None of this worried Blanca very much. The only thing that truly distressed her were the mummies. She was well acquainted with the dead, having spent much of her life in contact with them by means of her mother’s three-legged table. She was used to seeing their transparent silhouettes gliding down the hallways of her parents’ house, making noise in the wardrobes and appearing in people’s dreams to predict calamities or lottery prizes. But the mummies were another matter. Those shrunken beings wrapped in rags that were decaying into dusty threads, with their wasted, yellow heads, their wrinkled hands, their sewn eyelids, the sparse hairs on their napes, their eternal, terrible, lipless smiles, their rancid odor, and that sad, impoverished aura of ancient corpses, made her sick in her soul. They were very rare. Only once in a great while did the Indians arrive with one in tow. Slow and immutable, they appeared at the door carrying an enormous vessel sealed with clay. Jean would carefully remove the lid in a room with all its doors and windows closed so that the first breath of air did not turn it to dust. Inside its jar, shrunken into a fetal position, wrapped in tatters, and accompanied by its wretched necklaces of teeth and a handful of rag dolls, the mummy looked like the pit of some exotic fruit. They were far more highly prized than any other objects that were brought out of the tombs, because private collectors and a few foreign museums paid very handsomely for them. Blanca wondered what sort of people collected the dead and where they put them. She could not imagine a mummy as part of the decoration in a drawing room, but Jean de Satigny told her that, displayed in a glass urn, they were even more valuable to European millionaires than works of art. It was not easy to get mummies onto the market, let alone through customs, which meant that there were times when they remained in the house for several weeks, awaiting their turn to embark on the long trip abroad. Blanca dreamt about them. She also had hallucinations, imagining that they were walking down the halls on tiptoe—tiny, cunning, furtive gnomes. She would close her bedroom door and put her head under the blankets, and there she would remain for hours at a time, trembling, praying, and calling for her mother with the power of thought. She told Clara about it in her letters, and her mother replied that there was no reason to fear the dead, only the living, because, despite their bad reputation, there was no evidence that mummies had ever attacked anyone; if anything, they were naturally timid. Emboldened by her mother’s advice, Blanca decided to spy on them. She waited for them silently, watching through the half-open doorway of her bedroom. It was not long before she was convinced that they were walking up and down in the house, dragging their tiny feet across the carpets, whispering like schoolchildren, pushing and shoving their way in little groups of two and three, always moving toward the darkroom of Jean de Satigny. At times she thought she heard distant otherworldly moans, and she would fall prey to uncontrollable fits of terror, shouting for her husband, but no one came and she was too afraid to walk to the other side of the house to look for him. With the first rays of sunlight, Blanca would regain her good sense and control of her nerves. She realized that her nighttime anxiety was the fruit of the feverish imagination she had inherited from her mother, and this thought would console her until darkness began to fall again and the cycle of dread resumed. One day she simply could not stand the rising tension as night drew near, and she decided to tell Jean about the mummies. They were having dinner. When she told him about their nightly promenades, their whispers, and their suffocated cries, Jean de Satigny was rooted to his chair, his fork frozen in midair and his mouth locked open. The Indian who was just entering the dining room with the serving tray stumbled, and the roast chicken rolled under a chair. Jean employed all his charm, firmness, and reason to convince her that her nerves were playing tricks on her and that none of what she thought was really happening; that it was all the product of her unbridled fantasy. Blanca pretended to accept his explanation, but her husband’s vehemence struck her as suspicious, since he normally paid no attention to her problems. So did the servant’s face, which with its popped-out eyes had finally lost the impassive gaze of an Incan idol. She decided to embark on an investigation of the nomadic mummies. That night she excused herself early after telling her husband that she was going to take a tranquilizer to be sure of falling asleep. But instead she drank a large cup of black coffee and stationed herself behind her door, prepared to spend many hours waiting.
She heard the first footsteps close to midnight. She opened the door with the utmost caution and stuck her head out just as a tiny crouched figure was moving down the hall. This time she was positive she had not dreamt it, but because of the weight of her unborn child it took her almost a minute to reach the corridor. It was a chilly night and the desert breeze was blowing, making the old wooden ceilings creak and the curtains swell like black sails on the high seas. Ever since she was little, when she listened to Nana’s stories of the bogeyman down in the kitchen, she had feared the dark, but now she did not dare turn on the lights or she would frighten the tiny mummies during their erratic strolls.
Suddenly a hoarse, muffled sound broke the thick silence of the night, as if it was coming from the bottom of a coffin, or so Blanca thought. She was beginning to fall victim to a morbid fascination with things from beyond the grave. She stopped in her tracks, her heart in her mouth, but a second moan pulled her to her senses, giving her the strength to continue toward Jean de Satigny’s laboratory door. She tried to open it, but it was locked. She pressed her face to the door. It was then that she clearly heard the moans, suffocated cries, and laughter, and no longer doubted that something was going on with the mummies. She returned to her room relieved to know that her nerves were not failing her but that something atrocious was going on in her husband’s secret den.
The next day Blanca waited for Jean de Satigny to finish his meticulous toilette, eat his usual parsimonious breakfast, read his newspaper cover to cover, and finally leave on his morning walk, letting nothing in her placid, expectant mother’s countenance betray her fierce determination. When Jean went out, she called the high-heeled Indian and for the first time gave him an order.
“Go to the city and buy me some candied papaya,” she told him brusquely.
The Indian set off at the slow trot typical of his race, and she remained in the house with the other servants, whom she feared far less than that strange individual with the courtly inclinations. Since she estimated that she had a couple of hours before he returned, she decided not to be too hasty, and to proceed calmly. She was determined to clear up the mystery of the furtive mummies. Convinced that in daylight the mummies would be in no mood for clowning, she went to the darkroom hoping that the door would be open, but it was locked, as always. She tried all the keys on her ring but none of them worked. Then she took the biggest knife from the kitchen, slipped it into the doorjamb, and forced it until the dried-out wood splintered and came out in fragments. Thus she managed to pry the lock loose from the frame and open the door. The damage to the door was impossible to hide, and she realized that when her husband saw it she would have to give some rational explanation, but she consoled herself with the argument that as mistress of the house she had a right to know what was going on beneath her roof. Despite her common sense, which had withstood more than twenty years’ worth of the three-legged table and her mother’s prognostications, she was trembling as she crossed the threshold of the darkroom.
She groped for the light switch and flicked it on. She found herself in a spacious room with black walls and thick black curtains on the windows, through which not even a feeble ray of sunlight filtered. The floor was covered with dark, thick rugs. Everywhere were the bulbs, lamps, and screens she had first seen Jean use at old Pedro García’s funeral, when he had been so enamored of photographing the living and the dead that he made everyone uneasy and the peasants ended up kicking his photographic plates to the ground. She looked around in bewilderment: she was standing in the middle of the strangest scene. She continued forward, sidestepping open trunks that held plumed garme
nts from every period, curled wigs, and ostentatious hats. She stopped before a golden trapeze, suspended from the ceiling, on which hung a disjointed life-size puppet. In a corner she saw a stuffed llama; on the tables were bottles filled with amber-colored liquids, and on the floor the skins of exotic animals. But what most surprised her were the photographs. She stood open-mouthed before them. The walls of Jean de Satigny’s studio were covered with distressing erotic scenes that revealed her husband’s hidden character.
Blanca was slow to react, and it was a while before she realized what she saw, because she had no experience in such matters. Pleasure, to her, was the final, precious stage of the long road she had traveled with Pedro Tercero, on which she had moved unhurried and in good spirits, framed by the forests, the wheatfields, the river, and the immense sky, in the silence of the countryside. She had never felt the uncertainties of adolescence. While her classmates secretly read forbidden romances about passionate suitors and virgins aching to be so no longer, she sat in the shade of the plum trees in the convent courtyard, closed her eyes, and summoned with complete precision the magnificent vision of Pedro Tercero García holding her in his arms, stroking and kissing her, and eliciting from her the same profound harmony he drew from his guitar. Her instincts were satisfied as soon as they were awakened, and she had never imagined that passion could take other forms. These chaotic, tormented scenes were a thousand times more disconcerting than the scandalous mummies she had expected to find.
She recognized the faces of the household servants. There was the entire Incan court, as naked as God had put them on this earth, or barely clad in theatrical costumes. She saw the fathomless abyss between the thighs of the cook, the stuffed llama riding atop the lame servant girl, and the silent servant who waited on her at table, naked as a newborn babe, hairless and short-legged, with his expressionless stone face and his disproportionate, erect penis.
For an interminable second, Blanca was suspended in her own uncertainty; then she was overcome with horror. She managed to think clearly. She understood what Jean de Satigny had meant on their wedding night when he explained that he did not feel inclined to married life. She also glimpsed the sinister power of the Indian and the subtle mockery of the servants, and felt herself a prisoner in the anteroom of hell. Just then the child moved inside her and she jumped as if an alarm had just been sounded.
“My daughter! I have to get out of here!” she cried, hugging her womb. She ran out of the darkroom, crossed the entire house in a flash, and reached the street, where the leaden heat and the ruthless midday sun brought her back to reality. She understood that she would not get very far on foot with her nine-month belly. She returned to her bedroom, took all the money she could find, prepared a bundle containing some of the clothing from the splendid wardrobe she had knit, and left for the station.
Seated on the hard wooden bench near the tracks, with her bundle in her lap and her eyes full of fright, Blanca waited hours for the train, praying that the count, on returning home and discovering the damage to his laboratory door, would not come looking for her and force her to return to the evil kingdom of the Incas. She prayed for the train to be on time for once in its life so that she might arrive at her parents’ before the creature that was crushing her insides and kicking at her ribs announced its arrival in the world. She prayed for the strength to endure this two-day journey. And she prayed that her desire to live would be stronger than this terrible sense of desolation that was beginning to paralyze her. She gritted her teeth and waited.
— NINE —
LITTLE ALBA
Alba was born feet first, which is a sign of good luck. Her Grandmother Clara searched her back and found the tiny star-shaped mark that distinguishes those born to true happiness. “There’s no need to worry about this little girl. She will be lucky and she will be happy. She will also have a good complexion, because that is inherited, and at my age I have no wrinkles and I’ve never had a pimple,” Clara declared two days after the birth. This is why they made no effort to prepare the child for life, since the stars had already conspired to endow her with so many gifts. Her sign was Leo. Her grandmother studied her astrological chart and recorded her destiny in white ink in an album with pages of black paper, in which she also pasted the child’s first greenish locks of hair, the fingernails she clipped soon after her birth, and various portraits that allow one to see her as she was then: an extraordinarily tiny creature, almost bald, creased and pale, with no other sign of human intelligence than her sparkling black eyes, which bore an expression of ancient wisdom even when she was in the cradle. They were identical to those of her real father. Her mother wanted to call her Clara, but her grandmother did not believe in repeating names, because it created confusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life. They searched for a name in a thesaurus, where they found hers, the last in a chain of luminous words. Years later, Alba tormented herself with the thought that when she had a daughter there would be no other word with the same meaning to use as a name, but Blanca gave her the idea of using foreign languages, which offer a wide choice.
Alba was almost born in a narrow-gauged train, at three o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the desert. That would have been fatal to her astrological chart. Fortunately, she managed to restrain herself within her mother for a few more hours and to enter the world in her grandparents’ house, on the day, the hour, and in the place most propitious for her horoscope. Her mother arrived at the big house on the corner without advance notice. She was completely disheveled, covered with dust, bleary-eyed, and doubled over from the pain of the contractions with which Alba was pushing her way out. She knocked at the door in desperation, and when it opened, she rushed through, all the way to the sewing room, where Clara was putting the finishing touches on the last exquisite dress for her future granddaughter. There Blanca collapsed after her long journey, without explaining a thing, for her belly erupted in a long, liquid sigh and she felt as if all the water in the world were running out between her legs in a violent flush. At the sound of Clara’s screams the servants came running, and so did Jaime, who was always in the house during that time, keeping watch on Amanda. They moved Blanca into Clara’s room, and while they were laying her on the bed and pulling off her clothes, the minuscule human form of Alba began to appear. Her Uncle Jaime, who had assisted at several births at the clinic, helped her into the world, grasping her firmly by the buttocks with his right had while the fingers of his left groped in the darkness for the child’s neck to remove the umbilical cord, which was strangling her. Meanwhile, drawn by the noise, Amanda ran in and pressed with all her weight on Blanca’s belly while Clara, leaning over her daughter’s suffering face, held a tea strainer covered with an ether-soaked rag to her nose. Alba was born quickly. Jaime removed the cord from around her neck, held her upside down and dangled her in the air, and with two resounding slaps introduced her into the suffering of life and the mechanics of breathing. But Amanda, who had read about the customs of African tribes and preached a return to nature, seized the newborn from his hands and gently placed her on the warm belly of her mother, where she found some consolation for the sadness of being born. Naked and embracing, mother and daughter lay resting while the others cleaned up the afterbirth and bustled about with the new sheets and the first batch of diapers. In the excitement of these first moments no one noticed the half-open door of the wardrobe, where little Miguel had observed the entire scene, paralyzed with fear, engraving in his mind forever the vision of a huge balloon of veins crowned with an enormous navel, from which that bruised creature emerged, wrapped in a hideous blue membrane.
Alba’s name was entered in the Civil Registry and in the books of the parish with her father’s French surname, but she never used it because her mother’s was much easier to spell. Her grandfather, Esteban Trueba, did not approve of this bad habit. As he said every time he was given the opportunity, he had gone to a lot of trouble to be sure the child would have a known father a
nd respectable name and would not have to use her mother’s as if she were a child of shame and sin. Nor did he allow anyone to doubt the legitimate paternity of the count. Against all logic, he continued to hope that sooner or later the quiet, awkward little girl who glided through his house would display the Frenchman’s elegant manners and refined charms. Clara made no mention of the matter either until much later, when she saw the little girl playing among the ruined statues in the garden and realized that she did not resemble anyone in the family, much less Jean de Satigny.
“I wonder where she got those old man’s eyes?” she asked.
“They’re her father’s eyes,” Blanca replied absentmindedly.
“Pedro Tercero García, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was the only time anyone ever mentioned Alba’s origin within the family, because, as Clara noted, the issue was irrelevant since Jean de Satigny had disappeared from their life. They never heard a word about him, and no one bothered to investigate his whereabouts, not even to legalize Blanca’s status, for she lacked the freedom of an unmarried woman and had all the limitations of a married one even though she had no husband. Alba never saw a picture of the count, for her mother did not leave a corner of the house untouched until she had destroyed them all, even those that showed them arm in arm on their wedding day. She had decided to forget the man she had married and act as if he had never existed. She never spoke of him again, nor did she offer any explanation for her flight from the conjugal abode. Clara, who had spent nine years without speaking, knew the advantages of silence and asked her daughter nothing, joining in her efforts to erase all memory of Jean de Satigny. Alba was told that her father was a distinguished and intelligent aristocrat who had unfortunately succumbed to fever in the northern desert. This was one of the few lies she had to put up with as a child; in everything else she was in direct contact with the prosaic truths of life. Her Uncle Jaime had taken it upon himself to destroy the myths that children come from under cabbage plants or are brought by stork from Paris, and her Uncle Nicolás had demolished those of the Three Kings, good fairies, and bogeymen. Alba had nightmares in which she saw her father’s death. She dreamt of a young, handsome man dressed all in white, with patent-leather shoes and a straw hat, walking across the desert bathed in sunlight. In her dream the walker slackened his pace, hesitated, went slower and slower, stumbled and fell, picked himself up and stumbled again, burning with the heat, fever, and thirst. He pulled himself along the hot sand on his knees for a time, but in the end he lay stretched out in the vastness of those pale dunes as birds of prey circled over his inert body. She dreamt about him so many times that years later it came as a surprise when she was called to the central morgue to identify the body of the man she thought must be her father. By that time Alba was a bold young woman, much accustomed to adversity, so she went alone. She was met by a white-aproned technician, who led her down the long corridors of the ancient building to a large, cold room whose walls were painted gray. The man in the white apron opened the door of an immense refrigerator and withdrew a tray on which lay an old, swollen, bluish corpse. Alba examined it carefully, finding no resemblance to the image of her dreams. The man appeared to be an ordinary citizen, perhaps a post-office employee. She stared at his hands: they were not those of a refined, intelligent aristocrat, but of a man who has nothing interesting to say. But his identification papers gave irrefutable proof that the sad, blue corpse was Jean de Satigny, who had not died of fever in the golden dunes of a child’s nightmare, but of a simple stroke as he crossed the street in his old age. But this all happened much later. When Clara was alive and Alba was still a child, the big house on the corner was a cloistered world in which she grew up protected even from her own nightmares.