthetic substitute that had shot the whole industry to hell. The house was somewhat musty and abandoned, like everything in sight, and needed a number of repairs, but its former dignity and fin de siècle charms were intact. The count decorated it according to this personal taste, with a decadent, ambiguous refinement that startled Blanca, accustomed as she was to country life and her father’s classical sobriety. Jean brought in suspicious Chinese porcelain vases that, instead of flowers, held dyed ostrich feathers, damask curtains with pleats and tassels, cushions with fringe and pompons, furniture of every style, gold room dividers, and screens and several incredible standing lamps held aloft by life-sized ceramic statues of half-naked Abyssinian Negroes wearing turbans and slippers with upturned toes. The curtains were almost always drawn, leaving the house in a tenuous darkness that kept the cruel desert light at bay. In the corners, Jean had placed Oriental incense burners in which he burnt special perfumed herbs and sticks of incense that at first turned Blanca’s stomach but to which she quickly became accustomed. He hired several Indians to work for him, in addition to a monumentally fat woman cook, whom he taught to make the spicy sauces that he was so fond of, and a lame, illiterate maid to wait on Blanca. They were all outfitted with showy uniforms that looked like costumes from an operetta, but he was unable to make them wear shoes, because they were accustomed to going barefoot and could not adjust. Blanca was uncomfortable in the house. She did not trust the expressionless Indians who waited on her with such evident ill will and seemed to make fun of her behind her back. They moved around her like ghosts, gliding soundlessly through the rooms, almost always bored and empty-handed. They never answered when she spoke to them, as if they did not understand Spanish, and when they spoke among themselves they always whispered or used one of the mountain dialects. Whenever Blanca told her husband the strange things she had observed among the servants, he replied that they were Indian customs to which she should pay no heed. Clara gave her the same answer in a letter after Blanca wrote that one day she had seen one of the Indians standing in a pair of astonishing antique shoes with twisted heels and velvet laces, in which the man’s broad, callused feet had got stuck. “The heat of the desert, your pregnancy, and your unconscious desire to live like a countess, in accordance with your husband’s lineage, are making you see things, darling,” Clara wrote in jest, adding that the best cure for Louis XV shoes was a cold shower and a cup of camomile tea. Another time, Blanca found a small dead lizard on her plate, which she was about to put in her mouth. When she recovered from the shock and managed to regain her voice, she called for the cook and pointed to the plate with a trembling finger. The cook approached, her mountainous fat and her braids swaying, and picked up the plate without a word. But as she turned around, Blanca could have sworn she caught a wink of complicity between her husband and the cook. That night she lay awake very late, wondering about what she had seen, until she finally concluded that she had imagined it. Her mother was right: the heat and her pregnancy were affecting her mind.
The farthest rooms in the house were allocated to Jean’s mania for photography. In them he set up his lights, his tripods, and his various machines. He begged Blanca never to enter what he called his “laboratory” without permission, because, he explained, the plates could be destroyed by natural light. He installed a lock on the door and carried the key everywhere he went on a gold watch chain, a completely useless precaution since his wife had practically no interest in her surroundings, much less in the art of photography.
The larger she grew, the deeper Blanca sank into an Oriental placidity that dashed all her husband’s attempts to introduce her into society. He wanted to take her to parties, to drive her around by car, and to involve her in the decoration of her new home, but Blanca, heavy, torpid, solitary, and the victim of an unshakable fatigue, took refuge in her knitting and embroidery. She slept most of the day, and spent her few waking hours sewing tiny articles of clothing for a complete pink wardrobe, for she was convinced that her baby would be a girl. As her mother had done with her, she developed a whole system for communicating with the infant that was growing inside her, turning in on herself in a silent, uninterrupted dialogue. Her letters described her secluded, melancholy life, and she referred to her husband with blind sympathy, as a fine, discreet, considerate man. Thus, without ever setting out to do so, she set in motion the myth that Jean de Satigny was practically a prince, never mentioning the fact that he spent his afternoons inhaling cocaine and smoking opium, because she was sure her parents would not understand. She had a whole wing of the house to herself. There she had arranged her headquarters and begun to pile up all the things she was preparing for her daughter’s arrival. Jean said that fifty children would not be able to wear all the clothes and play with all those toys, but Blanca’s only amusement was to scour the paltry downtown stores, where she purchased every pink baby item she c
ould find. She spent her days embroidering infants’ dresses, knitting woolen booties, decorating little baskets, arranging the stacks of tiny blouses, bibs, and diapers, and ironing the sheets she had embroidered. After the siesta she would write her mother and sometimes her brother Jaime, and when the sun began to set and the air grew cooler she would go for a walk around the property to shake the numbness from her legs. In the evening she joined her husband in the enormous dining room, whose bordello lighting was supplied by the ceramic Negroes standing in the corners. They sat at opposite ends of the table, which was set with a long tablecloth, a full service of china and glassware, and adorned with artificial flowers, because no real ones grew in that inhospitable region. They were always attended by the same impassive, silent Indian, who constantly sucked a green ball of coca leaves that was his chief sustenance. He was a peculiar servant, and had no specific duties within the domestic hierarchy. Waiting on table was certainly not his forte; he had still to master platters and serving implements, and would fling the food down however he could. One time, Blanca had to remind him please not to grab the potatoes with his hand and put them on her plate. But Jean de Satigny held him in mysterious regard and was training him to be his assistant in the laboratory.
“If he can’t talk like a human being, how do you expect him to take pictures?” Blanca observed when Jean told her his plan.
This was the Indian Blanca thought she had seen in Louis XV heels.
Her first months as a wife were peaceful and boring. Blanca’s natural tendency to isolation and solitude became accentuated. Since she refused to partake of the local social life, Jean de Satigny was forced to go alone to the numerous events to which they were invited. Later, returning home, he regaled Blanca with accounts of the vulgarity of these stale, out-of-date families, whose daughters were still chaperoned and whose gentlemen wore scapulars. Blanca led the idle life that was her true vocation, while her husband gave himself to those small pleasures that only money can buy and that he had denied himself for such a long time. Every night he went to the casino. His wife calculated that he must be losing huge sums of money, because at the end of the month there was invariably a long line of creditors at their door. Jean had very strange ideas about their household finances. He bought himself the most up-to-date automobile, with leopard-skin upholstery and golden fittings worthy of an Arab prince, the largest, most ostentatious car ever seen in those parts. He established a network of mysterious contacts that enabled him to buy antiques, particularly baroque French porcelain, for which he had a weakness. He also imported crates of fine liqueurs that were cleared through customs without incident. His contraband entered the house through the service door and exited through the front door on its way to other destinations, where Jean consumed it in secret revels or sold it at exorbitant prices. They never invited people to their house, and within weeks the ladies of the neighborhood had stopped inviting Blanca. Rumor had it she was proud, arrogant, and ill, which only increased the general sympathy for the count, who gained a reputation as a patient, long-suffering husband.
Blanca got along well with him. The only times they argued were when she tried to look into their finances. She could not understand how Jean could buy porcelain and drive that spotted car when he did not have enough money to pay the Chinese man in the general store or the salaries of their numerous servants. Jean refused to discuss the matter, on the assumption that it was a man’s business and that she had no need to fill her sparrow’s brain with problems she could not understand. Blanca supposed that Jean de Satigny’s account with Esteban Trueba gave him unlimited amounts of money, and since it was impossible to reach an understanding with him, she ended up pretending to be ignorant of such matters. In this house embedded in sand and inhabited by strange Indians who seemed to exist in some other dimension, she vegetated like a flower from another climate, frequently coming across certain small details that made her question her own sanity. Reality seemed blurred to her, as if the same implacable sun that erased all colors had also deformed the world around her, transforming even people into silent shadows.
In the soporific heat of those months Blanca, protected by the creature that was growing inside her, forgot about the magnitude of her disgrace. She stopped thinking about Pedro Tercero García with the terrible urgency she had felt before and took refuge in the sweet, faded memories she could always conjure up at will. Her sensuality was dormant, and on the rare occasions when she brooded over her unfortunate fate, she had a pleasant vision of herself floating in a nebula, without suffering or joy, far away from the cruelties of life, with her daughter as her sole companion. She came to believe that she had lost her capacity to love, and that the burning desire of her flesh had been quelled forever. She spent interminable hours staring at the pallid landscape that stretched out before her window. The house was on the very edge of the city, and was ringed by a few rickety trees that had managed to withstand the onslaught of the desert. To the north, the wind had destroyed all vegetation, and she could see the immense plains of dunes and distant hills quivering in the sweltering light. During the day, she was overcome by the suffocation of that leaden sun, and at night she shivered in her bed, protecting herself from chills with hot-water bottles and woolen shawls. She stared at the limpid, naked sky looking for traces of a cloud, hoping that sooner or later a drop of rain would fall to break the unbearable harshness of that lunar valley. The months rolled by unchanging, with no other distraction than her mother’s letters, which told of her father’s political campaign, Nicolás’s madness, and the excesses of Jaime, who lived like a priest but walked around with lovesick eyes. In one of her letters Clara suggested that to keep her hands busy she go back to making crèches. She tried. She ordered some of the special clay she had used at Tres Marías, set up a studio in the back of the kitchen, and had a couple of Indians build her an oven for firing her pieces. But Jean de Satigny made fun of her artistic impulse, saying that if she wanted to do something with her hands she would be better off knitting booties and learning to make pastry. She finally abandoned her work, not so much because of her husband’s sarcasm, but because it seemed impossible to compete with the ancient pottery of the Indians.
Jean had organized his business with the same tenacity he had formerly brought to the idea of the chinchillas, but this time with more success. Aside from a German priest who had spent thirty years ranging across the area digging up the Inca past, no one else had bothered with those relics, since they were thought to be of little or no value. The government forbade any trafficking in Indian antiquities and had given the priest a general concession, authorizing him to catalog whatever he found and hand it over to the museum. Jean saw them for the first time in the dusty display cases of the museum. He spent two days with the German. Happy after all these years to discover someone interested in his work, the priest had no misgivings about revealing his vast knowledge. Thus Jean learned how to determine the exact amount of time the relics had lain in the ground, how to differentiate the various styles and epochs, and how to locate burial grounds in the desert by means of signs invisible to civilized eyes. Finally, he decided that even if these shards lacked the golden splendor of Egyptian tombs, they nonetheless had a certain historical value. Once he obtained all the information that he needed, he organized teams of Indians to dig up whatever might have escaped the priest’s zealous archaeological notice.
Magnificent ceramic jars, green with the patina of time, began to arrive at his house disguised in Indians’ bundles and llama saddlebags, quickly filling the secret places that had been set aside for them. Blanca watched them piling up in the rooms and was astonished by their shapes. She held them in her hands, caressing them as if hypnotized, and whenever they were wrapped in straw and paper to be shipped to far-off, unknown destinations, she was grief-stricken. This pottery was just too beautiful. She felt that the monsters from her crèches did not belong under the same roof. For this reason, more than for any other, she abandoned her works
hop.
The business of the Indian excavations was completely secret, since they were part of the historical heritage of the nation. Various teams of Indians who had slipped across the twisted passes of the border undetected were working for Jean de Satigny. They had no documents that proved they were human beings, and they were silent, stubborn, and inscrutable. Every time Blanca asked where these people who would suddenly appear in her courtyard came from, she was told they were cousins of the servant who waited on them in the dining room; and it was true, they all looked alike. They did not stay long, however. Most of the time they were in the desert, with only a shovel to dig the sand and a wad of coca in their mouths to keep them alive. Occasionally they were fortunate enough to unearth the half-buried remains of an Incan village, and in no time at all the house would fill with all the objects they had stolen from the site. The search, transport, and selling of this merchandise was conducted in such a cautious fashion that Blanca had no doubt that there was something highly illegal behind her husband’s activities. Jean explained to her that the government was very interested in filthy pots and scrawny necklaces from the desert, and that in order to avoid the endless paperwork required by the official bureaucracy, he preferred to negotiate matters on his own. He shipped his items in boxes sealed with apple labels, thanks to the interested cooperation of certain customs inspectors.